Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The software defines networking, storage, and processing."

"The product is stable. No one complains about the stability, which is fabulous."

"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."

"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."

"The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system.. It saves money in the long-run."

"We are providing this solution for the customer or converting the customer from a traditional environment to a hyper-converged environment which consolidates all management and support on a single port. This is the main benefit of using the hyper-converged versus the traditional."

"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."

"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."

"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."

"It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run."

"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."

"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."

"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."

"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"

"The solution could improve by having more customization."

"Its price could be better."

"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."

"The scalability could use improvement."

"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."

"It needs more detailed documentation."

"You cannot just apply the VSXi updates. You are dependent on Cisco HyperFlex for metric services, analytics, and everything else. I don't like that dependency."

"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."

"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."

"They could improve the packaging."

"The networking needs improvement."

"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."

"I would like to see the implementation process improved."

"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."

"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."

"It is highly priced compared to other vendors."

"Our licensing costs are large, but it is combined between all of the Cisco products that we have."

"HyperFlex is a little pricey."

"They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive.""

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

"HyperFlex is relatively expensive, but you get good value for money."

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

"Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount."

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."