We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual Tape Library 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 product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"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."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"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."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"It is a stable solution."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"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."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful 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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"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."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
More StarWind Virtual Tape Library Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 15th in HCI with 6 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. 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 Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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