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Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
HCI (10th)
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

HH
Systems Engineer at First Rand Bank Ltd.
Virtual environment achieves seamless management and reduces downtime through improved fault tolerance
With regards to storage area networks versus virtual SAN, vSAN is better off. It is much faster because the disk is within, utilizing NVMe type disks running SSD for the OS and capacity, making it easier to expand storage. It is stable, and similar to any issues on a standalone machine, there's resilience; if we lose one host, data will not be lost because of the technology on vSAN that allows us to free up that host into maintenance mode without issues. The benefit of using vSAN is that it's easy to manage on vCenter. You can see if there are issues, get recommendations, and overall, it's highly fault-free which is beneficial because we want to minimize downtime. Operationally, we perform well enough during the week; the only time we are highly operational on vSAN is when we do switch upgrades on the MX7000 switches and firmware, which we schedule outside of business hours.
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The cost is higher compared to non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, but when compared with external storage solutions, there are significant benefits."
"It is easy to install."
"The best feature about any type of storage related to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is its ease of scaling, and with a converged infrastructure platform, you can easily add a storage node or a compute node to the stack and grow in smaller increments compared to getting a whole new array or upgrading controllers."
"I rate vSAN ReadyNodes as a nine out of ten."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"Dell's technical support is generally very good."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"The benefit of using vSAN is that it's easy to manage on vCenter, you can see if there are issues, get recommendations, and overall, it's highly fault-free which is beneficial because we want to minimize downtime."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"The ability of this solution to scale on-demand is great."
"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."
"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"It's simple, flexible, powerful; we've been able to move most of our workload to it and we've seen increased performance across the board."
"We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols."
"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."
 

Cons

"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"Although vSAN ReadyNodes work well, a faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes doesn't perform as well as IBM. There are significant limitations, especially with scalability and flexibility over time. For example, adding drives can be problematic if the specific drives aren't available with older nodes that are four or five years old. Unlike IBM, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes isn't as flexible and doesn't scale easily. Additionally, while present, features like deduplication and compression don't perform as efficiently as they do on IBM. Our experience shows that the tool isn't as robust or flexible as advertised."
"When customers want to expand capacity but all the drive slots are full, they are forced to buy new servers or nodes which adds more costs with licenses and hardware, rendering it less scalable than other storage setups."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"We have experienced some issues with performance."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"I would like to have more variety, like GPU cards."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."
"There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."
"The solution is more expensive than a traditional array. The prices are skyrocketing."
"We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."
"The price of the solution was reasonable."
"My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the solution. The solution is expensive."
"Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Government
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
There is no specific licensing model for vSAN ReadyNodes as it is linked with Broadcom VMware's solutions rather than Dell's. As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to...
What needs improvement with Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
I would want VMware to ensure that when there's a hardware failure on a host, it should gracefully migrate the VMs to another host available in the cluster without restarting, which would be a grea...
What is your primary use case for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
I am familiar with VMware Workstation, but we don't actually use a workstation. We only use ESXi because we're running a big organization. We have people that are responsible for a Citrix farm that...
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Also Known As

vSAN Ready Nodes
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: June 2026.
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