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."The solution is scalable."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"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 installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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 would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"The installation is complex."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"The documentation could be better."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
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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