We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"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 aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"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."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The installation is complex."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell VxBlock System, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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