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FlexPod XCS vs Vblock [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (2nd)
Vblock [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
TS
Chief Consultant and Architect at Tahir Professional Services
Centrally-managed and stable, but the initial setup could be made simpler and technical support can be improved
There is a different platform and there are different interfaces for different parts of the product. Although there are some centralized components, you still manage each component using its own set of tools. There is definitely room for improvement in this regard. I would like to have a catalogue like menu where you simply define your end computing needs and the rest would be taken care of internally. The initial setup could be unified to make it simpler.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I see the most value in the UCS portion. I love Cisco UCS."
"Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.). No single point of failure is identifiable."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It is all interface-based, so point and click."
"I would say that the most valuable feature is the single-vendor support model."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ease of support and industry leading technology – in storage, servers and networking, as well as virtualization."
"FlexPod is exactly what we're looking for as far as performance is concerned."
"The return on investment is very high for FlexPod implementations."
"From that perspective, if we look at our return on investment, we have had more productivity uptime, our end users are obviously happier, and IT is not constantly getting a black mark from the business because tech has not been worked."
"Not having to worry about the firmware integrations with the software infrastructure components has been grand."
"This solution has rock-solid reliability."
"Legacy built architecture disappeared with VCE converged infrastructure, as only one person with transversal knowledge can achieve the Logical Configuration Survey, resulting in a strong and powerful infrastructure with nearly no downtime, and this is well known by the VCE technical support."
"The most valuable features are reliability and high availability."
"Capability for scale and growth within a single rack brings strong possibilities for capacity planning."
"UCS brings the entire datacenter system together, letting us offer non-disruptive, seamless upgrades and storage tiering for people with higher IO demands, and it gives us flexibility."
"VMware NSX: Provides the ability for our organisation to deliver true DR."
"The solution was implemented by the VCE team, and they did a great job."
 

Cons

"Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance."
"The upgrade process needs to be improved and it would be nice to manage everything from a single pane of glass."
"Maybe in the future, they could include the HCI solution into the mix."
"The thing that stops us from jumping in more is that we are resource constrained; I have to piecemeal what we have, and I can’t stop using something because it’s old."
"Surprise me with something I haven't thought of. Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself."
"Just continuing to improve upon speed would be my biggest area with room for improvement, the 10-gig backbone."
"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."
"Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved."
"Tighter alignment could simplify and speed up the configuration and delivery process.​"
"The integration with other vendors' products needs to be looked at. It's not as flexible as we would like it to be."
"The implementation and support could be better."
"The initial setup was complex. The LCS was a nightmare."
"It's pretty good, but not great."
"Paid support is expensive so the cost of operation could be lowered."
"Improve the patching process and timeliness of updates/releases."
"It is still on the expensive side, near the top-end of cost compared to what's available now."
 

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."
"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."
"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase."
"We can just swap in new equipment or hardware as we need, which has probably saved us several weeks."
"The main return on investment would be that instead of having to refresh all of our desktop hardware we have been able to go reimage existing machines and use those as thin clients, then also purchase new thin clients rather than buying actual hardware. It also reduces the overhead of having our technicians deploy those systems and maintain them."
"Vblock is priced at a premium because people don't want the headache of managing and deploying different products."
"I would not say the pricing is not good value. It is still on the expensive side, near the top-end of cost compared to what's available now. Also, the licensing has to be improved. There has to be a clear definition of the licensing from the initial set-up so the customer knows what they are paying for, without being hit later on with extra licensing. The licensing definitions should be clearer and, perhaps, have one set of licenses rather than multiple licenses."
"Strive for a consolidated ELA."
"The paid support for Vblock is expensive."
"It is not cheap."
"Related to tech support: I believe it is too expensive."
"I think the pricing is on the higher end of the spectrum. There could be some adjustments that could be made there. Regarding licensing, watch compatibility with external products that you run on Vblock. It has got to be properly architected, otherwise, you will run into licensing issues."
"Vblock appears from the first while to be very expensive. There are more items you cannot see in the BOQ: customer service, support, delivery short time, and highly experienced VCE engineers."
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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
14%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
12%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Performing Arts
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
 

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 Enterprise16
 

Also Known As

No data available
VCE Vblock
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
Xerox, ACS, and Columbia Sportswear.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Rackspace Technology and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: September 2026.
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