We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN 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."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 most valuable feature is high availability."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The support is highly responsive."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The program is stable."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"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 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."
"The installation is complex."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"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."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN 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 Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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