We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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."
"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 program is stable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The sales process is easy."
"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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 installation is complex."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"Updates need improvement."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell VxBlock System, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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