We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The support team responds quickly."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"It is extremely stable."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The installation is complex."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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