We compared Dell PowerFlex and VxRail based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Dell PowerFlex is praised for its flexibility, scalability, and reliability, while VxRail is appreciated for its excellent performance and seamless integration. Dell PowerFlex offers strong customer service, pricing, and return on investment, while VxRail is commended for its support and pricing structure. Dell Powerflex users emphasize the ease of use and efficient operations, while VxRail users highlight the scalability and flexibility. Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements, while VxRail users suggest improvements in scalability, compatibility, setup process, monitoring, customer support, and documentation. Overall, both products have positive user feedback with some areas for enhancement.
Features: The valuable features of Dell PowerFlex include its flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Users also praise its performance and user-friendly interface. On the other hand, VxRail is highly appreciated for its excellent performance, seamless integration, and highly scalable infrastructure solution.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Dell PowerFlex was reported as straightforward and hassle-free, making the implementation process smooth. Users found the pricing of Dell PowerFlex to be reasonable and competitive. On the other hand, VxRail also offers a favorable pricing structure with reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options., Dell PowerFlex product delivers enhanced productivity, improved efficiency, and cost savings. VxRail offers increased efficiency, improved performance, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. Both products have positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: The Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements in certain areas, while suggestions for improving the VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, the duration required to establish a new tech solution varies for both Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. However, while Dell PowerFlex users reported separate timeframes for deployment and setup, VxRail users had varying experiences with some indicating that both terms may refer to the same period., The customer service for Dell PowerFlex is highly praised by users. They appreciate the efficient and helpful assistance provided by Dell's support team. Customers report that their questions and concerns are promptly addressed and resolved. Dell's commitment to a smooth experience and timely solutions is lauded. On the other hand, customers express satisfaction with the level of support received for VxRail. They appreciate the helpfulness and responsiveness of the customer service team. Users also value the knowledgeable and friendly staff during installation and troubleshooting. Overall, the customer service and support of VxRail are well-regarded.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Dell PowerFlex and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The solution is scalable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The support is highly responsive."
"I can roll out the system in thirty minutes and the customer can work with it."
"It gives us tons of flexibility. We can create new machines, then destroy them if they don't work out. We test a lot of use cases that may or may not play out. We can build all types of scenarios into virtual machines that we may or may not use. If we don't use them, we just turn them off, no using up resources."
"VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization."
"RecoverPoint give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal."
"I have found that the admin deployment, monitoring off-premises, and the many services important features. Additionally, the solution has good integration."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"For me, the most valuable feature is in relation to the software updates."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"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."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"The licensing needs to be improved upon."
"VxRail should try to improve the pricing."
"I would like to see more solutions for satellite capabilities where we can put it into smaller locations and still have the redundancy that we have with a larger cluster."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"My customers want more storage for university databases."
"VxRail could improve by having domain protection."
"The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware, however, maybe it should integrate with Hyper-V or with KVM as well."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VxRail report.
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VxRail is a hyper converged infrastructure. While PowerFlex appliance is a flexible solution with a small starting point and massive scale potential.