Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs HPE SimpliVity comparison

Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

HPE SimpliVity

Read 155 HPE SimpliVity reviews

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10,028 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

HPE SimpliVity

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and HPE SimpliVity based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

May 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HPE SimpliVity

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

155

Ranking in other categories

HCI (6th)

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem

High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

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Mohammed Lokman Hossen

Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable

There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Overall, the solution is pretty good."

"We see ROI every day; the return on investment is fantastic and is the primary reason why we deployed these clusters all around our site locations so that our SE engineers can show the customers."

"You can administer things easily. E.g., if you need more power, you can add a system."

"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."

"The product is easy to manage and flexible for upgrading without major changes."

"The product makes management much easier since there's a single pane of glass to use to monitor, manage and upgrade the system."

"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."

"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."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."

"Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely, allow less experienced admins to perform storage tasks."

"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."

"HPE SimpliVity can improve our DR solution, and I would recommend this for the Hospitality industry because of the data recovery."

"We evaluated different solutions, but SimpliVity was the best choice in performance and scalability."

"Operational efficiency is definitely one of the biggest benefits, as they could get rid of all those man hours worrying about babysitting their SAN and their servers and the network and take those hours and put them back into real value for the business working on issues with the applications, not the SAN and the infrastructure."

"We chose this solution because the product was very innovative."

"The key point is the Data Virtualization Platform that allows you to achieve great efficiency in storage use, data management, backup and disaster recovery."

More HPE SimpliVity pros

Cons

"Having a small infrastructure that includes Nexus and fabric interconnects is costly, which is something that should be improved."

"They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out."

"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."

"The platform itself is very stable and robust, but when it comes to upgrading the system, it's not stable."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is stable. However, this solution has a lot of dependencies, and if there is a single point of failure the solution will be impacted."

"Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex."

"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."

"It needs improvements in terms of I/O. Sometimes I have felt it is slightly slow while we are trying to provision VMs or access VMs."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions."

"I would like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases."

"Its scalability can be improved. When we put a lot of nodes, sometimes, its performance decreases."

"SimpliVity has little to no integrations."

"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."

"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."

"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."

"Single file restore capabilities and ease."

More HPE SimpliVity cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we negotiated with Cisco for the HyperFlex solution, they gave us a good price because they wanted to break into the market in Portugal for the first time. However, in general, I think it's a very expensive solution. It's a huge amount of money to acquire this kind of infrastructure."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is expensive. It's a standard license, and we pay for it yearly. I think we pay about 700."

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

"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."

"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."

"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."

"We have a yearly license."

"Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"There is not a license required for the solution."

"We spent $250,000 back in the day, and that was for two servers in my data center for that cluster. We then ran what they call an arbiter, and that took the place of a third server or the third node in the cluster. My DR site was one standalone server, and its horsepower was more than the two at my main site. It included my Cisco Switches that I needed to re-upgrade. It was comparable to what we were paying a year in VM."

"For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey."

"If we compare the price of HPE SimpliVity with other vendors that are selling the hyper-converged infrastructure, all of them are not cheap and are priced similarly. However, the price we pay and what we receive makes it a good price."

"It's about $10,000 monthly."

"One big advantage with SimpliVity is that you don't need the higher license cost or VMware to put together a simple SimpliVity solution."

"Scaling isn't cheap"

"HPE SimpliVity is much more affordable than Nutanix or VMware vSAN...The first pair of servers was about 90,000 EUR, including three years of warranty. It is 30,000 EUR per year."

More HPE SimpliVity pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Marketing Services Firm

12%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	67
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	80

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?

Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE SimpliVity?

I haven't noticed anything that should be better in HPE SimpliVity, as I haven't done extensive work on this platform; I have only completed a couple of projects recently. Pricing could be an area ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 21% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

VxRail vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

VxRail vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 26% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 4% of the time

More HPE SimpliVity Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

May 2026

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE SimpliVity

May 2026

Download HPE SimpliVity product report

Also Known As

No data available

SimpliVity, HPE HCI

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

HPE SimpliVity provides businesses with advanced features such as inline deduplication, compression, and instant recovery, enabling efficient backup and scalability. Its integration with VMware and centralized management fosters ease of use, establishing a streamlined IT infrastructure.

HPE SimpliVity stands as a comprehensive solution for organizations seeking a robust infrastructure capable of handling diverse workloads. Its features like integrated backup and disaster recovery ensure quick restores and high availability. Known for its efficient use of storage and data processing capabilities, it helps reduce operational costs. This system offers a reliable framework for virtualized environments, enhancing disaster recovery processes, IT operations, and application hosting while supporting workloads such as Oracle, SAP, and SQL.

What are HPE SimpliVity's key features?

Inline Deduplication: Minimizes data redundancy, enhancing storage efficiency.
Compression: Optimizes storage, reducing space requirements.
Instant Recovery: Facilitates rapid restoration of data and applications.
Centralized Management: Simplifies IT operations with unified management.
Scalable Architecture: Adapts to business growth seamlessly.

What benefits should users seek in HPE SimpliVity reviews?

Cost Reduction: Achieves savings through efficient data processing and storage utilization.
High Availability: Ensures consistent service and data accessibility.
VMware Integration: Provides compatibility and smooth operations in VMware environments.
Quick Disaster Recovery: Enables swift restoration processes for continued business operations.

Organizations deploy HPE SimpliVity mainly for virtualized environments, focusing on disaster recovery, IT operations, and application hosting. Extensively used in sectors for VDI, backups, and data center tasks, it supports major workloads like Oracle and SAP, simplifying infrastructure management while ensuring high availability.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: May 2026.

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