We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."
"Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 11th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 33 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2. 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 HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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