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."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"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 most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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 scalable."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"Its ease of use is valuable. It is being used in a mining company. They wanted their working nodes to be seamless, and they wanted ease of use. That's why they opted for SimpliVity. They are running VMware virtual machines on it."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the backup rate and the backup transfer."
"The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"The technical support is exceptionally good."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"The solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"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."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The installation is complex."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party."
"HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show."
"There is room for improvement in the operations area because the support for that server space is minimal."
"The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time."
"A lot of our customers are using VMware and also are using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is not very stable on the HP SimpliVity."
"We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Is very resilient and protects our data, but the solution is complex". 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 Scale Computing HC3. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
