Dell PowerFlex vs FlexPod XCS comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and NetApp solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #5 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 13.0% mindshare in the category. NetApp is ranked #5 in CI , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 9.7% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerFlex

Read 26 Dell PowerFlex reviews

11,797 Views
7,436 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

FlexPod XCS

Read 295 FlexPod XCS reviews

619 Views
301 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Dell PowerFlex

FlexPod XCS

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerFlex

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

HCI (5th)

FlexPod XCS

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

Converged Infrastructure (5th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell PowerFlex is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 13.0%, up 7.4% compared to last year.
FlexPod XCS, on the other hand, focuses on Converged Infrastructure, holds 9.7% mindshare, down 10.9% since last year.

HCI

Converged Infrastructure

Featured Reviews

Ayodeji Oyewole

Managing Director at Atlantic factorial

A hyper-converged infrastructure that is like a mini data center of its own

There are two categories, namely, the appliances and the racks. The partners are able to set up the Dell PowerFlex appliances, but not fully. The partners are able to physically set up the appliances, while the OEM will set them up logically. The PowerFlex racks are fully set up by the OEM, both physically and logically. The solution's initial setup is not pretty straightforward in emerging markets at the moment.

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Bob Greenwald

Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

There are no limits in terms of integration.

The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand. I can do just about anything storage-related with it. In a FlexPod environment, we can provide whatever you want from a data storage perspective. Replication, backup, disaster recovery, etc., are all there right out of the box. I can set up fiber channel LAN, channel-over-ethernet LAN, etc. Storage is highly flexible in this environment. I don't have to buy two or three products and don't have to do some sort of software virtualization of the storage, which takes away your performance. For hyperscalers, you have insights on the Cisco side that you can use to look at tons of stuff. From the storage side, you could put a range of NetApp tools in the cloud. You could put VMware in the cloud and talk back to the native on-prem Cisco compute environment. Their network environment extends into the cloud. There are no limits in terms of integration. NetApp is the most integrated hyper-scale for storage and moving data into the cloud for long-term backup storage. VMware is fully available, so you could run VMware or Kubernetes on VMware in the cloud and tie it to your local storage through NetApp integration. It's an excellent match because your compute could easily DR to the cloud and be ready to go with all your storage without any modifications necessary because of the native integrations. It integrates well with the hyperscalers.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The support is highly responsive."

"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."

"The support team responds quickly."

"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."

"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."

"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."

"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."

"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."

More Dell PowerFlex pros

"It is a complete solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is one call for support."

"We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere."

"Going from the old monolithic server and silo storage that they used to use is an improvement. With the FlexPod solution, just being able to manage and monitor the overall environment helps."

"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."

"I am happy with the stability. I haven't had any major issues with it in four years. This includes upgrades."

"This solution has given us a great deal of on-site storage that we didn't have before."

"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."

More FlexPod XCS pros

Cons

"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."

"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."

"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."

"The installation is complex."

"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."

"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."

"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."

"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."

More Dell PowerFlex cons

"In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed."

"We use technical support from time to time. Most of the time if we really need assistance we end up having to get above the tier one support. We're able to do a lot of the tier one troubleshooting on our own."

"I would like to see the following: Support for multiple vendors' hardware; support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches; automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD."

"There is a lot of documentation that has to be reviewed before you go through an upgrade. It is not as straightforward as some other solutions."

"It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components."

"There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed."

"Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades."

"The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions."

More FlexPod XCS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From my perspective, pricing is expensive. If they can reduce the pricing or offer more customer incentives, it would attract more users."

"The pricing for this solution is good."

"We have a good contact in Dell and he prepared all the information and provided everything to us."

"The solution's price is medium."

"The price could be improved."

"The solution's pricing could be much cheaper and affordable."

"The cost of this solution is fair."

"The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten."

More Dell PowerFlex pricing and cost advice

"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 pricing and licensing are quite expensive. However, compared to other solutions, it is okay."

"The scalability is very expensive."

"We immediately saw a return on investment due to the fact that replacing our legacy storage arrays with the new AFFs reduced the footprint and maintenance costs. Overall, we saw an almost immediate ROI."

"Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product."

"We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past."

"The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years."

"I have saved time on new service deployments. I've done deployments in under a week, and if it's a cloud-based deployment, it's even faster."

More FlexPod XCS pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user244362

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerFlex?

The support is highly responsive.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerFlex?

From my perspective, pricing is expensive. If they can reduce the pricing or offer more customer incentives, it would attract more users.

See all answers

What do you like most about FlexPod?

The system is designed for easy scaling. Because we define everything clearly. So when we plug the system in, we apply the profile, and it scales easily.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FlexPod?

The pricing is not cheaper, but stability is more important for us now. We focus on business gains, not static numbers. Following XCS rules ensures a stable environment, which is crucial. For me, C...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FlexPod?

FlexPod should focus more on automation. Integrating an automation tool with FlexPod would enable customers to leverage automation capabilities. More automation would be helpful. Currently, we cont...

See all answers

Comparisons

VxRail vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 49% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 15% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 6% of the time

Dell VxBlock System vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 1% of the time

More Dell PowerFlex Competitors

Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSAN vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VxBlock System vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 9% of the time

VxRail vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 8% of the time

More FlexPod XCS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex

December 2024

Download Dell PowerFlex product report

Buyer's Guide

FlexPod XCS

December 2024

Download FlexPod XCS product report

Also Known As

VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex

No data available

Learn More

Dell Technologies

NetApp

Overview

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.

FlexPod XCS is the secure platform your applications need from edge to cloud. Easily manage your suite of cloud-native, edge, and enterprise apps. Integrate advanced cloud services without compromising performance, security, reliability, or scale.

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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: December 2024.

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