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 ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The support team responds quickly."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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 quite stable."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"The performance is good. It's stable and easy to operate."
"No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool."
"Among the valuable features are that it's a complete solution, it's easy to use, and there is not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution."
"It comes all in one box."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"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."
"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."
"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 biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"Once I am onto the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node."
"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 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), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
