We performed a comparison between Dell XC Appliance and SteelFusion based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."
"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."
"The solution's hardware is great."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"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."
"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."
"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."
Earn 20 points
Dell XC Appliance is ranked 38th in HCI while SteelFusion is ranked 26th in HCI. Dell XC Appliance is rated 8.0, while SteelFusion is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell XC Appliance writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SteelFusion writes "Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices". Dell XC Appliance is most compared with , whereas SteelFusion is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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