We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"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 setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"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."
"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."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance."
"Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layerKnowing that everything works, having a single place to be able to find out compatibility and things like that are the biggest benefits of this solution. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was."
"We have absolutely been able to save space."
"For our DR, we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM."
"This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization."
"We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere."
"The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution."
"If the network or site is down, you just need to go to a single vendor. You don't have to open up multiple cases with each vendor to get things done. That is one of the financial benefits of this solution."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The installation is complex."
"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."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The integration between both companies, Cisco and NetApp, is very good but it still needs to be enhanced in terms of visibility and observability."
"This solution is very hard to maintain and keep up."
"Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back."
"It could be more innovative."
"There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful."
"We have had some problems with SnapSuite and the replication functionality."
"I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective."
"The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 11th in HCI with 19 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. 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 FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Oracle Exadata, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell VxBlock System and HPE Hyper Converged.
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