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."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."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support is highly responsive."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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 integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"They offer top-tier support."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"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."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
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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