We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and HPE Hyper Converged 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."For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment."
"There are very many features, but from experience, the single point of contact for support has been valuable to our customers."
"From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking."
"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."
"Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done."
"The overall versatility and validate designs are great. We previously used a different platform, but we gained a lot of utilization with FlexPod."
"That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin."
"For our DR, we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We can avoid downtime when there's maintenance or updates needed. Also, we have homogenous hardware, so we have a lot of trust in the solution's reliability."
"I've found the data protection features the most valuable."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"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."
"We would like more security features."
"I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to bring it back a little bit, but it's still not great."
"Since 2018 or 2019, maybe due to COVID and the chipsets, my DIMMs are dying left and right."
"I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod."
"I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release."
"In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed."
"Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that."
"Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better."
"The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Oracle Exadata and VMware vSAN, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity.
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