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 integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The solution is scalable."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"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'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 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."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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 should be more functionality available for routing."
"The storage capability must 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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The installation is complex."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"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."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
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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