We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The solution is quite stable."
"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 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."
"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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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've had some issues around the licensing."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. 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 Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN.
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