We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Dell PowerFlex 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 customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"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."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"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."
"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."
"It saves space for data centers, which is good."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"The compression and deduplication are very high. Therefore, we can use the size of the product more efficiently than other storage solutions."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"It's easy to get the tool started."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The support is highly responsive."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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 integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The solution is scalable."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"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."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"Their technical support is very bad. We had an issue where instead of an engineer we got a PDF "doctor" that didn't know anything about our problem which was very frustrating."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"We are operating two clusters for site resiliency. I would like to support running redundant/resilient vCenter server instances on each rather than a supported external server."
"It needs more detailed documentation."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, 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". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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