We compared Dell PowerFlex and VxRail based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Dell PowerFlex is praised for its flexibility, scalability, and reliability, while VxRail is appreciated for its excellent performance and seamless integration. Dell PowerFlex offers strong customer service, pricing, and return on investment, while VxRail is commended for its support and pricing structure. Dell Powerflex users emphasize the ease of use and efficient operations, while VxRail users highlight the scalability and flexibility. Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements, while VxRail users suggest improvements in scalability, compatibility, setup process, monitoring, customer support, and documentation. Overall, both products have positive user feedback with some areas for enhancement.
Features: The valuable features of Dell PowerFlex include its flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Users also praise its performance and user-friendly interface. On the other hand, VxRail is highly appreciated for its excellent performance, seamless integration, and highly scalable infrastructure solution.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Dell PowerFlex was reported as straightforward and hassle-free, making the implementation process smooth. Users found the pricing of Dell PowerFlex to be reasonable and competitive. On the other hand, VxRail also offers a favorable pricing structure with reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options., Dell PowerFlex product delivers enhanced productivity, improved efficiency, and cost savings. VxRail offers increased efficiency, improved performance, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. Both products have positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: The Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements in certain areas, while suggestions for improving the VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, the duration required to establish a new tech solution varies for both Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. However, while Dell PowerFlex users reported separate timeframes for deployment and setup, VxRail users had varying experiences with some indicating that both terms may refer to the same period., The customer service for Dell PowerFlex is highly praised by users. They appreciate the efficient and helpful assistance provided by Dell's support team. Customers report that their questions and concerns are promptly addressed and resolved. Dell's commitment to a smooth experience and timely solutions is lauded. On the other hand, customers express satisfaction with the level of support received for VxRail. They appreciate the helpfulness and responsiveness of the customer service team. Users also value the knowledgeable and friendly staff during installation and troubleshooting. Overall, the customer service and support of VxRail are well-regarded.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Dell PowerFlex and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"The most valuable feature for me in this latest release has been the ability to add a compute or storage node. In the previous release, if I wanted to add only the compute mode, I need to buy a full node, including both compute and storage. That is no longer the case; I can upgrade whatever I want one based on my demand."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"Initial setup is straightforward, as everything is pre-installed."
"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."
"One beneficial feature is that the solution can handle complex environments."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"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."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"The installation is complex."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"It's not really flexible with different use cases."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"The search feature isn't good."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"Its price could be better."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"The most important thing that I want to be included in this solution is the VMware license. Its deployment time can be quicker so that instead of 40 minutes, it takes 10 minutes."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while VxRail 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VxRail report.
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VxRail is a hyper converged infrastructure. While PowerFlex appliance is a flexible solution with a small starting point and massive scale potential.