We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Scale Computing HC3 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."It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"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."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"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."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"The documentation could be better."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"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've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"The product could use a better control center."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 21st in HCI with 7 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.6. 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 Scale Computing HC3 writes "A reliable stripped-down solution that comes with excellent support". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Scale Computing HC3 report.
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