Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

"The ease of use and the graphical user interface (GUI) are two of the most valuable features of this solution."

"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."

"The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers."

"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."

"It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors."

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

"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."

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

"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"

"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."

"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."

"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."

"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."

"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."

"It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."

"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."

"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."

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

"The pricing is pretty expensive."

"You have to get the same servers with the same storage; they need to be identical. However, in vSAN or in VMware we don't have to do that. We can just add storage and manage it in the same server."

"I would like it to be easier to manage the server, create VMs, and manage the VMs on the client."

"This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity."

"The product does not have a cloud version...The product should be made more flexible in terms of integration capabilities."

"My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."

"It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."

"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."

"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."

"There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."

"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."

"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."

"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."

"There is a license required to use this solution."

"Its price is high. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Nutanix or VMware are cheaper products, and they provide almost the same functionality. Its price is a big road blocker when we are working with an end customer, and Nutanix and VMware are in competition. If they can reduce its price, it is actually a better choice for customers."

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

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

"HyperFlex is a little pricey."

"We would not have invested if we didn't feel the return was there for our customers."

"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."

"Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."

"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."