We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"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 is scalable."
"The support team responds quickly."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The support is highly responsive."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."
"It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal."
"It's flexible. You can scale up or out. Our environment has never needed it, but the option has always been there."
"FlexPod gives us the opportunity to deploy a product which is fully built and racked with minimal touch installation when it arrives onsite, so we can do all the configuration remotely."
"The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward."
"It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint."
"It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution."
"The most valuable feature is ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes."
"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."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Automatic tiering would be good to have."
"I would like to see more CVDs and more published designs around a multi-hypervisor approach within a single pod."
"The technical support is slightly above average. I would like them to have quicker escalation"
"They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential."
"We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor."
"FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing."
"We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue."
"I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while FlexPod XCS 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 FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Scale Computing HC3, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Dell VxBlock System and Dell PowerEdge VRTX.
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