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.
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The program is stable."
"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 most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us."
"It comes all in one box."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible."
"The HPE SimpliVity disc compression is very valuable."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"The solution must provide other hypervisors."
"Our customers are always looking or a discount on the product."
"I have a free project with SimpliVity deployment in the next three months. What can be improved is that in one or two of these projects, I need a cloud backup for the infrastructure and data. As for the infrastructure of the product as it relates to customer size, it is not very good at this moment in Peru. I need a solution for the cloud. In Peru, it's a three or four solution provider for cloud services."
"The initial setup was complex because it was a new solution."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"I would like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases."
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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