We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and VMware vSAN 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."It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"The solution is quite stable."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"The high availability is very good."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"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."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"The documentation could be better."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"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."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The installation is complex."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 13th in HCI with 5 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 69 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Stable with good technical support and the capability to scale". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VMware vSAN report.
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