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."For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"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 support is highly responsive."
"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."
"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 setup was very straightforward."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping."
"I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp."
"Backup, restore, and ease of deployment are the most valuable features."
"Gives us a single point of contact for support."
"It reduces the time required to dynamically provide applications to our end users and developers."
"It reduced the total cost of ownership."
"The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is critically important because we cannot afford downtime."
"It is scaling to our needs. We don't have any issues."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The installation is complex."
"Sometimes, it can take awhile for support cases to get to the right people, especially if it's not a P1 case."
"The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end."
"I think it is sufficient for now, but in the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better."
"I would like to see more cloud-centric modules that are specific to applications and more software-based solutions. That's all that is missing."
"I would like to see more interoperability within FlexPods. This comes into more of how we grow from multiple domains to a massive domain."
"One touch upgrades would be nice."
"For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor."
"The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly."
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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