We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual Tape Library 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 management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The program is stable."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"The installation is complex."
"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."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 11th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 15th in HCI with 6 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. 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 Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual, VMware vSAN and IBM Cloud Object Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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