We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StorMagic SvSAN 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."As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"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."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The program is stable."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The installation is complex."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while StorMagic SvSAN is ranked 14th in HCI with 9 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StorMagic SvSAN is rated 8.2. 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 StorMagic SvSAN writes "The best choice for performance and price". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StorMagic SvSAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, DataCore SANsymphony, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Veeam Backup & Replication. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StorMagic SvSAN report.
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