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."The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"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 solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The program is stable."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"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."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th 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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