We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell VxBlock System 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."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 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."
"The support team responds quickly."
"Its performance is very good."
"Good default features."
"In comparison to traditional file load systems, Dell VxBlock System can be deployed quickly and results in monthly cost savings."
"VxBlock has good performance, so that is an advantage."
"It's at least 99 percent problem-free because it's factory-built. So from an informational point of view, everyone trusts that VxBlock has been tested well at the factory and has been configured to their requirements."
"With a converged infrastructure, it's easy to troubleshoot from network to server issues from a single point of reference."
"The monitoring and management parts are the most valuable. Monitoring is specifically valuable because you have one console to monitor everything. This console is called Vision."
"Virtual machines for the infrastructure."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"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."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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."
"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"The only thing that I can say is when you procure the VxBlock, obviously you have to complete detailed questionnaires about your architecture including the configuration, et cetera. If you make a mistake on the implementation, then you need to rebuild the entire VxBlock. That is just a point of consideration rather than a flaw. You need to be absolutely sure and validate the upfront configuration information that you provide because your VxBlock comes delivered and built, according to that exact information."
"This solution does not support Hyper-V, and we would like the new version to be supported and certified to work with Hyper-V."
"It is a good product, but for us, it is like a black box. We are not really sure about its internal components, and how to do the terminal upgrade, and how to make sure about the security of the device. We understand how it works, but in order to do the upgrades, we have to get help from the company. We cannot do it ourselves. In another model that we had, the internal team could do the upgrade but not in this one. There is no clear process for a new upgrade or update. They should provide a software intelligence tool that has a dashboard where you can see the current firmware, the latest firmware, and the documentation and the process for the upgrade. For VxBlock, we have different management consoles. There is no single management console that you can use to manage all components inside VxBlock. Their scale up and scale out process is also not clear. Their support is also a little bit slow in responding to the cases."
"We are finding it a bit challenging in terms of the management of a specific VxBlock component. Currently, we have different units as a part of the block storage. We have one for Cisco equipment and one for Dell. When we have an issue in the infrastructure, Dell EMC VxBlock System should automatically detect it and send a notification to VC support, but, unfortunately, it is doing that only for one unit. It is not working for Cisco components. We have informed them about this area of improvement, and they are working on this. The way different parts are integrated should be improved. We should have one console to log in to see all the infrastructure in terms of each machine and hardware."
"There are components of VxBlock that are not managed or supported by Dell because some of the components are from Cisco. Thus, when there are problems with compute nodes, though Dell was managing the interaction, we had to rely on Cisco to solve the issue. When Cisco was not responding as quickly as Dell would for their components, it made it difficult for us because we needed to have the failed nodes back up and running. As such, the disparate ownership of components in the equipment is an issue."
"It's a good product but the price could be lowered. It's expensive."
"The hardware lifecycle is not documented very well. For example, now you can buy a piece of equipment, but you don't know if the hardware is going to be a team production next month or next year."
"Does not support different kinds of mixed applications."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while Dell VxBlock System is ranked 4th in Converged Infrastructure with 12 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while Dell VxBlock System is rated 7.8. 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 Dell VxBlock System writes "Can be deployed quickly, is easy to manage, and is stable and resilient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas Dell VxBlock System is most compared with Dell PowerEdge VRTX, FlexPod XCS, Dell Vscale Architecture, IBM VersaStack and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.
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