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."It's a highly optimized piece of equipment that doesn't give us any problems."
"The monitoring and management parts are the most valuable. Monitoring is specifically valuable because you have one console to monitor everything. This console is called Vision."
"Its performance is very good."
"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."
"Integration with VMware and VMotion definitely brings a lot of value."
"With a converged infrastructure, it's easy to troubleshoot from network to server issues from a single point of reference."
"In comparison to traditional file load systems, Dell VxBlock System can be deployed quickly and results in monthly cost savings."
"Good flexibility and speed."
"It simplifies the management of our entire system."
"The agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"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."
"The storage efficiency and performance are valuable."
"The most valuable feature is ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It is all interface-based, so point and click."
"It is the overall collaboration between NetApp and Cisco to come up with a product that is best in class and best in breed. You are bringing together the best things about UCS and NetApp, as well as you are tying it together with the Nexus fabric."
"Does not support different kinds of mixed applications."
"The solution could use a clearer description of working methods to tell people more about its use cases."
"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."
"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 consistency of disc quality could be improved."
"This solution does not support Hyper-V, and we would like the new version to be supported and certified to work with Hyper-V."
"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."
"Lacks flexibility with third-party applications."
"I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be."
"Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that."
"There are too many drivers and software combined all together, and we need to have compatibility between all of them."
"There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it."
"I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well."
"Areas for improvement would be the support for the engineering team, who seem to have no clue when you open a case, the communication with and recognition of resellers, and the documentation, with could be more detailed."
"The initial learning curve is pretty steep."
"I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod."
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, IBM VersaStack, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance and HPE ConvergedSystem, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and Dell PowerEdge VRTX. See our Dell VxBlock System vs. FlexPod XCS report.
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