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.
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The support team responds quickly."
"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 most valuable feature is high availability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"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 hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"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."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"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."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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 biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"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), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, 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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