We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The program is stable."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is high availability."
"It is absolutely resilient. It has built-in redundancy and multipathing. If there is an issue with one part, it doesn't fail automatically."
"Because we use it everywhere, it is standard to set up. Therefore, if you can manage the set up in one place, then you can manage the whole infrastructure."
"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."
"It can scale, compute, and storage independently by what we need."
"The advantage is being able to consolidate everything into a relatively small chassis."
"The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward."
"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"The installation is complex."
"I would like to see a more centralized support model."
"Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work."
"Parts of the initial setup were complex, especially on the networking side."
"I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly."
"We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM."
"It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components."
"They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential."
"FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. 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 FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Scale Computing HC3, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata, Dell VxBlock System and HPE Hyper Converged.
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