We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity 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 biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"The solution is scalable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The program is stable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"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 setup was very straightforward."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The solution is scalable."
"The backup feature is valuable, and replication is also valuable. It is very quick and easy to use."
"The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering."
"The feature that I like the most is the backup feature embedded inside the HPE SimpliVity. When we have any activity, within five minutes, we have a backup. It also has PDR for performing disaster recovery."
"Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"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."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"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."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"The installation is complex."
"We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"They can bring more awareness about this product. In this part of the world or this region, people normally don't know about SimpliVity and its capabilities. The company we have it sold to hasn't been able to fully utilize all the features or understand the features. So, product awareness should be improved."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"SimpliVity needs to improve the support for native backups, like SQL and Exchange."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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