We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity 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."PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The support is highly responsive."
"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 solution is scalable."
"Its ease of use is valuable. It is being used in a mining company. They wanted their working nodes to be seamless, and they wanted ease of use. That's why they opted for SimpliVity. They are running VMware virtual machines on it."
"It comes all in one box."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"Backups happen very quickly."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"It's a very nice solution. It's a complete solution that we are looking for because we don't have personnel with expertise."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"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."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there."
"Needs to improve the cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS."
"The ease of new deployments could be improved."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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