We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, Dell Technologies and others in HCI."Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"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."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"It reduced the total cost of ownership."
"FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important to our organization... Especially in healthcare, it is absolutely critical that we have a validated performance platform. It has to work every time."
"The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand."
"Integration is most valuable. This is a reference architecture. So, we don't have to design something from scratch and figure out how it is going to work."
"FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations."
"FlexPod is the primary solution we recommend for clients with high-availability server requirements. Our clients find FlexPod's management helpful. You can manage everything via plugins."
"The feature I have found most valuable is data protection."
"The solution's granular scalability and broad application support helps us to meet the needs of diverse workloads."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The installation is complex."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"We would like one-click upgrades."
"As the technology grows, we're looking to upgrade our storage systems to something faster, and we're hoping to improve our servers with next-generation technology. So we want to enhance our server infrastructure and explore server virtualization with VMware. That's the improvement that our clients are demanding."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"I would like to see increased performance."
"Since 2018 or 2019, maybe due to COVID and the chipsets, my DIMMs are dying left and right."
"The integration between both companies, Cisco and NetApp, is very good but it still needs to be enhanced in terms of visibility and observability."
"I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be."
"They need to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 13th in HCI with 4 reviews while FlexPod is ranked 1st in Converged Infrastructure with 13 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 7.8, while FlexPod is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Stable with good technical support and the capability to scale". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas FlexPod is most compared with Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, VxRail, Dell PowerEdge VRTX, Dell VxBlock System and HPE ConvergedSystem.
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