We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity 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."We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The solution is scalable."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"The setup is very easy."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"The configuration capabilities are good."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"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."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for 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."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"They can bring more awareness about this product. In this part of the world or this region, people normally don't know about SimpliVity and its capabilities. The company we have it sold to hasn't been able to fully utilize all the features or understand the features. So, product awareness should be improved."
"We had minor problems with the initial setup but it was with our internal infrastructure."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"SimpliVity's data management could be better. Nutanix's interface is a bit more user-friendly."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 6 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 23 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.4. 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 SimpliVity writes "Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Scale Computing HC3, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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