We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN 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."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."
"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."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The storage capability must 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."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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