We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual Tape Library 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."StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"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 most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"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 support team responds quickly."
"It is a stable solution."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"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."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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 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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 15th in HCI with 6 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. 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 StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE SimpliVity, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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