Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes comparison

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

"It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time."

"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."

"Cisco offers very good quality."

"Great integration with backup software."

"With our four HyperFlex HX hosts (consisting of processor, memory, and disk), the performance is very fast and we have no problems at all. In all of the five years that we have been using HyperFlex, we haven't needed to increase our budget to buy additional hosts."

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

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

"The best feature about any type of storage related to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is its ease of scaling, and with a converged infrastructure platform, you can easily add a storage node or a compute node to the stack and grow in smaller increments compared to getting a whole new array or upgrading controllers."

"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."

"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."

"The cost is higher compared to non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, but when compared with external storage solutions, there are significant benefits."

"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."

"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."

"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."

"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."

"In the next release, Cisco should add more integration and management capabilities as well as some tweaks to the dashboard that make it more user-friendly. They could also add support for multiple hypervisors."

"The initial setup can be complex."

"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."

"Cisco is a bit more challenging in terms of deployment. The admin must be knowledgeable in order to complete the task. Without that knowledge, it will be difficult to complete."

"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."

"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."

"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."

"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."

"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."

"I would want VMware to ensure that when there's a hardware failure on a host, it should gracefully migrate the VMs to another host available in the cluster without restarting, which would be a great improvement."

"Currently, it's like a black box that only Dell technical support knows how to handle."

"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."

"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."

"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."

"Sometimes we experience performance issues and disk failure issues frequently. Sometimes it impacts another disk group situation."

"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes doesn't perform as well as IBM. There are significant limitations, especially with scalability and flexibility over time. For example, adding drives can be problematic if the specific drives aren't available with older nodes that are four or five years old. Unlike IBM, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes isn't as flexible and doesn't scale easily. Additionally, while present, features like deduplication and compression don't perform as efficiently as they do on IBM. Our experience shows that the tool isn't as robust or flexible as advertised."

"HyperFlex is a little pricey."

"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."

"The price is a bit too high."

"Its price is rather fair when compared with other solutions like VxRail, vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity. We got a fair amount of discount from Cisco for Cisco HyperFlex. It is cost-effective. We have renewed storage till next year, and we have already paid the vendor. When we talk about HyperFlex or any HCI solution, storage is the part where we can reduce a lot of costs. At the current moment, we are already using NetApp storage, which did not allow us to go for a full Cisco HyperFlex setup. We are planning to go to a larger scale next year. Then we will be able to see how cost-effective it really is for us."

"The pricing is a bit expensive."

"We are on an annual subscription and the price is fair."

"We currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet."

"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."

"The solution is more expensive than a traditional array. The prices are skyrocketing."

"Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."

"My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the solution. The solution is expensive."

"The price of the solution was reasonable."

"We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."

"The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."

"There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."