We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The price was right."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"It's quite easy to install."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The program is stable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"The integration is excellent."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"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."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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 solution must be more flexible."
"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."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. 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 StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StorMagic SvSAN, StoneFly VSO NAS, VMware vSAN and DataCore SANsymphony.
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