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.
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The solution is scalable."
"The program is stable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"They require more media visibility."
"The documentation could be better."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"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 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."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"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."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
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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