We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"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."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"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."
"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 is scalable."
"The program is stable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The support is highly responsive."
"It is easy to install."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"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."
"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."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"This is a great product."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes 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 Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and FlexPod XCS, whereas Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes report.
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