We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell VxBlock System based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"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."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"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 most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"The support is highly responsive."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"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."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"Virtual machines for the infrastructure."
"Integration with VMware and VMotion definitely brings a lot of value."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the speed."
"The monitoring and management parts are the most valuable. Monitoring is specifically valuable because you have one console to monitor everything. This console is called Vision."
"Good flexibility and speed."
"It's a highly optimized piece of equipment that doesn't give us any problems."
"Good default features."
"With a converged infrastructure, it's easy to troubleshoot from network to server issues from a single point of reference."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"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."
"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."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"We are finding it a bit challenging in terms of the management of a specific VxBlock component. Currently, we have different units as a part of the block storage. We have one for Cisco equipment and one for Dell. When we have an issue in the infrastructure, Dell EMC VxBlock System should automatically detect it and send a notification to VC support, but, unfortunately, it is doing that only for one unit. It is not working for Cisco components. We have informed them about this area of improvement, and they are working on this. The way different parts are integrated should be improved. We should have one console to log in to see all the infrastructure in terms of each machine and hardware."
"The consistency of disc quality could be improved."
"Lacks flexibility with third-party applications."
"The only thing that I can say is when you procure the VxBlock, obviously you have to complete detailed questionnaires about your architecture including the configuration, et cetera. If you make a mistake on the implementation, then you need to rebuild the entire VxBlock. That is just a point of consideration rather than a flaw. You need to be absolutely sure and validate the upfront configuration information that you provide because your VxBlock comes delivered and built, according to that exact information."
"Does not support different kinds of mixed applications."
"There are components of VxBlock that are not managed or supported by Dell because some of the components are from Cisco. Thus, when there are problems with compute nodes, though Dell was managing the interaction, we had to rely on Cisco to solve the issue. When Cisco was not responding as quickly as Dell would for their components, it made it difficult for us because we needed to have the failed nodes back up and running. As such, the disparate ownership of components in the equipment is an issue."
"Scalability is an area that needs to be improved."
"This solution does not support Hyper-V, and we would like the new version to be supported and certified to work with Hyper-V."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while Dell VxBlock System is ranked 4th in Converged Infrastructure with 12 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Dell VxBlock System is rated 7.8. 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 Dell VxBlock System writes "Can be deployed quickly, is easy to manage, and is stable and resilient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas Dell VxBlock System is most compared with Dell PowerEdge VRTX, FlexPod XCS, Dell Vscale Architecture and IBM VersaStack.
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