Dell PowerScale and StarWind Storage Appliance both compete in the storage industry, offering distinct advantages. Dell PowerScale holds an edge in large-scale storage management with comprehensive features, while StarWind is favored for cost-efficiency and simplicity.
Features: Dell PowerScale offers scalability, stability, and ease of management, with features such as CloudIQ for monitoring and SmartQuotas for storage management. It provides flexibility with varied storage pools and policy-based file placements. StarWind Storage Appliance is recognized for high performance and affordability, featuring all-flash arrays and a proactive support model. Its simplicity and efficient support make it ideal for certain environments.
Room for Improvement: Dell PowerScale needs enhancement in cloud integration, update complexity reduction, and better small file compression and object storage handling. Improved security features and a cohesive management tool suite are also requested. StarWind could improve synchronization times and expand integration capabilities for redundancy and VMware support. Broader integration and hardware availability are noted areas for StarWind's growth.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerScale receives positive feedback on customer support and deployment, although initial support experiences vary. StarWind users appreciate the solution’s ease of setup and licensing, though support quality can depend on engineer expertise. Both products maintain strong support systems, with Dell PowerScale benefiting from enhanced support routing and StarWind's seamless deployment in smaller enterprises.
Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale is a premium product with a high total cost of ownership, justified by management consolidation and reduced admin needs. Customers acknowledge its comprehensive features but note the initial and maintenance costs. StarWind is praised for cost-effectiveness and a straightforward licensing model based on node and capacity. Its affordability makes it attractive for smaller organizations, offering immediate pricing advantages and solid performance returns.
Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.
They have managed previous issues well.
Dell provides support within four hours, and they always fulfill their promises.
The service, particularly about hardware issues and support ticket handling, is an area that needs significant improvement.
Dell PowerScale is highly scalable, as evidenced by the reduced physical hardware and the efficient use of rack space.
Due to both cost and the knowledge required to maintain and use them, there are considerations about scalability.
Hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline.
The pricing of Dell solutions is higher than that of Huawei.
Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.
Dell PowerScale helps in saving costs related to power and rack space, reducing physical hardware from over one hundred to twenty-nine chassis.
Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us.
Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) storage solutions are designed to help manage data for enterprises of all types. Dell PowerScale systems are simple to install, manage, and scale to virtually any size and include a choice of all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes. Dell PowerScale solutions stay flexible and reliable no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future.
With Dell PowerScale, your data lake always stays simple to manage, simple to grow, simple to protect, and simple enough to handle the most demanding current and future workloads.
Ideal for companies of any size, from small enterprises to multi-national ones, Dell PowerScale storage provides secure collaboration, modular scalability, flexible consumption models, and easy cloud integrations, all with management tools spanning multiple platforms.
Key Benefits of Dell EMC PowerScale Storage
Reviews from Real Users
Dell EMC PowerScale storage stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its scalability capabilities and its user-friendly centralized management system.
Rachel B., a chief operations officer & acting CFO at Like a Photon, writes, "PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale."
Keith B., the director of IT at NatureFresh Farms, writes, "The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes, and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."
For SMB and Enterprises who are looking for high performance primary storage for server virtualization, VDI, database and Big Data scenarios, or inexpensive secondary backup tier, our solution is StarWind Storage Appliance. It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, and associated software into an easily scalable storage platform.
Additionally, the appliance features an optional gateway to Azure public cloud, which helps to implement an effective Disaster Recovery plan or meet regulatory requirements. StarWind SA scales up by adding individual disks and flash modules, or JBODs, while adding ready controller nodes allows scaling out.
StarWind SA targets those, who need high-performance primary storage or secondary storage for backup. In case there is a whole virtualization infrastructure to build from scratch, StarWind HCA will come in handy. Otherwise, if all the required hardware is present, StarWind Virtual SAN will be enough to build a high-performance virtualization setup.
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