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 fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box."
"It's very simple to manage. It has reduced the footprint in the datacenters quite a lot."
"The solution has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. It is designed to take advantage of deduplication strategies, which means we don't have to have as much disk in the system to do the job that we used to have to do."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"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."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"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."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives."
"The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell."
"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."
"There may be issues around scaling."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"One thing that I would like to see improved is the flexibility of the node expansion."
"I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install."
"The local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HP doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 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.
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