We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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."It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"The support is highly responsive."
"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."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"I am impressed with the product's firewall and virtualization."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"Sangfor HCI is a one-stop solution that enables you to store and centrally manage your VMs."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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 want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"The documentation and support from the community are not as good or as mature as VMware or Hyper-V."
"The migration process could be easier."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"Currently, when we need to do capacity planning, we have to rely on Sangfor's support team for assistance. However, if there were dedicated tools available, we could handle it ourselves and increase efficiency."
"My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0. 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 Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure report.
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