Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs FlexPod XCS comparison

"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."

"Scalability is easy and simple."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The compression and deduplication are very high. Therefore, we can use the size of the product more efficiently than other storage solutions."

"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."

"Our customers have seen ROI in terms of the time they save troubleshooting."

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

"Great integration with backup software."

"The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager."

"FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can parter and look for a solution together."

"The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is the ease of actually setting it up and learning it."

"It scales well. It allows us to have very flexible architecture but to have the same level of simplicity that we'd normally expect in hyper-converged environments."

"Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance."

"The ease of set up is probably the most valuable feature for us."

"The most valuable feature is that it is all-in-one, and it is easy to get support on it."

"We initially started out with siloed clusters and now we've been able to cluster everything together so that we have multiple nodes in our clusters. We have multiples on different data in different data centers. We've able to do replication between data centers. That's been very beneficial for us as we look to derive a mature DR model."

"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."

"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."

"It needs more detailed documentation."

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

"The initial setup of profiles and templates could be improved. Maybe some end profiles that you can use based on your type of deployment would be good."

"We would like to move off the GUI."

"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."

"I would like to see them expand onto the cloud."

"The upgrade process needs to be improved and it would be nice to manage everything from a single pane of glass."

"I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother."

"Support could be more integrated. For example, you might call NetApp, and they'll determine that VMware is the issue. It would be helpful if they could automatically engage VMware and bring them onto the same call to transfer ticket information and work together."

"Something that we struggle with because we're a relatively small scale organization and the administrative effort is spread across so many different pieces of infrastructure, it would be nice to have a set of tools that enables us to get a little bit more information out of our system."

"The initial setup is complex because it has to be done in a certain way."

"I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received."

"Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution."

"The majority of the time, if we need more storage, then we need to work with customizing the NetApp deployment. Right now, we just do a generic deployment, then wherever we have a need for storage, we have to move some application out of the next FlexPod deployment. One thing is to customize based on the requirements, but the requirements change so frequently, they are absolutely obsolete in six months."

"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."

"One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"The cost is expensive, but there is a chance to save money in the future."

"As a startup, for the amount of budget we have and the amount we spend, we are getting what we expected."

"The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect."

"You get better management and orchestration, but it still costs you money."

"We purchased FlexPod though Datalink."

"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."

"Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road."

"We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers."

"We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously."