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."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"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 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 solution is scalable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"It has been performing well. It was more than what we expected."
"The configuration capabilities are good."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The most valuable feature is the quick restore."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"I like the expandability of the solution. We can effortlessly grow the storage and resources without downtime."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"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."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"There may be issues around scaling."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"Once I am onto the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"The price is quite high. The system could also be more scalable."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 11th in HCI with 7 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 6 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE StoreVirtual. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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