We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."It's a new architecture, really scalable and programmable. When you look at SDN propositions it fits very well in a next-gen data center."
"The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design."
"It allowed us to scale out as our business grew without any issues."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is the ease of actually setting it up and learning it."
"It provides us with a lot of agility, on-demand or through orchestrations. We deliver hundreds of servers."
"For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment."
"FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important to our organization... Especially in healthcare, it is absolutely critical that we have a validated performance platform. It has to work every time."
"Provides unified support: Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"I can roll out the system in thirty minutes and the customer can work with it."
"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."
"The support has been excellent, especially if you compare it to IBM."
"The stability continues to get better and better. It's pretty reliable."
"The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail. This makes all files act as a single file with a large and huge resource, and, of course, with customized administration, configuration, and resources. It provides automatic failover for redundancy and data recovery."
"Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available."
"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."
"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."
"There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful."
"One of the things that I've wanted would be availability of a health status, similar to Active IQ from my converged platform, on an app. I have dashboards so I can see the health of the system when I'm in the office, but when I'm not in the office I can't."
"The initial setup was complex. UCS is not the easiest thing to configure from the ground up. The networking pieces can get confusing, especially when you are talking about virtual segmentation. It is not as easy as other things now on the market, such as hyperconverged."
"We would like FlexPod to have more power, though it is not lacking in power now."
"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."
"Having a native replication would be an improvement."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"
"Supply chain capabilities are certainly hurting us. We're in the process of placing a large order for more VxRail nodes right now."
"Its price could be better."
"Dell wants to implement the disaster site in the new year, but they haven't decided yet. I hope we will have the opportunity to sell VxRail with this disaster site. It is not really clear at the moment, but hopefully, we will get some good news from the customers in the new year."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive. NSX should be licensed together. It will make the network virtualization layer more usable. It would be better if they come together in a bundle, not separately."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell VxBlock System and Dell PowerEdge VRTX, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series.
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