Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerFlex is 14.1%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Unique Categories:

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

9.2%

No other categories found

Featured Reviews

Kyle Bautista

Systems Admininstrator at J&D Brush Company Inc.

Jul 22, 2024

Ensures that our critical data is always protected and easily recoverable

Implementing StarWind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging StarWind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage. This approach has significantly reduced our dependency on physical tape hardware, leading to considerable savings in both equipment and maintenance costs. The virtual tapes are not only more cost-effective but also offer enhanced flexibility and scalability, enabling us to manage our growing data needs without substantial additional investment. Furthermore, the integration with Azure Blob storage ensures our backups are stored securely in the cloud, providing us with peace of mind and reducing the need for expensive on-premises storage solutions. The combination of StarWind’s VTL and Azure Blob has streamlined our backup process, reduced our overall backup costs, and improved our data management efficiency. We are extremely satisfied with the financial and operational benefits StarWind has brought to our organization.

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Mohammed Farooqui

Platform and Backup Support Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 20, 2024

The hyperconverge automation makes it easy to deploy the machines

Dell PowerFlex helped our organization in many ways. The hyperconverge automation makes it easy to deploy the machines. They are stable and offer high availability. If we have to perform maintenance on a single-blade server, we don't need to bring down the complete hyperconverge. We can move it live. We are primarily using it for VMware so the availability is important for us. A reset takes only five minutes, while planned downtime for regulatory approvals and adjustments would take three weeks. PowerFlex's ability to manage storage across multiple environments depends on our requirements. We can go with only compute nodes, or storage nodes, or we can go with both. There are no restrictions or limitations. It is based on the workload. We are thinking about moving our containerized solution, Openshift to be on PowerFlex. Openshift is more compute-related consumption for our banking services so storage nodes are not heavily required for this and we are targeting to purchase PowerFlex more for compute nodes. Most security solutions are monitoring logs and events which requires more storage. PowerFlex gives us the flexibility to use either or both. We are happy with the combination of reliability and scalability that PowerFlex offers us. The most important aspects of PowerFlex for us are stability, performance, and availability. PowerFlex is good in all these areas. For example, we had VxRail in our call center. Our call center is using Avaya's telephone solution to support customer calls and five years before we purchased VxRail we forced Avaya to convert all of their physical appliances to virtual appliances. So the complete Avaya solution has been working on VxRail for five years now and the call center has had hundreds of thousands of calls without a single interruption from the infrastructure. This is the beauty of the solution. We are now in the process of upgrading the Avaya solution which requires infrastructure upgrades. I purchased the latest version of PowerFlex and the implementation is in place now. In two weeks I will be moving the entire Avaya solution from the old VxRail solution to the new PowerFlex. The beauty of it is we will be able to make the switch without any interruption to the banking service because of the version. This makes life easy for us when we go for a complete software-defined solution. Dell PowerFlex helped streamline our organization. The local Dell team is close to us and understands our infrastructure. They are not just trying to sell the Dell products to us. There was one time we discussed with them about converting our complete infrastructure to the hyperconverge and they told us that though they are the leaders in hyperconverge, they don't recommend we move our complete workload onto the hyperconverge. It depends on the use case. Some of the banks need to be run on three-tier infrastructure and some services can run on the hyperconverge. So based on the requirement, they proposed the right solution for us.

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reviewer2084550

Senior System Administrator at Inflexion

Jan 25, 2023

Great onboarding with proactive support and helps virtualize more infrastructure

My nonprofit organization purchased a pair of StarWind Hyperconverged appliances almost three years ago. We wanted to simplify our environment while also cutting costs on server equipment. We compared other vendors and settled on StarWind for the cost and excellent reviews. We replaced our old…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."

"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."

"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."

"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."

"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."

"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"

"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."

"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."

"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."

"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."

"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."

"The program is stable."

"The setup was very straightforward."

"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."

"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."

More Dell PowerFlex pros

"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."

"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."

"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."

"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."

"High-availability is what I bought it for."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."

"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."

"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."

"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."

"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."

"StarWind really needs to market its product more."

"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."

"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."

"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"We've had some issues around the licensing."

"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."

"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."

"The installation is complex."

"Needs some more monitoring tools."

"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."

"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."

"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."

More Dell PowerFlex cons

"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."

"Updates need improvement."

"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."

"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."

"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."

"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."

"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."

"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."

"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."

"This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."

"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."

"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."

"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."

"I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN."

"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"The cost of this solution is fair."

"The pricing for this solution is good."

"We have a good contact in Dell and he prepared all the information and provided everything to us."

"The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten."

"The price could be improved."

"I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The price of the solution is fair, it is priced in the average range amongst competitors."

"The solution's price is medium."

More Dell PowerFlex pricing and cost advice

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to ext...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design. A facelift would ...

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What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerFlex?

The support is highly responsive.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerFlex?

I have good partners who prepared the price for us. I told them what we needed and everything worked out perfectly. W...

See all answers

What do you like most about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWin...

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were t...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 32% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 5% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

VxRail vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 50% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 4% of the time

Scale Computing HC3 vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 0% of the time

More Dell PowerFlex Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 44% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2024

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex

July 2024

Download Dell PowerFlex product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

June 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex

No data available

Learn More

StarWind

Dell Technologies

StarWind

Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.

The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Canopy, 8x8Inc., Atos, Canadian Pacific, City of Denton, CenturyLink, BNP Paribas, Asyaport, EDF, CSC, Fox Sports, Insight, Hunter, KPIT, Paetec, Rosetta Stone, Sonda, Xerox

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2024

Free Report: Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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