We performed a comparison between Dell XC Appliance [EOL] and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"The solution's hardware is great."
"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."
"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."
"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"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."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."
"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
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Dell XC Appliance [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Dell XC Appliance [EOL] writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is most compared with , whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN.
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