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Dell PowerFlex vs FlexPod XCS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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 PowerFlex
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
HCI (7th)
FlexPod XCS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell PowerFlex is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 5.8%, down 10.0% compared to last year.
FlexPod XCS, on the other hand, focuses on Converged Infrastructure, holds 12.7% mindshare, up 10.0% since last year.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerFlex5.8%
VxRail9.6%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)8.9%
Other75.7%
HCI
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FlexPod XCS12.7%
HPE ConvergedSystem11.1%
Dell VxBlock System9.8%
Other66.4%
Converged Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

Serdar De - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at ÜÇGE Shopfitting & Design
Initial setup has been straightforward and it has reasonable pricing
We are new to this, so we are still learning about the valuable features The solution is okay overall. It could be easier to learn. We haven't had any issues. They could have more AI functionality in the future.  I have been using the solution for six months. I have not encountered any problems…
John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enforces standardized setup procedures following Certified Validated Design (CVD) guidelines and offers greater flexibility and control over the system compared to traditional systems
The GUI setup follows the right setup, meaning we have to follow the CVDi.e. Certified Validated Design. Everything is clear, because you can build CI yourself, but without rules, it can be messy. With FlexPod, there are rules to follow, making it more standardized. This helps with troubleshooting and compatibility assessments, simplifying troubleshooting significantly. We also use FlexPod pre-validated architectures to validate the design. It is very, very important to us because we had a bad case in 2015 where separate items integrated poorly due to no version or firmware compatibility certification. Troubleshooting became a nightmare. So, standards are crucial for us, and everything entering production should be verified or at least documented for certification.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"PowerFlex allows us to scale compute and storage resources independently, which is extremely valuable for optimizing costs and right-sizing infrastructure based on workload demands, particularly in environments with variable AI and database workloads."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage, and it provides great scalability and reliability."
"The tool's most valuable features are its price and flexibility. It has high performance."
"The API catalog helps us use Ansible automation."
"Dell PowerFlex is a complete hyperconverge that makes automation easy to manage and extremely stable."
"The technical support for this solution is pretty good."
"My overall product rating would be nine out of ten."
"It is more stable, more powerful, and has more integration features."
"It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it combines storage and server – very streamlined, very flexible, and built upon reliability."
"The technical support is amazing."
"Very scalable, and we’ve been very pleased."
"The solution is resilient, because it has good scalability, and other products in the market don't have this. It has scalable storage and service."
"The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are amazing."
"The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, definitely simplifies it and aids in going to that journey, with cloud as the last piece of that route and this gives a seamless way to do this."
"It is one of the best unified computing architectures out there, and is highly scalable."
 

Cons

"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"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 think that stability is good for small and mid-level environments, but I don't think that it is suitable for high-end."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"The initial deployment was complicated and required a lot of data nodes, IPs, internal vLANs, data vLANs, and many other things."
"As a solution, it isn't really very innovative."
"I would like to see more CVDs and more published designs around a multi-hypervisor approach within a single pod."
"I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system."
"Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation."
"The user interface isn't as friendly as I would like it to be."
"We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there."
"Most of the implementations that I've seen don't take advantage of its features. Where I work now it's been more costly to implement it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"We have a good contact in Dell and he prepared all the information and provided everything to us."
"The price could be improved."
"The pricing for this solution is good."
"From my perspective, pricing is expensive. If they can reduce the pricing or offer more customer incentives, it would attract more users."
"The solution's pricing could be much cheaper and affordable."
"I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the price as eight and a half. The tool is expensive."
"Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase."
"We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously."
"The product is kind of expensive even from an entry-level standpoint. I would say FlexPod would be the way to go if you are a larger business or one with large data volume."
"The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model."
"Overall, the solution works pretty well. The biggest complaint I have from customers is the cost."
"We have saved time, money, space, and power consumption on new service deployments. We have a data center in Toronto which had ten racks on one of the new servers. This was all reduced to two racks with six chassis, which is amazing."
"We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"Pricing is always tough. We need to get to a point where the customer's happy. Then, as partners, we are also happy."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
 

Questions from the Community

What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerFlex?
Dell PowerFlex is a premium software-defined infrastructure solution and while the initial investment may seem higher than traditional SAN or mid-tier HCI solutions, the long-term TCO is competitive.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerFlex?
Area of Improvement: While PowerFlex Manager is powerful, the UI could be more intuitive, especially for first-time users or non-technical admins. Streamlined navigation, contextual help and guided...
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Also Known As

VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Canopy, 8x8Inc., Atos, Canadian Pacific, City of Denton, CenturyLink, BNP Paribas, Asyaport, EDF, CSC, Fox Sports, Insight, Hunter, KPIT, Paetec, Rosetta Stone, Sonda, Xerox
University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: August 2026.
911,839 professionals have used our research since 2012.