FlexPod XCS vs Vblock [EOL] comparison

NetApp and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the Converged Infrastructure category. Additionally, 96% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 84% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

FlexPod XCS

Read 295 FlexPod XCS reviews

2,640 Views
1,135 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Vblock [EOL]

Read 24 Vblock [EOL] reviews

84% willing to recommend

FlexPod XCS

Vblock [EOL]

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and Vblock [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies and others in Converged Infrastructure.

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Converged Infrastructure

October 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

FlexPod XCS

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

Converged Infrastructure (1st)

Vblock [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

John Kevin

Deputy IT Manager at MBBank

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.

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Fred Armantrout

Senior System Specialist at Burns & McDonnell

A reliable and highly-available solution with good technical support

It's difficult to think of anything that needs to be improved because it's a good stable system, but paid support is expensive so the cost of operation could be lowered. In the next release, I would like to see a smaller footprint in the data center and have improvements to disk performance.

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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

"A valuable feature of the FlexPod solution is that it is all one architecture and I can call one number and get support for Cisco and NetApp without having to jump through open TAC (Technical Assistance Center) cases and do multiple things to get issues addressed."

"Provides unified support: Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation point because it's a lot less staff to have to manage it."

"The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately."

"The product is very stable and it does what it needs to do."

"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."

"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."

"Gives us a single point of contact for support."

More FlexPod XCS pros

"VMware NSX: Provides the ability for our organisation to deliver true DR."

"We have seen measurable increases in our system performance. Those increases have been directly measurable in application performance and the delivery of critical business information to our users."

"Systems run solidly."

"Access to VMs is now faster due to the centralized management console."

"Finding a fully bundled, deployed, and configured solution with a short delivery time and unique support is really attractive."

"UCS Manager worked well for net/blade management and has allowed fairly easy use of dedicated bare-metal blades."

"It has improved system performance, batch times for off-hours processing, and reliability with production applications."

"The high redundancy of components has minimized frequent service degradation/failure."

More Vblock [EOL] pros

Cons

"They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential."

"I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this."

"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."

"For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor."

"Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved."

"I had one problem at the site where I had an aggregate that would not shrink after I had deleted some stuff. It took a few tries to get the right guy on the call. We do have a NetApp SAM with our company, and it really took getting to him to get the solution fixed."

"We would like them to improve the validate designs. It is hard to stay in a supported config with the software and firmware versions of the platform. It's always a concern to ensure things not only work well, but they work at all. If we run into incompatibility inside of the NetApp, Cisco, or VMware versions, it can cause real issues."

"I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received."

More FlexPod XCS cons

"The implementation and support could be better."

"RCM upgrades are painful."

"VCE tools, like Vision or AMP were not stand alone, and depended too much on other management consoles."

"The integration with other vendors' products needs to be looked at. It's not as flexible as we would like it to be."

"It needs more customer/client involvement in back-end management."

"I would like to see them improve their switching infrastructure and rely on Cisco configurations. They are a bit more complex and technical, but result in a slightly reduced cost in terms of switching on the network side of it."

"While most public clouds are deployed on Linux, there is current no certified Vblock working on KVM hypervisors."

"Tighter alignment could simplify and speed up the configuration and delivery process."

More Vblock [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not cheap, but there is a return on investment in time saved and efficiency."

"It seems very cost effective once it's in place, and it's easy to expand and easy to add capacity without a lot of extra money."

"In terms of the cost, the last bill I saw was about $3.5 million, from the latest contract. That might have been for a five-year contract."

"The cost is a little high."

"You get better management and orchestration, but it still costs you money."

"We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers."

"It is not going to save you money, but that is not the point. The opportunity to stay competitive in the marketplace is not a cost."

"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."

More FlexPod XCS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It is not cheap."

"Strive for a consolidated ELA."

"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."

"Vblock is priced at a premium because people don't want the headache of managing and deploying different products."

"The paid support for Vblock is expensive."

"Related to tech support: I believe it is too expensive."

"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

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

Manufacturing Company

22%

Performing Arts

10%

Educational Organization

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	66
Large Enterprise	182

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

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

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Comparisons

Dell PowerFlex vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 24% of the time

HPE ConvergedSystem vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 16% of the time

Dell VxBlock System vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance vs FlexPod XCS

Compared 11% of the time

More FlexPod XCS Competitors

Dell VxBlock System vs Vblock [EOL]

Compared 100% of the time

More Vblock [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FlexPod XCS

November 2025

Download FlexPod XCS product report

Buyer's Guide

Vblock [EOL]

October 2025

Download Vblock [EOL] product report

Also Known As

No data available

VCE Vblock

Overview

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

VCE Vblock Systems is an all-in-one virtualization platform that integrates the leading storage, network, and compute technologies from the likes of EMC, VMware and Cisco. VCE Vblock allows organizations to easily and securely deploy cloud computing and virtualization in their environments, supporting these multiple technologies and providing flexibility and agility for changing business needs.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group

Xerox, ACS, and Columbia Sportswear.

Buyer's Guide

Converged Infrastructure

October 2025

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