We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI 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 control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"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."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"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 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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"HPE's InfoSight software, which does the comparative analysis and artificial intelligence built-in in the box, and with Nimble they do well against the competition. Additionally, the dashboards are good."
"The technical support services are good."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has the most valuable features for performance, resilience, and scalability."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is stable."
"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"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."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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 storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"The solution must be hypervisor-agnostic."
"The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's website does not open properly or work consistently."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"It can be made cheaper."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 13th in HCI with 23 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2. 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 HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Alletra dHCI report.
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