We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and Dell PowerFlex based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"It is scalable and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."
"It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time."
"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."
"It is a complete package. For any kind of on-premises hyper-converged solution, we usually have to separate networks, but Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a complete solution. It has its own network and storage. The storage part is the most valuable feature."
"The technical support has been helpful. We are always able to get through to the right person."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The solution is quite stable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The support team responds quickly."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"The solution's price could be affordable."
"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."
"Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any."
"A stretch function is really needed. Germans think that because of the high availability and the security that two data centers are better but we want edge all in one cluster. This is a needed feature, the cluster feature, and we'd also like to see a possibility for ROBO offices."
"The documentation could be substantially better, but the product itself does everything it needs to do."
"Unlike other options, you need to pay a subscription to Cisco yearly instead of paying for the hardware outright, which makes it more expensive in the long run."
"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."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
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 Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. 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 Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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