Dell PowerFlex vs Dell XC Appliance [EOL] comparison

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StarWind Logo
5,311 views|1,782 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Dell Technologies Logo
12,771 views|7,871 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Dell Technologies Logo
views| comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell XC Appliance [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: April 2024).
769,334 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service.""Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software.""It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure.""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.""With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability.""The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment.""You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage.""The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."

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"The most valuable feature is high availability.""The integration with AWS is a valuable feature.""The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited.""Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power.""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.""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 solution is quite stable.""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."

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"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy.""The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features.""What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage.""The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time.""The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it.""The solution's hardware is great.""The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."

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Cons
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode.""I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced.""The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated.""Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers.""Some configuration options still demand service restarting.""If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online.""StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere.""I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."

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"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement.""The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials.""The solution must be more flexible.""The storage capability must be improved.""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.""The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem.""I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."

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"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers.""Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product.""The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical.""Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster.""There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution.""We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date.""The solution's storage size could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing for this solution is good."
  • "The price of the solution is fair, it is priced in the average range amongst competitors."
  • "The cost of this solution is fair."
  • "The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten."
  • "The solution's price is medium."
  • "The price could be improved."
  • "The product is expensive."
  • More Dell PowerFlex Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price point is very fair for a product in this category but can vary depending on the components selected within the family of products."
  • "We received a good price from Dell."
  • "The pricing is dependent on the technology and is in direct relation to the manufacturer and the components."
  • "The pricing is good."
  • "The pricing for Dell EMC solutions is quite expensive and not really made for small or medium-sized businesses."
  • More Dell XC Appliance [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:I would highly advise new users to consult the StarWind technical team beforehand. Also, consider the paid version if… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer:VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being… more »
    Top Answer:The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten.
    Top Answer:My advice for people who are selling this product is to first make sure that you educate the customers. The customer… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    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.

    XC Series hyper-converged appliances integrate Dell EMC 14th generation PowerEdge servers with Nutanix software to offer one of the industry’s most versatile and scalable hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. By supporting a choice of hypervisors, XC Series appliances can be deployed quickly for all virtualized workloads to reduce management complexity and total cost of ownership.

    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Canopy, 8x8Inc., Atos, Canadian Pacific, City of Denton, CenturyLink, BNP Paribas, Asyaport, EDF, CSC, Fox Sports, Insight, Hunter, KPIT, Paetec, Rosetta Stone, Sonda, Xerox
    Cardlytics, AEW Energie, Aubert, Zhongtong Information Service, Commune de Villepinte, Teikyo University Hospital
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Construction Company8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Wellness & Fitness Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government8%
    No Data Available
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise25%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: April 2024.
    769,334 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while Dell XC Appliance [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is rated 8.0. 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 Dell XC Appliance [EOL] writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is most compared with .

    See our list of best HCI vendors.

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.