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 8.6, 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

10,404 Views
6,669 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

FlexPod XCS

Read 295 FlexPod XCS reviews

500 Views
228 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 (5th)

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 is high availability."

"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."

"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."

"Dell PowerFlex is a highly scalable solution."

"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."

"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."

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

"The solution is quite stable."

More Dell PowerFlex pros

"The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution."

"High availability is outstanding. We haven't had any problems with that."

"UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes."

"The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it."

"The most valuable feature is the one support. Anytime that a customer buys a solution for a server, storage, or network, once they have trouble in their environment, everyone wants to find out who was wrong. With FlexPod, everyone is wrong and there is unified support. The best way to solve the problem is have it be everyone's problem, not just one person's problem. For FlexPod, you can call NetApp or Cisco, and I think it's the best way to solve the problem that the customer has."

"It took a server room where we had 280 servers and another with 180 and condensed them from 15 racks down to three racks. It's helping us in the data center with all our environmentals... In addition, we're getting the ability of VMware, which is virtualization, so now we have redundancy on all of our boxes, instead of them being physical."

"It is a complete solution."

"The assurance and the peace of mind that we get from knowing if we had an issue with either the NetApp equipment, Cisco equipment, or our VMware enviroment, we can call one number for support, then everyone works together and nobody is pointing fingers all over the place."

More FlexPod XCS pros

Cons

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

"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."

"We are still hoping for better ways to incorporate AI. We have to extend third-party access to PowerFlex by calling the API. It would be easier if the product had built-in AI integration. If PowerFlex can contribute more to AI, it would be more useful."

"It could be easier to learn."

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

"The solution is okay overall. It could be easier to learn."

"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."

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

More Dell PowerFlex cons

"Automatic tiering would be good to have."

"Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work."

"There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options."

"Some of the define features could use improvement."

"The FAS in it, with all its flexibility and scalability, it is much more complex and could be simplified."

"Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layer. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was."

"We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor."

"I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective."

More FlexPod XCS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this solution is fair."

"The solution's price is medium."

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

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

"The price of the solution is fair, it is priced in the average range amongst competitors."

"The pricing for this solution is good."

"The product is expensive."

"The price could be improved."

More Dell PowerFlex pricing and cost advice

"We have saved 50 percent on new service deployments."

"Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road."

"The cost is a little high."

"Licensing can be interesting with the new version because of the Intersight integration. I don't know what that looks like yet. I have seen some of the different licensing models, but with the new purchasing, all customers are going to have to buy some sort of Intersight licensing with the Blades or FlexPod. I am curious to see how that option shakes out. Previous to the UCS X-Series, the licensing was the same."

"We purchased from CDW•G. They are great partners on the government side."

"Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating."

"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."

"We definitely saw a lot of operational cost savings using FlexPod. As far as capital outlay goes, that was a little bit too much for us to swallow and we weren't able to recognize enough savings in that area to afford it."

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

11%

Government

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

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 1% 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

HPE Hyper Converged vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSAN vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 11% of the time

More FlexPod XCS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerFlex

April 2025

Download Dell PowerFlex product report

Buyer's Guide

FlexPod XCS

April 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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