We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"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."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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."
"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 solution is scalable."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"The sales process is easy."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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."
"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."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell VxBlock System, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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