We performed a comparison between Dell VxBlock System and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Converged Infrastructure solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Good flexibility and speed."
"Integration with VMware and VMotion definitely brings a lot of value."
"Virtual machines for the infrastructure."
"Good default features."
"It's at least 99 percent problem-free because it's factory-built. So from an informational point of view, everyone trusts that VxBlock has been tested well at the factory and has been configured to their requirements."
"In comparison to traditional file load systems, Dell VxBlock System can be deployed quickly and results in monthly cost savings."
"It's a highly optimized piece of equipment that doesn't give us any problems."
"With a converged infrastructure, it's easy to troubleshoot from network to server issues from a single point of reference."
"It's all converged into one consolidated platform, which works well together."
"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."
"The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well."
"The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are also extremely important in our organization. We don't always have time to research products and solutions ourselves. By going with a validated design, we're assured that it's the latest and greatest. It's supported by the three major vendors that we deal with."
"From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking."
"We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system."
"I like the combination of the brands that they decided to include, in terms of its compatibility, e.g., they integrated UCS into this solution."
"We’ve seen an improvement in application performance."
"The only thing that I can say is when you procure the VxBlock, obviously you have to complete detailed questionnaires about your architecture including the configuration, et cetera. If you make a mistake on the implementation, then you need to rebuild the entire VxBlock. That is just a point of consideration rather than a flaw. You need to be absolutely sure and validate the upfront configuration information that you provide because your VxBlock comes delivered and built, according to that exact information."
"The hardware lifecycle is not documented very well. For example, now you can buy a piece of equipment, but you don't know if the hardware is going to be a team production next month or next year."
"There are components of VxBlock that are not managed or supported by Dell because some of the components are from Cisco. Thus, when there are problems with compute nodes, though Dell was managing the interaction, we had to rely on Cisco to solve the issue. When Cisco was not responding as quickly as Dell would for their components, it made it difficult for us because we needed to have the failed nodes back up and running. As such, the disparate ownership of components in the equipment is an issue."
"It is a good product, but for us, it is like a black box. We are not really sure about its internal components, and how to do the terminal upgrade, and how to make sure about the security of the device. We understand how it works, but in order to do the upgrades, we have to get help from the company. We cannot do it ourselves. In another model that we had, the internal team could do the upgrade but not in this one. There is no clear process for a new upgrade or update. They should provide a software intelligence tool that has a dashboard where you can see the current firmware, the latest firmware, and the documentation and the process for the upgrade. For VxBlock, we have different management consoles. There is no single management console that you can use to manage all components inside VxBlock. Their scale up and scale out process is also not clear. Their support is also a little bit slow in responding to the cases."
"Does not support different kinds of mixed applications."
"The consistency of disc quality could be improved."
"Lacks flexibility with third-party applications."
"We are finding it a bit challenging in terms of the management of a specific VxBlock component. Currently, we have different units as a part of the block storage. We have one for Cisco equipment and one for Dell. When we have an issue in the infrastructure, Dell EMC VxBlock System should automatically detect it and send a notification to VC support, but, unfortunately, it is doing that only for one unit. It is not working for Cisco components. We have informed them about this area of improvement, and they are working on this. The way different parts are integrated should be improved. We should have one console to log in to see all the infrastructure in terms of each machine and hardware."
"The cost may be high compared to other solutions."
"We would like to have more monitoring and reporting, because today some of the reporting, and if you purchase it separately is expensive. We use OnCommand Unified Manager today, which is great, but we are looking for more of that."
"The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end."
"Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back."
"I would like to see more cloud-centric modules that are specific to applications and more software-based solutions. That's all that is missing."
"Automatic tiering would be good to have."
"The initial learning curve is pretty steep."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
Dell VxBlock System is ranked 4th in Converged Infrastructure with 12 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell VxBlock System is rated 7.8, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell VxBlock System writes "Can be deployed quickly, is easy to manage, and is stable and resilient". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell VxBlock System is most compared with Dell PowerEdge VRTX, Dell Vscale Architecture, Dell PowerFlex, IBM VersaStack and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Oracle Exadata and Dell PowerEdge VRTX. See our Dell VxBlock System vs. FlexPod XCS report.
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