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."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."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The price was right."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"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 of this solution is integration."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 solution is quite stable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"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."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"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."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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 storage capability must be improved."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
"The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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