StarWind Virtual SAN and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes compete in the virtual SAN solutions category. StarWind seems to have the upper hand due to its cost-effectiveness and ease of integration with existing infrastructure.
Features: StarWind Virtual SAN offers active-active high availability, integration with Microsoft clustering, and versatile compatibility with commodity hardware. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are noted for their performance and flexibility with seamless file sharing and consolidated storage management through vSAN.
Room for Improvement: StarWind could enhance documentation for iSCSI management and streamline the upgrade process. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes face issues with scalability, high initial prices, and limited flexibility, with further automation and competitive pricing being suggested improvements.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind's deployment is straightforward with commendable support, ensuring a smooth experience. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes also provide strong customer service, though the setup process can be complex compared to StarWind's setup ease.
Pricing and ROI: StarWind offers a more affordable pricing model with significant cost savings on setup, providing a quicker ROI. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, while offering potentially higher ROI due to reduced downtime, involve higher initial costs, making StarWind the more budget-friendly option.
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.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
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.
I would rate the customer support for StarWind Virtual SAN a ten, as they are responsive and competent.
When we set it up, they validate our settings and configurations to ensure we don't miss anything.
For large environments with frequent scalability actions, we propose the Terraform solution that builds ESXi, does necessary configuration, and automatically starts up for associating with the existing environment.
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.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
I have never needed to scale up or add additional nodes with StarWind Virtual SAN, but we have had to expand, and customer support has been excellent.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
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.
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
Having more visibility on what's actually happening when an error occurs would be beneficial.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
The pricing can be a bit complex depending on the features you need.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
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.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
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.
StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.
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