Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are both competitive solutions in the hyper-converged infrastructure category. Dell PowerFlex appears to have an upper hand in performance and integration, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are favored for their flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
Features: Dell PowerFlex offers extensive integration, high storage capacity, and significant performance enhancements that improve application efficiency and reduce latency. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide high availability, node flexibility, and are easy to configure, ensuring immediate storage scalability and robust performance.
Room for Improvement: Dell PowerFlex could enhance data protection features, simplify upgrades, and improve custom analytics interfaces. It needs more cost efficiency and flexibility in ecosystem support. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes require simplified pricing, better documentation, and reduced deployment complexity, particularly for scaling and cloud integration. Both could benefit from improved licensing flexibility and technical support.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are primarily deployed on-premises. Dell PowerFlex has hybrid and public cloud options. Users report good technical support, though concerns about scalability and responsiveness exist. PowerFlex users sometimes face bureaucratic processes, while vSAN Ready Nodes customers find support satisfactory but desire more detailed assistance and deployment guidance.
Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerFlex is a high-end solution with pricing challenges but offers bundled support services that enhance ROI by optimizing operational costs. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are competitively priced against peers like Lenovo, though maintenance costs can be high. Both solutions ensure return on investment driven by infrastructure support and bundled overall costs, though users suggest pricing improvements for broader access.
The OPEX benefits are around 30 to 40% because the same engineer who manages vSphere can handle Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, eliminating the need for additional support engineers.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
We do not have local Dell technical support.
There is always room for improvement in terms of response time and reaching knowledgeable staff quickly.
Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.
If we require a replacement part, the engagement is usually within four hours
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
With VCF we have significant automation built-in within the VCF console within SDDC manager as the primary management console.
I would rate scalability around seven because when customers want to expand capacity but all the drive slots are full, they are forced to buy new servers or nodes which adds more costs with licenses and hardware.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
They could have more AI functionality in the future.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
As more customers start deployment, I believe use cases will develop, leading companies to consider that.
A faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
I would want VMware to ensure that when there's a hardware failure on a host, it should gracefully migrate the VMs to another host available in the cluster without restarting, which would be a great improvement.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are useful as a product, but the lack of expansion with VMware has led customers to refrain from further upgrades.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
Dell PowerFlex includes PowerFlex Manager, which integrates with this solution to provide complete orchestration; you can manage your entire hardware as well as software segment and application segment through a single pane of glass, making it very easy to use and manage.
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
It is stable, and similar to any issues on a standalone machine, there's resilience; if we lose one host, data will not be lost because of the technology on vSAN that allows us to free up that host into maintenance mode without issues.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Dell PowerFlex | 9.3% |
| Dell vSAN Ready Nodes | 2.9% |
| Other | 87.8% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 15 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
Dell PowerFlex is a software-defined storage infrastructure delivering modern architecture and versatile deployment for on-premises or cloud. It achieves high performance, scalable storage, and workload consolidation through advanced automation.
PowerFlex's VMware compatibility ensures seamless integration, offering flexibility in compute and storage scaling. With its hyper-converged infrastructure, it caters to AI, cloud, and database environments, providing robust automation, resilience, and security. Flexible deployment options are complemented by a single-window management system, prioritizing cost optimization. However, enhancements are needed in monitoring tools, user interface, and AI functionality. Migration from Hyper-V and licensing flexibility also require attention, while improved documentation could simplify usage. Integration with services and streamlined upgrade processes are essential.
What are the key features of Dell PowerFlex?PowerFlex is essential in industries requiring support for mission-critical workloads and large-scale applications. It is instrumental for deploying storage, compute nodes, hyper-converged infrastructure, and private clouds. The platform integrates compute, storage, and networking, optimizing performance for modern applications like AI video analytics and disaster recovery.
Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.
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