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Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
HCI (8th)
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experience improved efficiency and customer satisfaction with enhanced integration and management capabilities
Scalability involves two types of environments: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and non-VCF environment where we use VMware Validated Foundation. With VCF we have significant automation built-in within the VCF console within SDDC manager as the primary management console. For non-VCF environments, it depends on customer choice. For small environments, we do manual scalability and sometimes use Terraform scripts to keep the host ready and add in the cluster automatically. For large environments with frequent scalability actions, we propose the Terraform solution that builds ESXi, does necessary configuration, and automatically starts up for associating with the existing environment. If scaling is infrequent, with one or two hosts per month, it is a manual job. From a challenge perspective, it seems easier, with just a few pre-checks regarding make and model compatibility, disks, and server health on the hardware level.
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"vSAN ReadyNodes offer easy scalability, which has proven beneficial for storage needs."
"The tool's most valuable features are compression and its usage in Kubernetes."
"Dell's technical support is generally very good."
"We previously used the old traditional type of file storage and we switched because there was almost no difference in cost but we got a product with much better features."
"You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."
"Now you don't have to be a storage administrator to provision or do anything, and any VMware system administrator, with the ease of a button, would get storage provision, which makes their lives easier."
"The benefits for our organization are the performance that we're able to get out of it, as well as the guaranteed minimum performance from a storage perspective."
"Because NetApp usually marries capacity, performance, and upgrade planning together, there's not a whole lot that I need to worry about at this point."
"The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud."
"NetApp HCI solves predictability challenges with industry-leading performance capabilities that allow the granular control of every application."
"It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do."
"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
 

Cons

"Currently, it's like a black box that only Dell technical support knows how to handle."
"Although vSAN ReadyNodes work well, a faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"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, rendering it less scalable than other storage setups."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"When comparing Dell VxRail and Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes, I have found that when managing and expanding Dell VxRail is much better."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take a look at that."
"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
"I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."
"The price of the solution was reasonable."
"The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."
"The solution is more expensive than a traditional array. The prices are skyrocketing."
"My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the solution. The solution is expensive."
"There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."
"We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Government
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
University
7%
Construction Company
21%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
There is no specific licensing model for vSAN ReadyNodes as it is linked with Broadcom VMware's solutions rather than Dell's. As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to...
What needs improvement with Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
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 grea...
What is your primary use case for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
I am familiar with VMware Workstation, but we don't actually use a workstation. We only use ESXi because we're running a big organization. We have people that are responsible for a Citrix farm that...
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Also Known As

vSAN Ready Nodes
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: August 2026.
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