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

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Executive Summary

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
90
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes - PeerSpot reviewer
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).
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the stretch cluster, it's a feature that allows us to warranty a service for the customer that has to be 100% uptime."
"There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it."
"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 most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX is that it is self-contained."
"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."
"We have been using this product for a while, we wanted to use our current equipment and have been very excited with the results of our projects."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"The most valuable feature is to simplify management, as we can lower the need for people to work on the storage itself."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"The initial setup was straightforward; it was easy and fast to deploy, and NetApp Cloud Manager made getting up and running with Cloud ONTAP amazing, easy to use, simple, and it basically did everything."
"NetApp HCI solves predictability challenges with industry-leading performance capabilities that allow the granular control of every application."
"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."
"Now you don't have to be a storage administrator to provision or do anything, and any VMware system administrator, with the ease of a button, would get storage provision, which makes their lives easier."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more flexibility in the storage."
"I would like to see more analytics. It could use better infographs in the HyperFlex Connect on how traffic is running in the network. If you were reaching any capacity issues on the Fabric Interconnects, it should be able to cool all of the servers and Fabric Interconnects, then possibly integrate it with, e.g., Nexus Series switches. This should all be available in a single pane of glass."
"If you need to expand, scalability is an issue."
"I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept."
"There is a VMware plugin for HyperFlex, which sometimes it hangs up in our environment, and doesn't function well."
"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."
"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
"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."
"It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like."
"HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The reason I give it a nine instead of a ten is because of the need for pre-check work. While it is simpler than most products, there is still a lot of configuration that needs to be done."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is better if you buy more Cisco products."
"The product could be cheaper."
"It is highly priced compared to other vendors."
"They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive.""
"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."
"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."
"We are on an annual subscription and the price is fair."
"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"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."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"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."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise58
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

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