We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and Vblock [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."The feature I have found most valuable is data protection."
"It is definitely easier for us to maintain and do build-outs, so it takes a lot less time to set things up for the customer."
"This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization."
"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."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"All of our main applications run on this solution, and it has done a stellar job."
"The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are also extremely important in our organization. We don't always have time to research products and solutions ourselves. By going with a validated design, we're assured that it's the latest and greatest. It's supported by the three major vendors that we deal with."
"It's flexible. You can scale up or out. Our environment has never needed it, but the option has always been there."
"The most valuable feature is that it is centrally managed, as it is quite easy for our customers to manage everything, end-to-end."
"Capability for scale and growth within a single rack brings strong possibilities for capacity planning."
"The high redundancy of components has minimized frequent service degradation/failure."
"UCS Manager worked well for net/blade management and has allowed fairly easy use of dedicated bare-metal blades."
"Some of the key features are the ease of operation and access, without constraining actions. The tool is available to actually move things around, do things quickly quickly."
"The most valuable features are reliability and high availability."
"The component integration means I don't have to worry about technology mismatches."
"It's an integrated box Mac solution, so it's a plug and play. The deployment and build is pre-made and ready to deploy. It makes it easy to apply."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"I would like to see programmability into a SaaS-based offering, as I know Cisco's going in a lot of directions with their Intersight application."
"It could be more innovative."
"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."
"The majority of the time, if we need more storage, then we need to work with customizing the NetApp deployment. Right now, we just do a generic deployment, then wherever we have a need for storage, we have to move some application out of the next FlexPod deployment. One thing is to customize based on the requirements, but the requirements change so frequently, they are absolutely obsolete in six months."
"I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly."
"There have been issues upgrading the firmware."
"One touch upgrades would be nice."
"The integration with other vendors' products needs to be looked at. It's not as flexible as we would like it to be."
"The user control could be more advanced. They should work to improve this in future releases."
"With respect to the technical support, there is room for improvement."
"VCE tools, like Vision or AMP were not stand alone, and depended too much on other management consoles."
"Improve the patching process and timeliness of updates/releases."
"While most public clouds are deployed on Linux, there is current no certified Vblock working on KVM hypervisors."
"RCM upgrades are painful."
"RCM upgrades were not scripted, and you needed to roll on your own. We were led to believe this would be otherwise."
Earn 20 points
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while Vblock [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Converged Infrastructure. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while Vblock [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vblock [EOL] writes "The VCE VBlocks came along and it was the best combination of an all-in-one virtual data center in a box Converged SAN, Network, and Compute that used VMware to drive the whole package". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and Dell VxBlock System, whereas Vblock [EOL] is most compared with .
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