We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity 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."It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"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."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"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."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. The management is easy, and you don't have to have a lot of knowledge about storage, network, etc. It is simple to manage and simple to implement, and that's its key feature."
"Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc."
"Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"HPE SimpliVity is scalable. Some 200 people at my organization are using this solution at present."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"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."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there."
"SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"Our customers are always looking or a discount on the product."
"There may be issues around scaling."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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