Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs FlexPod XCS comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the Converged Infrastructure category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.9, while NetApp is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4. Dell Technologies holds a 1.8% mindshare in CI, compared to NetApp’s 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

Read 171 Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers reviews

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18 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

FlexPod XCS

Read 295 FlexPod XCS reviews

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228 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

FlexPod XCS

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

FlexPod XCS and Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers compete in the data center solutions category. FlexPod XCS seems to have the upper hand with its unified support model that simplifies deployment and ongoing management.

Features: FlexPod XCS distinguishes itself with pre-designed architecture, ensuring compatibility and flexibility through seamless integration of components, backed by joint Cisco and NetApp support for easier issue resolution. Key features include powerful scalability, FlexClone, and mirroring capabilities that expand storage and deployment options. Meanwhile, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers offer robust performance and reliability through iDRAC's remote management, along with OpenManage Essentials for easy hardware management. High resilience and support for virtualization and fault tolerance are noteworthy, accommodating diverse high-demand workloads.

Room for Improvement: FlexPod XCS users call for quicker certification of Cisco and NetApp updates and improved, unified support services to reduce vendor switching. A cohesive interface for component management is desired for smoother integration and better task automation. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers could benefit from reduced configuration complexity, more efficient firmware updates, and broader monitoring capabilities. Simplifying the OpenManage Console and ensuring a cohesive upgrade path for hardware iterations are also suggested.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: FlexPod XCS's verified architecture and single-vendor support streamline deployment, simplifying data center operations despite occasional cross-vendor support inconsistencies. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers provide strong customer service aided by iDRAC's remote management tools, although managing separate components remains complex.

Pricing and ROI: FlexPod XCS is considered expensive, yet its scalability and management efficiencies justify the cost by reducing operating expenses and enhancing ROI over time. Licensing complexities for Cisco, NetApp, and VMware require careful cost evaluation. Meanwhile, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are competitively priced, offering good ROI through consistent reliability and lower operational expenses. The ability to customize configurations appealingly suits various business needs, although a more extensive pricing strategy could enhance reach.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs. FlexPod XCS Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs. FlexPod XCS

April 2025

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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 PowerEdge Rack Servers

Ranking in Converged Infrastructure

3rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Data Center Networking (4th), Blade Servers (5th), Rack Servers (1st)

FlexPod XCS

Ranking in Converged Infrastructure

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Converged Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is 1.8%. The mindshare of FlexPod XCS is 9.3%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Converged Infrastructure

Featured Reviews

Syed Masuood

Country manager at Asta Innosys

Handles workloads and diverse applications efficiently

We have a lot of VMs on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. On a single server, we have probably hosted 14 or 15 VMs. Out of these, 8 to 10 are continuously running, and four of them are backup VMs, so it can handle a good workload. For cybersecurity, it is only accessible on the intranet; it is not accessible through the web. We use it for local development purposes, and it is behind our firewall. Its security is strong. We handle a lot of test data for government and confidential customers. It is safe and strong locally. We have not experienced any security issues. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have helped to reduce unplanned production downtime if we need to replace a hard disk, instead of completely shutting a server, there is a hot swap feature. It is quite good in that aspect. Usually, for any activity, there is a downtime of about 30 minutes. It has saved a lot of time. We have tried AI workloads for a development environment for a government customer in Singapore. The servers are hosted in Singapore. It is an ML-based engine with AI. It is a government project where data is processed, and we run it on Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. The benefit of running AI workloads on PowerEdge Servers is that it is easy to allocate memory. The application we are running is memory intensive. It is pretty easy to scale memory and storage.

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Chris Haight

Sr. Solutions Architect at CDW Canada Inc.

Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools

The traditional UCS Blades do not take much storage internally. You would be challenged to create an HCI (Hype converged Infrastructure) solution on FlexPod / UCS or any other solution that pools internal storage. Now, with UCS X-Series, you can carve off an HCI solution, software defined pooled solution if you want. This was one area of improvement that I wanted to see and can now realize with the refresh of the Cisco UCS infrastructure. With modern modular infrastructure, RESTful API has been added, there are more integrations, ServiceNow and vCenter along with tighter plug-ins. There is cross-user interface launching, for example with Windows Admin Center. The solutions are using Ansible and Terraform for deploying infrastructure as code. All the improvements that I wanted from the last gen are here or coming. With modern workloads and GPU use on the rise, adding GPUs to modern modular infrastructure will have some pros and cons. Typically, you can add one or two GPU's to a blade with no or little trade off. With the UCS X-Series, if you are doing a GPU farm, then you may have to sacrifice compute blades in the front slots to put in a GPU tray / module. A chassis holds eight compute blades, but if you are adding a ton of GPUs, a single GPU tray or more will reduce your blade count by as many GPU trays you add. This is not just a Cisco UCS X-Series problem. It is an industry problem with modular infrastructure and one that I would like to see get solved! I am looking into one such solution, VMware BITFUSION where you can send CUDA requests over the network to a BITFUSION server with the results sent back to the requestor, early stages here and only scratched the surface thus far. With Cisco UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects built into the chassis instead of being external. With the fabric interconnects, the real footprint of UCS X-Series is 9U, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed the network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though, not really on the NetApp side of the fence, NetApp is solid storage.

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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 way it integrates with other brands and its manageability are valuable. It is easy to use."

"Our overall experience with their product and support has been consistently excellent."

"The MX7000 gives us the most concentrated amount of compute in the smallest area possible."

"It is reliable. We have not faced any issues."

"It operates without any downtime. It runs 24 hours and 365 days. The downtime is there for an hour or two only when I do an upgrade, but it is within the SLA."

"I like the reliability and ease of swapping out failed equipment. It is very easy to replace power supplies and drives."

"The server itself is valuable. It does what we ask it to do."

"It is quite flexible when you use it."

More Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers pros

"It's a common platform, which provides for ease of use between all of the blade servers. It uses all the same tech, moving service profiles seamlessly across from one blade to the next. There is also combined support."

"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."

"The tool provides a single point for storing applications and it increases the availability of them. It also has improved the way we handle applications within VMware."

"We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow."

"It definitely streamlined operations. TCO-wise, it reduced cabling in the architecture. So, there has definitely been some savings. There have been a lot of reductions in the IT admin's time: reduced time to troubleshoot, reduced time to inventory the infrastructure, and reduced time to set up a host with templates and storage. The solution is saving easily 10 hours a week in time."

"The most valuable feature for me is that you can swap out pieces when you have to lifecycle your equipment."

"We’ve seen an improvement in application performance."

"FlexPod has affected the workload of our network admin team awesomely. We have fewer employees. It's good."

More FlexPod XCS pros

Cons

"There needs to be more flexibility for business options."

"We use PowerEdge servers in conjunction with VMware, a VCF Rack, and VxRail. That has worked out well. We are using it for firmware upgrades and other similar tasks. It's a one-stop shop, but it could be better when the servers aren't on a VCF stack. Profile handling and upgrading standalone servers could improve, but they have gotten better over the years."

"They can consider making them smaller in physical size but retain the same quality and the same security."

"Currently, the solution does not have the in-process memory encryption technology."

"Until they get new technology and density, it would be nice to see four nodes in a one-year package instead of a three-year package."

"PowerEdge is not that flexible. For example, it's difficult if I need something that is not in Dell's portfolio. We offer the flexibility to the customer. We can implement different things Dell doesn't have. If you have preconfigured systems, it's hard to transition them to what you need."

"I've had some trouble where the customers are not happy with the Toshiba drives, and it's a challenge when it comes to specific requests for Dell to a non-deviate, and only use Seagate drives."

"The product must improve its integration with VMware."

More Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers cons

"There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had."

"As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of IT, that is something where both Cisco and NetApp could look to improve further. Just simplifying the day to day management, the day to day issues that arise, and building more intuitiveness into the interfaces would help."

"It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side."

"We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM."

"I had one problem at the site where I had an aggregate that would not shrink after I had deleted some stuff. It took a few tries to get the right guy on the call. We do have a NetApp SAM with our company, and it really took getting to him to get the solution fixed."

"I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received."

"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."

"Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components."

More FlexPod XCS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At present, the pricing seems a bit high for us."

"The pricing and licensing are fair."

"PowerEdge pricing is equivalent to that of all the others in the market."

"I'd like them to be cheaper, but that's not the world we live in and that's not where the pound is at."

"The licensing is expensive and inflexible."

"The cost structure associated with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers presents itself as a potential point of contention for budget-conscious consumers, as it could be more strategically positioned to compete within the broader marketplace."

"They seem to have become more expensive. I've not done a comparison with other vendors recently. If the price increases more, we would need to do a comparison next year just to make sure that we are benchmarking our server purchases correctly."

"It's a bit of a shock when you have to find the money, but the pricing is very competitive, so I'm happy with that."

More Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers pricing and cost advice

"It is not going to save you money, but that is not the point. The opportunity to stay competitive in the marketplace is not a cost."

"We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month."

"It created lower total cost of ownership. Previously, we had disparate storage and servers, and there were bits of kits everywhere. Now, we have two data centers with almost identical setups in both."

"We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments."

"We have reduced our manpower with the solution."

"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."

"FlexPod has saved data center costs, due to the fact that we reduced our footprint for storage in a big way. We went from three complete racks down to a 2U storage array for more than 300 terabytes of storage."

"Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours)."

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

22%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

University

Manufacturing Company

20%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Educational Organization

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

When shopping for a rack server, would you go with Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Dell EMC Poweredge or Lenovo Thinksystem rack servers were the better fit for us. We ultimately decided to go with Dell EMC Poweredge....

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

It has helped us reduce unplanned downtime by 20% to 30%.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers?

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have pretty much progressed a lot if we look at what features are on them now. I don't know what more could be asked for, perhaps just faster performance. Every ( /produ...

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

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Compared 41% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

Compared 31% of the time

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

Compared 6% of the time

Huawei FusionServer RH Series Rack Servers vs Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

Compared 5% of the time

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Dell PowerFlex vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 31% of the time

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 15% of the time

Dell VxBlock System vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers

April 2025

Download Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers product report

Buyer's Guide

FlexPod XCS

April 2025

Download FlexPod XCS product report

Also Known As

PowerEdge R

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Overview

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are designed to optimize performance and efficiency in a data center environment, supporting various applications. Dell stands as the leading vendor in accelerated servers for AI, commanding a 33.8% revenue share. Based on user reviews, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers supporting tasks from basic web hosting to more demanding applications like data analytics and virtualization. They are engineered to offer high performance, reliability, and scalability. With a focus on automation and integrated security, these servers simplify operations and protect against threats, making them a smart choice for businesses of all sizes.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are a robust, secure, and scalable solution that can meet the diverse needs of businesses, backed by comprehensive support. Benefits to look for in reviews include performance, reliability, scalability, and customer support.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers key features include:

Scalability: These servers can easily scale to meet growing business needs, supporting more workloads and processing power.
Integrated Security: From hardware to firmware to the operating system, Dell PowerEdge servers are designed with security in mind, offering layers of protection.
Energy Efficiency: Advanced thermal design and energy-smart technology help reduce operational costs and environmental impact.
Automation: With Dell EMC OpenManage, the management of servers is streamlined, allowing for automated deployment, monitoring, and updates.

In terms of implementation, Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are used across various industries, from small businesses to large enterprises. They serve as the foundation for IT infrastructure, powering critical applications in healthcare, finance, education, and more. The adaptability of these servers means they can be tailored to specific industry needs, from handling large datasets in research institutions to supporting high-transaction databases in financial services.

Dell Technologies

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.

NetApp

Sample Customers

NxtGen Datacenter, Medien-Service Untermain (MSU), Exasol, IndigoVision, Dayco

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs. FlexPod XCS

April 2025

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