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 SANs come with outstanding support."
"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 solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"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."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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."
"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 support is highly responsive."
"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."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"Among the valuable features are that it's a complete solution, it's easy to use, and there is not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution."
"It comes all in one box."
"It is simple and easy to use."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
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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