Dell PowerFlex vs FlexPod XCS comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and NetApp solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #4 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 12.1% mindshare in the category. NetApp is ranked #6 in CI , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 9.3% 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 27 Dell PowerFlex reviews

9,940 Views
6,562 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

FlexPod XCS

Read 295 FlexPod XCS reviews

490 Views
216 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

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 PowerFlex

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

HCI (4th)

FlexPod XCS

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

Converged Infrastructure (6th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell PowerFlex is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 12.1%, up 9.1% compared to last year.
FlexPod XCS, on the other hand, focuses on Converged Infrastructure, holds 9.3% mindshare, up 9.3% since last year.

HCI

Converged Infrastructure

Featured Reviews

Serdar De

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…

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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 most valuable feature of this solution is integration."

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

"The solution's most valuable feature is the storage space it offers."

"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature is high availability."

"The setup was very straightforward."

"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."

"The support team responds quickly."

More Dell PowerFlex pros

"I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp."

"It's amazingly scalable. It just works. It can expand to large MetroClusters and keep expanding."

"I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid."

"The hardware has been rock solid so far. It has gone up easy. It runs well. We have not had issues with it."

"Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place."

"It's flexible. You can scale up or out. Our environment has never needed it, but the option has always been there."

"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."

"You can add more boxes and you can have more IOPS available if you want. It's very easy to add new hardware to the cluster."

More FlexPod XCS pros

Cons

"The solution’s automation and pricing could be improved."

"The storage capability must be improved."

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

"The initial deployment was complicated and required a lot of data nodes, IPs, internal vLANs, data vLANs, and many other things."

"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."

"It could be easier to learn."

"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."

More Dell PowerFlex cons

"The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing."

"Updates are not frequent enough."

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

"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."

"FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design."

"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."

"It could be more innovative."

"FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side."

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 product is expensive."

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

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

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

"The pricing for this solution is good."

"The price could be improved."

"I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

More Dell PowerFlex pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The scalability is very good. I wish it was a more cost-effective, but you get what you pay for."

"The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect."

"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."

"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."

"We have seen a five to ten percent savings on new service deployments."

"The scalability is very expensive."

"We pay approximately $1,400 USD in total for between five-thousand and ten-thousand ports."

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

20%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

11%

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?

I don't know the cost of PowerFlex. I understand it is reasonable.

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 44% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 14% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs Dell PowerFlex

Compared 2% of the time

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Oracle Private Cloud Appliance vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 15% of the time

Dell VxBlock System vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSAN vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 10% of the time

More FlexPod XCS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex

May 2025

Download Dell PowerFlex product report

Buyer's Guide

FlexPod XCS

May 2025

Download FlexPod XCS product report

Also Known As

VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex

No data available

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.

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

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: April 2025.

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