We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The most valuable features are scalability and the easy operation - if it works. You can configure everything from just one window."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is its performance."
"The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"It is a hyper-converged solution which integrates with the network instead of the product."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the time to deliver a VM takes me five minutes. In comparison, my cloud team's response is a couple of days based on all their overhead policies, procedures, and ticket requests. This is substantial."
"Cisco offers very good quality."
"It has had a big, positive impact, because now everything is centralized."
"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."
"The storage efficiency and performance are valuable."
"The validated design is really important for us because it gives us a model on which to base our architecture and continued support for all firmware upgrades. It also provides consistency throughout the environment."
"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."
"We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system."
"FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can parter and look for a solution together."
"It's a new architecture, really scalable and programmable. When you look at SDN propositions it fits very well in a next-gen data center."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"With the cache disk fails in Cisco, the whole node fails, and the workload goes down."
"The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running."
"Lacks easy integration with other vendors."
"In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud."
"I would like to see more analytics. It could use better infographs in the HyperFlex Connect on how traffic is running in the network. If you were reaching any capacity issues on the Fabric Interconnects, it should be able to cool all of the servers and Fabric Interconnects, then possibly integrate it with, e.g., Nexus Series switches. This should all be available in a single pane of glass."
"We are working with a lot of different technologies and trying to manage them with one tool. The API could be improved for better integration with other systems."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"It is not as easy as a hyperconverged solution, but you are going to have a hard time finding that anywhere, where you can just plugin and run a deployment app."
"A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process."
"We would like them to have better features to integrate with the cloud."
"I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system."
"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."
"We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue."
"Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI."
"It would be helpful if they sold a pre-boxed option so that you can buy a rack and everything's already there, everything's connected."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Oracle Exadata and Dell VxBlock System.
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