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FlexPod XCS vs SteelFusion comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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)
SteelFusion
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
HCI (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. FlexPod XCS is designed for Converged Infrastructure and holds a mindshare of 12.7%, up 12.0% compared to last year.
SteelFusion, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 1.4% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FlexPod XCS12.7%
HPE ConvergedSystem11.0%
Dell VxBlock System9.5%
Other66.8%
Converged Infrastructure
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SteelFusion1.4%
VxRail9.3%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.0%
Other80.3%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist Assistant 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.
it_user866178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at MAZZETTI+GBA
Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices
The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The FlexPod solution is one of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale."
"Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it."
"It's all converged into one consolidated platform, which works well together."
"I think the most valuable features are the architecture and the support from Cisco and NetApp."
"I would say that it gives us more flexibility than an entire VM or bare metal solution."
"For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization, much like you move a guest from a VMware host to a VMware host."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"We have definitely seen an improvement in application performance, with high availability delivering about a ninety percent improvement."
"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."
"That is why Riverbed SteelFusion has delivered a masterclass technology that not only abstracted and virtualized the storage vendors’ unique logical storage structures, it has made it logically closer and seamless to the branch applications from a performance and experience perspective."
 

Cons

"The cost is an issue – it is not a cheap solution and the other piece of it, is that for EMC users (like my current company) it may not be relevant."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side."
"I would to see a little bit more in the FlexPod interface."
"For the initial customer or engineer, installing for the first time, this product sometimes is challenging to set up."
"Storage and compute could be better managed. Right now, there are two separate consoles for NetApp and Cisco components."
"The FlexPod service and support could be improved."
"I would like it to be cheaper but other than that nothing to add. As much as I can try to get the price lower, why should I have to negotiate in the first place?"
"A progress bar would...be pretty cool."
"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating."
"Pricing is always tough. We need to get to a point where the customer's happy. Then, as partners, we are also happy."
"As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts."
"We immediately saw a return on investment due to the fact that replacing our legacy storage arrays with the new AFFs reduced the footprint and maintenance costs. Overall, we saw an almost immediate ROI."
"You get better management and orchestration, but it still costs you money."
"If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint."
"We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers."
"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."
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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
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business35
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
Roxtec, Engen, Bobst, CBP, IUCN, Mahoning County, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Rackspace Technology and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.