We compared Dell PowerFlex and VxRail based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Dell PowerFlex is praised for its flexibility, scalability, and reliability, while VxRail is appreciated for its excellent performance and seamless integration. Dell PowerFlex offers strong customer service, pricing, and return on investment, while VxRail is commended for its support and pricing structure. Dell Powerflex users emphasize the ease of use and efficient operations, while VxRail users highlight the scalability and flexibility. Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements, while VxRail users suggest improvements in scalability, compatibility, setup process, monitoring, customer support, and documentation. Overall, both products have positive user feedback with some areas for enhancement.
Features: The valuable features of Dell PowerFlex include its flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Users also praise its performance and user-friendly interface. On the other hand, VxRail is highly appreciated for its excellent performance, seamless integration, and highly scalable infrastructure solution.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Dell PowerFlex was reported as straightforward and hassle-free, making the implementation process smooth. Users found the pricing of Dell PowerFlex to be reasonable and competitive. On the other hand, VxRail also offers a favorable pricing structure with reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options., Dell PowerFlex product delivers enhanced productivity, improved efficiency, and cost savings. VxRail offers increased efficiency, improved performance, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. Both products have positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: The Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements in certain areas, while suggestions for improving the VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, the duration required to establish a new tech solution varies for both Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. However, while Dell PowerFlex users reported separate timeframes for deployment and setup, VxRail users had varying experiences with some indicating that both terms may refer to the same period., The customer service for Dell PowerFlex is highly praised by users. They appreciate the efficient and helpful assistance provided by Dell's support team. Customers report that their questions and concerns are promptly addressed and resolved. Dell's commitment to a smooth experience and timely solutions is lauded. On the other hand, customers express satisfaction with the level of support received for VxRail. They appreciate the helpfulness and responsiveness of the customer service team. Users also value the knowledgeable and friendly staff during installation and troubleshooting. Overall, the customer service and support of VxRail are well-regarded.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Dell PowerFlex and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"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."
"It is extremely stable."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"For me, VxRail's most valuable feature is its life-cycle management."
"One-click upgrade is valuable because upgrading an environment that is considered a traditional one is something that we never do or are never going to complete. It is very time-consuming for my team. With the one-click upgrade, it is much quicker. There are preparation stages, but it takes less time, so we are also saving time in the daily administration."
"The assurance that my systems would not suffer a performance drop no matter where they are is valuable. I do not need any extra hardware."
"The most valuable feature is that it is VMware-embedded. VxRail HCI is on VMware, and we can use VMware vCenter and vSphere. Our infrastructure consists of servers and VMware, and by using VxRail, our experience and familiarity have not changed because VxRail HCI is on VMware."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"This is a good solution for medium-sized installations especially when it will be coupled with VMware."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"The technical support from Dell was very good."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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 installation is complex."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The storage capability must 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."
"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."
"I would like to see VxRail add duplication features to its hybrid solution."
"The only issue which is every now and again is that when you log in it will tell you that there's an issue with VxRail when there actually isn't. All that's required is a refresh or reload. The solution itself works but you may get some bad reports every now and again. Probably once every couple of months; there is no effect to the solution's capabilities."
"It needs faster deployment of security patches."
"The initial setup is very complex."
"The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run."
"The version upgrade process should be simplified."
"They need to keep upgrading the environment and improving automation so that the solution keeps getting better and better."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VxRail report.
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VxRail is a hyper converged infrastructure. While PowerFlex appliance is a flexible solution with a small starting point and massive scale potential.