Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

Cisco and Nutanix are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Read 197 Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) reviews

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5,694 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. NCI appears to have an advantage due to its robust feature set, ease of deployment, and customer service.

Features: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance I/O and high availability. It features ease of administration and advanced data management with distributed file systems supporting deduplication and compression. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, while integrating computing, storage, and networking, focused on scalability and Cisco environment integration but lacked some advanced functionality found in competitors.

Room for Improvement: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure could enhance network integration, improve support for various hypervisors, and expand storage capabilities. Cisco HyperFlex faced challenges with cloud integration, scalability, and high cost, along with complex storage and backup integration issues.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is praised for easy deployment across on-premises and hybrid environments. It provides exceptional customer service with responsive support. Cisco HyperFlex, though providing good integration within Cisco ecosystems, can be complex and costly to deploy, and its support has received mixed reviews.

Pricing and ROI: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers competitive pricing, with high performance and reduced downtime justifying the investment. Cisco HyperFlex is perceived as expensive, with high initial costs and licensing issues. Although some users report decent ROI, it varies significantly based on deployment scale and additional service costs.

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

March 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

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

197

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), HCI (3rd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th)

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem

High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

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MahendraPanchotiya

Infrastructure Manager at ER Tech Pros

Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates

Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.

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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

"The solution can scale up and out."

"Our customers have seen ROI in terms of the time they save troubleshooting."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."

"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."

"On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional."

"The automation is a valuable feature, it's interesting."

"The management from the switches to the hyper-convergence solutions are quite good and well-developed."

"The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things."

"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks."

"Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution."

"Everything is core centralized on the UI."

"One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots."

"We like that the size of the box is 1U or 2U only, and all the servers are fit into that box. The ease of operation is there. All the servers and the SAN storage are inside the box."

"We are suggesting Nutanix to the management because of scalability and time efficiency."

"Ease of deployment"

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

Cons

"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."

"One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue."

"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."

"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."

"We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users."

"The product does not have a cloud version...The product should be made more flexible in terms of integration capabilities."

"We would like to move off the GUI."

"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."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"I would like to see Acropolis add the ability to migrate VMs between storage containers. I don't know if they've added this in the latest versions, but I haven't seen it yet. It's mainly about AHV. When we use VMware, we can move between storage containers. In VMware, it's just like regular storage, and we can move it."

"This solution offers excellent functionality but could use a stronger interface."

"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."

"One thing to keep in mind is that only experts can use it. It has to be in the proper hands, instead of going to XYZ people just for some cost savings. So lift-and-shift and migrations might be tricky, because it is not like a VMware."

"There are other services that Nutanix has that could be improved, but I'm not very familiar with the other services of Nutanix, such as Era and Flow. However, they seem a bit hard for us to implement and integrate with the Nutanix Acropolis AOS and other Nutanix tools. We would not dare to implement those other Nutanix solutions into Nutanix Acropolis AOS right now. The implementation of that tool could be the problem, I am a bit hesitant to implement the other tools into Nutanix Acropolis AOS."

"The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older."

"Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful."

"In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a recurring cost for the VMware license and the HyperFlex licenses."

"Cisco is quite expensive, but not in the initial first buy."

"The licensing is perpetual and the only thing that you may need to pay for on a monthly basis is if you're going to use their cloud-based management features."

"There is a 30 percent additional premium that all the companies are charging for Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series because of the lack of chips and bottlenecks in the market. The cost of the solution is high right now."

"It's roughly $30,000 per Hyperflex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year."

"One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."

"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."

"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Their technical support is really good. They have been very helpful."

"We are aware of the pricing since we renew every year, at almost $100,000 per year."

"Our customers are on three years license to use Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The price of the solution includes all features and support."

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is affordable, it has good value. The final price depends a lot on the hardware used, it's an appliance in the end. Whether you use HPE as the hardware vendor or Supermicro as the hardware vendor, it really depends on what hardware is used which is the main cost."

"The product’s licensing fee is moderately expensive."

"Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix."

"The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."

"Cost-wise, it is very good. It is like the hypervisor cost is not there. We only need to pay for the system and AOS licenses."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

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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

Answers from the Community

Netanya Carmi

Content Manager at PeerSpot

Aug 2, 2022

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

See 2 answers

Leah Fainchtein Buenavida

Tech Blogger

Oct 17, 2021

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper-converged infrastructure at scale. We looked into it but then ultimately chose Nutanix Acropolis. We liked Hyperflex’s virtualization feature and the unified network fabric it provides. The Integrated Managed Controller was a nice feature to have. It is expandable, stable, and has good redundancy. If you require more processor cores per box, Cisco HyperFlex is a good solution for you. Support will depend on the type of contract you have, with some requests taken care of immediately and others taking longer according to the engineer’s expertise. While Hyperflex is designed for any company size, I wouldn’t recommend them for small businesses. It also requires a solid knowledge of Cisco products, as the UI can be difficult to manage. Upgrading to a newer version can also be cumbersome and could use some improvement. We chose Nutanix because it is easier to use and is more cost-effective. Nutanix allows us to deploy, run and scale applications both on-premises and in the cloud. It has excellent support. You can log the query straight to a technical expert, which is good if you have staff not familiar with AOS. It is easy to scale by adding new nodes, and the company is constantly adding new features. Nutanix is not for everyone, though. The Nutanix Cloud System can be complex to maneuver when at the command line or when troubleshooting. Conclusions Nutanix is better for medium-sized companies and when you need a cost-effective solution. Cisco Hyperflex is a complete solution but is better suited for large enterprises. It works better if you are already a Cisco user.

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Steffen Hornung

Administrator at Neuberger Gebäudeautomation GmbH

Aug 2, 2022

With Nutanix you have the freedom of choice. You can deploy it with several server hardware vendors or completely in the cloud. I don’t know Hyperflex at heart, though. Also, support at Nutanix is outstanding.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series?

It's easy to get the tool started.

See all answers

What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

See all answers

What makes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) worth using?

NCI is a product with many tools and services but the one that, in my opinion, makes it better than similar products and worth using, is the full-stack lifecycle management. This capacity allows u...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 26% of the time

VxRail vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 22% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 8% of the time

VMware vSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 5% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

April 2025

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

April 2025

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

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Also Known As

No data available

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

AOS storage
Flexible and open compute
Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

Integrated disaster recovery
Full-stack lifecycle management
VMware with Nutanix
Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.
Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.
Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.
Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.
Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.
Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.
The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.
The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.
Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: March 2025.

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