We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The program is stable."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The support is highly responsive."
"Our downtime has significantly been reduced."
"For our DR, we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM."
"The virtual environment is a lot more efficient than physical boxes."
"It simplifies infrastructure from edge to port to cloud. It proves that deployment is easy and straightforward. There isn't any need to do extra work."
"I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better."
"The flexibility and data deduplication have been the biggest practical applications."
"The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design."
"It's amazingly scalable. It just works. It can expand to large MetroClusters and keep expanding."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The installation is complex."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"I would like to see more interoperability within FlexPods. This comes into more of how we grow from multiple domains to a massive domain."
"I would like to see increased performance."
"The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end."
"I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod."
"I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement."
"There is a lot of documentation that has to be reviewed before you go through an upgrade. It is not as straightforward as some other solutions."
"I think it is sufficient for now, but in the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better."
"I would like to see a more centralized support model."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Scale Computing HC3, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata, Dell VxBlock System and HPE Hyper Converged.
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