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."Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The program is stable."
"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."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution is scalable."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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."
"The installation is complex."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"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."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"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."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th 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 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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