No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

FlexPod XCS vs Rackspace OpenStack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

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

FlexPod XCS
Ranking in Converged Infrastructure
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rackspace OpenStack
Ranking in Converged Infrastructure
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Converged Infrastructure category, the mindshare of FlexPod XCS is 12.8%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rackspace OpenStack is 7.4%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FlexPod XCS12.8%
Rackspace OpenStack7.4%
Other79.8%
Converged Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enforces standardized setup procedures following Certified Validated Design (CVD) guidelines and offers greater flexibility and control over the system compared to traditional systems
The GUI setup follows the right setup, meaning we have to follow the CVDi.e. Certified Validated Design. Everything is clear, because you can build CI yourself, but without rules, it can be messy. With FlexPod, there are rules to follow, making it more standardized. This helps with troubleshooting and compatibility assessments, simplifying troubleshooting significantly. We also use FlexPod pre-validated architectures to validate the design. It is very, very important to us because we had a bad case in 2015 where separate items integrated poorly due to no version or firmware compatibility certification. Troubleshooting became a nightmare. So, standards are crucial for us, and everything entering production should be verified or at least documented for certification.
SS
Manager Dev Ops at MSD
Private cloud control has deepened my DevOps automation and strengthened security practices
For improvement, I feel the documentation available for setting up and creating infrastructure using Rackspace OpenStack could be enhanced, as I personally find the existing documents are not sufficient for new learners or beginners. We can also work on improving the user interface; the Horizon dashboard is functional, but compared to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, the UI feels somewhat dated. A more modern, intuitive interface with better navigation would enhance the overall user experience, especially for new users. Improving the documentation, including more real-world deployment examples, troubleshooting guides, and architecture best practices, would make onboarding much easier. Faster upgrades would also help; Rackspace OpenStack upgrades can sometimes be complex, so simplifying the upgrade process and minimizing downtime would assist organizations in maintaining their environments more easily. Additionally, improving monitoring capabilities would be beneficial, with advanced monitoring and analytics dashboards providing administrators deeper visibility into performance, capacity, and potential issues without relying heavily on third-party tools. Adding more managed services, similar to what public cloud providers offer, could reduce operational overhead while still allowing customers to retain the flexibility of a private cloud. Lastly, integrating AI could be valuable, with AI-driven recommendations for capacity planning, security monitoring, and automated troubleshooting improving platform management.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"There is a huge improvement, between fifteen and twenty percent, in application performance."
"We have absolutely seen ROI, as we have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months."
"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."
"FlexPod is absolutely uniquely valuable for oil and gas, for some of the more higher-intensive products, the software that engineers will use to look for oil."
"It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal."
"DR has been tremendously easier."
"Implementing this solution has made our staff more efficient because once it is built, it's a matter of provisioning additional VMs."
"It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push."
"The most valuable feature is the customization, and with the customization you can really give the customers what they want."
"Rackspace OpenStack is stable and reliable, often compared favorably against other solutions."
"Rackspace OpenStack impacted my organization positively in that the drive helped me keep files in an organized folder, and obviously we needed email addresses to be able to communicate with each other and for outsiders to be able to email us."
"I like its integration with GitLab and its simplicity. OpenStack has a lot of third-party libraries that it uses."
"The solution is stable."
"In my experience, Rackspace OpenStack delivered a stable, flexible, and reliable private cloud environment."
"The documentation was plentiful and very helpful.​"
"OpenStack allowed for mass uploading of images to Akamai cloud services."
 

Cons

"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."
"Scalability is sometimes a challenge for us."
"It is not a one button thing, and there are some things like that."
"The graphical interface could be made easier to use and more intuitive."
"A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror."
"We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there."
"There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out."
"We would like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases."
"As a beginner, I find some difficulties in understanding Rackspace OpenStack, as it can be complex without a foundational grasp of cloud and networking concepts."
"Rackspace OpenStack can be improved because it wasn't clear that you have to cancel 30 days before; otherwise they charge you for the month."
"It could use more examples in different languages (API use cases).​"
"The deployment process could be easy."
"The pricing of Rackspace is quite high in the Vietnam market."
"VMware has a side-to-side replication feature, which is still more mature than Rackspace OpenStack's which can't be used in a production environment."
"The line migration is a problem."
"OpenStack's UI, while user-friendly, could be improved to offer a more intuitive experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput."
"Pricing is always tough. We need to get to a point where the customer's happy. Then, as partners, we are also happy."
"Make sure you are buying for performance, not just capacity."
"We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"We have saved time, money, space, and power consumption on new service deployments. We have a data center in Toronto which had ten racks on one of the new servers. This was all reduced to two racks with six chassis, which is amazing."
"As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts."
"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."
"I use it as an open-source tool."
"The pricing is low."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Converged Infrastructure solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with Rackspace OpenStack?
I cannot comment comprehensively on how Rackspace OpenStack can be improved, as I do not find that much difference; however, some areas can be improved, such as support for OEMs deploying highly sp...
What is your primary use case for Rackspace OpenStack?
My main use case for Rackspace OpenStack is that we are particularly using it for our OpenStack applications, where we are putting our applications on Rackspace OpenStack software day-to-day. A spe...
What advice do you have for others considering Rackspace OpenStack?
I rate Rackspace OpenStack an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. I chose 8 out of 10 for Rackspace OpenStack because every product has some space to improve. Regarding Rackspace OpenStack's AI capabilities, ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
OpenStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
X.commerce
Find out what your peers are saying about FlexPod XCS vs. Rackspace OpenStack and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.