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.
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"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."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"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."
"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."
"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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution is scalable."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"A very small package but with lots of memory and CPU."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"The technical support is exceptionally good."
"The HPE SimpliVity disc compression is very valuable."
"The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"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."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"The ease of new deployments could be improved."
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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