In the competitive hyper-converged infrastructure market, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail vie for dominance. PowerFlex edges out with its versatility and high IOPS, while VxRail is favored for its VMware integration and ease of management.
Features: PowerFlex offers high IOPS, scalability, and broad environment integration, suitable for high-performance applications. It is known for its adaptability in diverse cloud environments, supporting private and hybrid cloud setups. VxRail, meanwhile, integrates seamlessly with VMware, simplifies operations in VMware environments, and offers high availability with dynamic scalability. Its single console management and lifecycle automation enhance ease of use and provide peace of mind for users.
Room for Improvement: PowerFlex can improve its configuration simplicity and licensing flexibility. Users desire streamlined data resilience and easier cloud integration. VxRail would benefit from more flexibility with legacy hardware and cost-effective scalability. The need for more effective management tools to handle complex configurations and deployments is also noted.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PowerFlex's deployment supports on-premises, private, and hybrid clouds, leveraging adaptable infrastructure. VxRail primarily caters to on-premises and VMware-centric setups but includes some private and hybrid capabilities. Dell’s 24/7 customer support is generally well-received, though PowerFlex users report some global support issues, and VxRail users point out a need for clearer support processes.
Pricing and ROI: PowerFlex offers competitive pricing with significant ROI advantages, such as reducing Microsoft SQL licenses. In contrast, VxRail's pricing, though high, is justified by its VMware licensing integration within its appliance setup. Both solutions are praised for their long-term value, offering robust performance and reducing operational costs.
A key area for improvement for VMware would be response time.
The scalability is excellent.
There are limitations, such as the inability to upgrade from a single to dual CPU in certain configurations.
It is a very stable and mature product, with centralized management and upgrades being perfect for us.
The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten.
It requires a very clean environment to proceed without issues.
The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell.
Previously, the cost was higher, however, recent changes in VMware pricing have reduced it.
The cost varies for us as a large company because we receive special offers from Dell.
Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.
Another benefit is the fully automated upgrade process, which is completed with just one click through the VxRail Manager.
VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.
The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.
VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.
VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.
VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.
VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.
If you know VMware, you know VxRail.
VxRail Features and Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”
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