We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Scale Computing HC3 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 ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"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."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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."
"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 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 most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The installation is complex."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"The product could use a better control center."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 19th in HCI with 8 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.8. 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 Scale Computing HC3 writes "A reliable stripped-down solution that comes with excellent support". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Scale Computing HC3 report.
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