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

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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
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
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

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"The product is easy to manage and flexible for upgrading without major changes."
"Most of our users are Cisco customers, so it fits in within the suites we use. Primarily for me, as a solution architect, it's the technology and architecture that is the most valuable. I know from my technical colleagues that it's easy to use and for the customer, the up-time is the most valuable asset. It's running, has low failure, and so on which is why we use it."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"The flexibility is its most valuable feature; the ability to quickly deploy a number of help machines. It is not constrained by what we want to do."
"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 solution is very scalable."
"It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution."
"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."
"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
"It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
 

Cons

"Cisco has to continue improve the management tools to provide a better command line interface with more functions. That would be better for administration."
"We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution."
"There should be the opportunity to create more than one div group"
"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."
"We are working with a lot of different technologies and trying to manage them with one tool. The API could be improved for better integration with other systems."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"Cisco is quite expensive but not in the initial first buy."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by having the documents be more readily available and the support could be more flexible."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
"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."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
"Its stability is 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 crash."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license required to use this solution."
"It's roughly $30,000 per Hyperflex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year."
"The product is expensive. Other solutions are cheaper."
"There is a recurring cost for the VMware license and the HyperFlex licenses."
"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 a clearer licensing model. It should explain a bit more what you receive if you buy the more expensive license rather than the standard one."
"There is no additional licensing cost other than the cost for each part."
"HyperFlex is a little pricey."
"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."
"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 price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
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