We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN 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 solution is quite stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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 support is highly responsive."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"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 fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The installation is complex."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN 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 Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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