Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series pros and cons

The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset.

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.

The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect.

The solution is stable.

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

Its most valuable feature is its flexibility.

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

The solution scales extremely well.

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 is very scalable. It is also very secure. Cisco's security portfolio is integrated with it, which makes it secure. It is a platform-based device. Its performance is also fairly good in comparison to any other solution.

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.

Cisco HyperFlex should decrease the amount of memory needed from the Controller VM that controls the physical discs. They control the discs by using the virtual VM over every ESXi host and the VM consumes memory and consumes more hardware resources. They have to improve that by decreasing the amount of required memory and CPUs to control this disc on the server.

With the cache disk fails in Cisco, the whole node fails, and the workload goes down.

The initial setup can be a bit complex.

The pricing is pretty expensive.

In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud.

We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited.

The initial setup can be complex.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by having the documents be more readily available and the support could be more flexible.

If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product. Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors.