We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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.
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"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."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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 solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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