Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes Reviews

The ideal use case is going to be for an organization that has a mix of virtualized and physical workloads and wants a single platform to manage those on.

I'll add that Dell rebranded this solution, so it's now called the PowerFlex. I know it was VxFlex for a while, but now they're calling it PowerFlex. I just wanted to add that.

The feature that I have found most valuable is its Lifecycle Management of networking computer storage.

Additionally, it already has the capability to directly connect to VMware cloud on AWS. It is definitely cloud ready.

Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform.

From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price.

I have been using Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes for five years.

In terms of stability, it is best in class.

In terms of scalability, you can scale up to 1000's of nodes.

It only takes two people to run it depending on how complex their applications are, but their hardware itself only takes one or two people.

I've heard the technical support is pretty good. They have a dedicated team. It's not like a general support pool. So if you've got Powerflex, there's a dedicated Powerflex support team. I've heard good things about that.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. The whole solution can actually be delivered on site pretty racked and pre-configured.

In terms of price, it's one architecture. You can go anywhere from four nodes all the way up to 250 nodes, but it's all Powerflex, there is not a Powerflex optimum or a Powerflex balance. There are not differentiated models like that.

For the basic four nodes, the least the price is going to be is around 800,000. But it depends on the support. If you get three years of support, it's probably 600,00 and five years of support, closer to 800,000.

This solution is ideal for commercial to enterprise customers looking for a single platform to manage all their different applications.

On a scale of one to ten, I would probably give it a 10, just because of its reliability, ease of management, and flexibility with so many different application platforms.

The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition.

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it.

Software updates, patching, and remediation were painful in the beginning, but it has improved but still could be worked on.

I have used Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes within 12 months.

The support from Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is okay. It could be better, they have to work on their approach.

The approach they have I call "pass the baton". Every manufacturer does this, such as Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft. You call in, receive a call handler, and give them your problem. The first person you talk to can never fix your problem. They just collect information. There's probably a 5 percent chance that they could fix your problem. Then they pass it off to the next person, there is a lot of passing. That's why I call it "pass the baton". 

The company I work for the maintenance services is at 98 percent, we receive over 50,000 incidents a month, for those customers who have support through Dell, Cisco, or someone else, 98 percent of our incidents or ticket requests get resolved by your first point of contact. We try to take out that frustration. Knowing that it's possible to fix that model.  I don't think it saves them much money, because they're tying up too many resources where if they could route those incidents to the person that could fix them the first time, it would just save a lot of frustration on the customer's behalf. It would make everything a lot more efficient, and a better overall customer support image. It is a bad model that many vendors use.

The deployment of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is easy. 

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is based on Vmware. It makes things easy. It's already purpose-built, and you only need to plug it in, click a couple of buttons, and it builds out your environment, and you're ready to start deploying workloads to it.

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex.

My advice would be to understand what you're trying to accomplish with your workloads. Before you pick any solution, understand what you intend to do. If you're going to buy Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes, it is good if you need something that's easy to deploy, and you're not going to be extending it into the public cloud, it's a great entry-level solution.

I rate Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes an eight out of ten.