StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure category. StarWind seems to have the upper hand due to its ease of deployment, proactive support, and cost-effectiveness.
Features: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers live migration, proactive support, and high availability, significantly reducing hardware requirements. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes focus on high availability and performance, requiring consideration of storage and networking components.
Room for Improvement: StarWind users suggest enhancements in monitoring software and increased support for additional hardware configurations like Linux-based systems. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes need improvements in scalability and pricing flexibility, with users desiring better update automation and cloud integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is praised for easy deployment and exceptional proactive support addressing issues quickly. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes have a more traditional setup, requiring more effort initially, though they also receive positive support feedback.
Pricing and ROI: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is cost-effective for small to medium enterprises, featuring an all-inclusive pricing model that covers hardware and support. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are viewed as more expensive, with users noting its higher price compared to competitors like HPE.
The OPEX benefits are around 30 to 40% because the same engineer who manages vSphere can handle Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, eliminating the need for additional support engineers.
Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.
There is always room for improvement in terms of response time and reaching knowledgeable staff quickly.
With VCF we have significant automation built-in within the VCF console within SDDC manager as the primary management console.
I would rate scalability around seven because 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.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are useful as a product, but the lack of expansion with VMware has led customers to refrain from further upgrades.
A faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
In some cases, we have seen hardware failures and performance issues where performance suddenly deteriorates.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
I would say in-house management, administration, and storage policies are the three key differentiators compared to normal non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes where we are leveraging external storage.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.
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