Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are both competitive solutions in the hyper-converged infrastructure category. Dell PowerFlex appears to have an upper hand in performance and integration, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are favored for their flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
Features: Dell PowerFlex offers extensive integration, high storage capacity, and significant performance enhancements that improve application efficiency and reduce latency. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide high availability, node flexibility, and are easy to configure, ensuring immediate storage scalability and robust performance.
Room for Improvement: Dell PowerFlex could enhance data protection features, simplify upgrades, and improve custom analytics interfaces. It needs more cost efficiency and flexibility in ecosystem support. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes require simplified pricing, better documentation, and reduced deployment complexity, particularly for scaling and cloud integration. Both could benefit from improved licensing flexibility and technical support.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are primarily deployed on-premises. Dell PowerFlex has hybrid and public cloud options. Users report good technical support, though concerns about scalability and responsiveness exist. PowerFlex users sometimes face bureaucratic processes, while vSAN Ready Nodes customers find support satisfactory but desire more detailed assistance and deployment guidance.
Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerFlex is a high-end solution with pricing challenges but offers bundled support services that enhance ROI by optimizing operational costs. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are competitively priced against peers like Lenovo, though maintenance costs can be high. Both solutions ensure return on investment driven by infrastructure support and bundled overall costs, though users suggest pricing improvements for broader access.
The OPEX benefits are around 30 to 40% because the same engineer who manages vSphere can handle Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, eliminating the need for additional support engineers.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
We do not have local Dell technical support.
Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.
There is always room for improvement in terms of response time and reaching knowledgeable staff quickly.
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
For large environments with frequent scalability actions, we propose the Terraform solution that builds ESXi, does necessary configuration, and automatically starts up for associating with the existing environment.
I would rate scalability around seven because when customers want to expand capacity but all the drive slots are full, they are forced to buy new servers or nodes which adds more costs with licenses and hardware.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
They could have more AI functionality in the future.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
A faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are useful as a product, but the lack of expansion with VMware has led customers to refrain from further upgrades.
In some cases, we have seen hardware failures and performance issues where performance suddenly deteriorates.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
I would say in-house management, administration, and storage policies are the three key differentiators compared to normal non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes where we are leveraging external storage.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.
The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.
Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.
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