Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

The primary use was for a private cloud for the company. I used it for an ERP system and several other applications that were specialized for the company.

It improved the workflow, as it's much faster than rack servers. It saved months of work. When we implemented the system, it took two or three hours and it took us about another eight hours to move from the old system to the new system. In any other case, it would have taken a lot more time.

• The most valuable feature was the backup - it was easy to back up. 
• The system was never down.
• It was very easy to administrate and manage the system; much easier and faster.
• It was easy to install, it was up and running in minutes.
• It was easy to extend the disk capacities.

Regarding the backup, it's much easier because it's using VMware. You can do large backups without using any additional software because it backs up VMware, the whole process, at the same time.

I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place. If there is a data disaster, you need somewhere where the data is stored so the company can still work, especially if you have several other facilities working on the system remotely.

It's very stable. We had no issues with downtime.

With a hyperconverged system it's easy to increase whatever you need. We needed to increase our data storage several times and we increased it very easily. The scalability was very nice and we didn't need any downtime to increase the system.

We had 40 TB capacity and 20 TB availability with about 70 TB of backup. There were about 200 users. Their roles included finance, HR; almost all the departments in the organization.

Technical support was very good. When we needed anything, they were always online. They were generally responsive and helpful. We had to escalate an issue with them once and it was solved in 24 hours.

We used a special ERP system for real estate development, using SQL servers. We used Oracle servers. We used MySQL for HR servers. Those were the main three systems we were using.

We switched to Cisco because it was time to change our servers. They would have been seven years old, so we studied what the best solution to convert to would be and we found that the hyperconverged was much better for us.

The initial setup was very straightforward. There were three people involved: me and two others. One of them was responsible for backing up the old system and one was responsible for the implementation. I was mainly responsible for the overall work, managing it.

After implementation it required one person for maintenance.

We did not use consultant when deploying it.

The areas where we saw ROI were in the administration time for the servers, the lack of downtime, and increasing the capacity. On a five-year basis, the ROI was about 20 percent.

It's much more expensive than rack servers. It was an issue, but when you compare it to the number of people who were administrative assistants before, it's on the positive ROI side. It's much cheaper.

We did a comparison between Nutanix, Dell EMC, and Cisco. In the end, we decided on Cisco over Nutanix. HyperFlex was more affordable, although I think Nutanix is a little better.

My advice is go for it. I had never had experience with hyperconverged, and it was a very nice experience. I learned a lot from it. It was something completely new.

I prefer any hyperconverged system. I think it's a great system.

Our primary use case of this solution is for VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, for our community college.

It ultimately provides a virtual desktop so that we can backup user data a lot more easily. In the past, it was all a straight desktop computer so if your desktop dies, all your data would die as well.

In terms of it being flexible for various projects, it does seem to lend itself to other applications, for example, our VMware, as well as servers that we may want to bring up under the HyperFlex solution so we may go in that direction sometime in the future.

It has the potential of actually being a six million dollar impact to the college because it replaces people's computers. Until we start to transfer users over to it we really won't know how much of that six million dollars is savings for us.

I don't know if it's lowered the deployment time per se because we really haven't gotten to the point where we added shelves or added servers to it. We're expecting for that to be a simple process given what Cisco claims it will do. Ultimately we're expecting no downtime for that.

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 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 stability is great but ultimately we've noticed the updates and upgrades take a bit of an impact on the solution. More so, having to reboot the solution and having to restart it. While it is stable, rebooting it for updates isn't always convenient. Ultimately, just like any organization, we would do that on off hours whether it be weekends, nights, or whatnot. But that costs money because you have to have staff on weekends, nights and whatever overtime they have to account for.

Scalability is just as they predicted. It combined the frontend servers with the backend storage. While it is a little cumbersome to learn, it is scalable to be able to add more shelves if I need more memory or additional servers very easily. It does scale nicely.

I'm pretty neutral about technical support right now given that we're still setting up the solution to some degree. The support is great, as long as there is a maintenance contract in place. But because the overall solution is still rather new, using knowledge base or just generic knowledge base out on the internet is not as prevalent as I would like.

We are a Dell shop. We looked at HP but ultimately because of the features that Cisco brought with the HyperFlex solution, we felt that that was a superior product to everyone else.

The initial setup was straightforward. We simply wanted to understand how the two worked together given that the claim is that it's supposed to be easy to combine both storage and servers.

We used a consultant for the deployment that Cisco suggested. Because the solution is rather new to us the scenario was pleasant. They knew what they were doing but I felt like the knowledge transfer could have been a lot better.

I would rate it a high eight or nine out of ten because of the features and functions that it comes with that the competitors really can't do just yet. The advantage I think so far has been that Cisco developed the entire solution from scratch as opposed to other solution providers like HP and Dell who are still trying to reinvent existing solutions.

I think it's a viable solution if you have a need to cut down on your overall implementation costs on hardware. This does a good job of combining both software and hardware.

Our primary use case for HyperFlex is for connecting the Meraki VPN. We're working with the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila. We put the VPN through HyperFlex. 

This product has improved the way our organization functions in the way that we have less work. We have simple communication through the VPN and we have better confidentiality and security.

The most valuable features of this solution are the connectivity, consistency, and that we now have fewer vulnerabilities on the network.

The additional feature I would like to see included in the next release of this solution is more security. We want to add more data servers to all the hosts all over the world. We have 140 hosts that connect to one data center in Manila.

The stability works fine. 

Our scalability works well. It's fine.

The solution's technical support is good. We have a good technical team for support. 

I need to gain more knowledge about Cisco solutions that we need to apply to our system.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We used a reseller in the Philippines for the implementation. They are the only Cisco distributor in the Philippines.

We have seen ROI.

We have a 3-year contract with Cisco. The license is for three years also.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a 9. After using it for a year there haven't been any issues or technicalities. 

Pick Cisco.

We normally use a UCS, a uniform communication service, I'm still learning how HyperFlex works. We are evaluating it for use in the intermediate to deep future.

I do troubleshooting and monitoring on Cisco HyperFlex HX for our customers. I do maintenance and monitoring for the infrastructure environment.

We do a lot of internal projects like optimization, we also use ACI for optimizing the network. It simplifies the cost reduction.

The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization. 

HyperFlex is flexible for various projects. We have a lot of vendors doing projects where HyperFlex has been good at solving issues.

The scalability could use improvement. 

HyperFlex performs very well.

The scalability is up around 75%.

My team works on ACI and HyperFlex. They've had great Cisco support for that.

Our marketing team told us about the solution. They introduced every new technology that came in and gave us a demo. My managers considered the options and approved Cisco. 

The initial setup for HyperFlex is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. 

HyperFlex lowered our deployment times around one to two days based upon the environment of workers that we needed to invest.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product an eight. 

I completely recommend whatever Cisco solutions you use. They provide the best option to maintain infrastructure environment. It's very useful. 

We use this solution for our Call Monitor and for Contact Center Express.

This is a robust product that we can rely on.

The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features.

We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution.

Managing this solution is complex and should be improved.

So far, the stability has been good. Since we implemented six months ago, we haven't had any issues. We were able to upgrade the code without interrupting the service, which is good.

We add more HyperFlex servers as we need, so it is pretty scalable.

Technical support for this solution is very good. This is a new technology for us, and we had to call a lot to ask for help with updating or integrating.

We were using UCS previously, but we needed better hardware for our Call Monitor.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house by following all of the instructions.

We have not yet seen the ROI.

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

We trust Cisco and did not want to change vendors.

My advice for anybody who is researching this technology is to learn it before you implement it. This is a very stable product, but it is complex to manage.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use we have for this product is to act as a server and for storage.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to manage.

Another valuable feature is the fact that you can individually upgrade the specific parts of the product. Compared to other products like SimpliVity, or Nutanix you have to upgrade the whole node if you want to expand memory or storage. In HyperFlex, you can actually upgrade at will. If you want to upgrade your memory cloud, you upgrade it. So that is a big advantage I've seen from any hyper-convergence product. VxRail or Nutanix and products like that are not as flexible and that is the biggest reason we chose this solution.

I think the product can improve dramatically in the area of deduplication. With deduplication as it is, you have 30 or 40% of the storage that can't be used because the deduplication is not efficient enough. I hope they fix that problem.

The stability of the solution has never been a problem. I would say it is excellent.

I think the scalability of the solution is excellent. Because you can upgrade individual pieces without upgrading a whole node. The problem for other solutions is that if you want a hard drive or you want additional storage or you want memory, you have to make a bigger investment in hardware and time. So, scalability's excellent.

Our experience with Cisco support and products is always very good.

Through conferences and other research, we became aware that there were products which would serve our needs better. Previously, we needed a dedicated storage person to do storage, a dedicated BMR (Bare Metal Restore) person to do BMR. Now, one person can do both because you spend a lot less time with either. So that is the reason we looked at hyper-convergence and this product.

The initial setup was very straightforward compared to categorical peers. If you compare it with other products, it's straightforward. But when you consider hyper-convergence itself, it is not straightforward. I am technical and I have technical team, otherwise it might have been hard. But for our cumulative experience and looking at implementing products like Nutanix — or some other similar products — it's straightforward.

We used Cisco themselves as the vendor. They were very good at implementing the solution.

Return on investment is really immediate and substantial. In a traditional EMC storage environment, we needed to assign a full-time person to maintain storage. With this solution, our ROI is allowing one full-time person to maintain more because it is easier. You can say, basically, that you're gaining a full-time person to do something else for the same cost.

My advice about the product is simply that it's not cheap. If you have budget limitations it is best to look elsewhere.

We did consider other products like Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, and another company.

We had EMC VNX storage, BMR and such. Hyper-convergence made more sense. The big thing for us was being able to easily manage the product.

I can safely rate this product as an eight out of ten. This is because it's scalable and you can upgrade it as if you are upgrading a server. In any other solution with hyper-convergence, you can't do that, so you've got to buy a node part to upgrade memory. 

Anyone considering this solution should define their requirements. It's not a solution for everybody. If you're using a lot of storage, hyper-convergence might not be good for you. We don't have a lot of storage, so it is a functional and desirable solution for us. If you have much greater storage needs, it may not be a good solution.

My job is to change the technical language to business language. We need to increase efficiency and effectiveness, decrease the cost and decrease administrative issues. We are increasing the population inside the company, increasing the staff.

People in the management of the company are trying to decrease the cost expenses and increase efficiency.

In this case, centralization brings a lot of advantages. We have one person who works on everything and gathers everything together.

It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing.

When you get a new product, the updates are very important.

The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues. 

It is absolutely stable. 

Scalability is one of the most important things with the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. In terms of scalability, this product provides maximum scalability.

We can easily increase horizontally. We can easily increase the number of nodes. It depends on the subscription.

We've worked directly with Cisco for the setup. We have our company team. We're also worked with a service provider. 

It's a team that consists of the Cisco people, the service provider, and our company's internal engineers.

Our ROI was about 100% over the last twelve months.

We always use Cisco for 95% to 98% of our capacity.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rank the Cisco HyperFlex HX at about 8.5 to 9.

Our primary use case for the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the hosting of VMs.

We were just using standard ESX clusters on UCS flights. Instead, they chose HyperFlex to see if it could replace that solution. 

This is just your standard ESX on blade server type of deployment.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions on the storage side by having one big storage space for hosting VMs. We do not have to provision other ones. That's a positive aspect of it.

I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept.

I don't work day-to-day enough with Cisco HyperFlex to be able to say what would necessarily make it better. Initial integration was tough. 

Our group was just looking for another approach to hosting their various VMs. 

So far, it's been fairly stable.

It seems like the Cisco HyperFlex is very scalable. Our deployment is small. We haven't tested out that aspect of it.

Technical support is good. I don't do day-to-day operations of it, another group does.

The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX was complex, i.e. trying to integrate it into an existing environment. It was more tailored for a brand new deployment, where you're just building it from the ground up. 

We already had an existing system and we're trying to integrate it into it.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate this product a seven. It seems like it would be easy to utilize for a new deployment.

I would prefer that Cisco not try to sell it as something that can integrate into an existing environment. They are beating down on that, but be aware. 

The limitations, whether you're doing a new deployment or trying to integrate it into an existing system, might be tough.