No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs Rubrik 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
Rubrik
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th)
 

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).
KB
Information Technology Specialist at LIGHTHOUSE DOCUMENT TECHNOLOGIES, INC
Technical support has improved my data management process but I encounter GUI and cost challenges
The solution is available in the Azure Marketplace, but approaching directly is more cost-effective. The Marketplace approach incurs additional platform and reporting costs. We initially built Rubrik at host level and DB level. We encountered latency issues when reverting back, with numerous snapshots available. This resulted in increased costs and occupied spaces. I performed manual deletion of snapshots and verified with the Rubrik team for confirmation. The GUI reporting functionality lacks flexibility. For instance, obtaining specific server reports considering drive space and backup quantities is not possible, as it only provides overall reporting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our clients have definitely seen a return on investment using Cisco."
"It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time."
"The initial setup is easy."
"When we did benchmarking on this particular product line, the results were great and quite amazing."
"Great integration with backup software."
"It is a hyper-converged solution which integrates with the network instead of the product, and we love its ease of use, ease of deployment, and combination with UCS."
"I really highly recommend Cisco due to its stability and scalability, and also the performance of the equipment."
"On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Mounting recent backups to create new servers rather than cloning servers in VMware drastically cut down required time."
"The most valuable feature is the archive to cloud location and the automation around the PowerShell script. There are also reports and dashboards."
"I value the options it has for storage tiering (i.e. whether it should be a flash, SSD, or pushed to the cloud) depending on the data provided."
"I would estimate that Rubrik recovery testing saves us 80% in time as compared to our prior solution."
"I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches using the solution."
"The fact that the API is so available to us with the playground — there's an internal and public playground — is also valuable. We can write API calls — and although I'm sure there's a way we could hurt the data — we write those calls with a lot of certainty that we won't be destroying anything. We write these API calls using really easy mechanisms and generate automation a lot faster."
"Rubrik is an easy and automatic solution that needs no manual intervention."
 

Cons

"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place."
"There is a VMware plugin for HyperFlex, which sometimes hangs up in our environment and doesn't function well."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"The price could be better. I think it's more expensive than VxRail."
"The platform itself is very stable and robust, but when it comes to upgrading the system, it's not stable."
"It is not a stable solution."
"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."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"It would be nice if they could work on the pricing a bit."
"Global management of multiple systems is lacking, as is reporting across multiple installed units."
"They have what's called an organization which means different groups of access to Rubrik, but the alerting only goes to the admins."
"Troubleshooting failed backups is difficult, and deciphering the logs without the help of support is usually almost impossible."
"I wish there was more training readily available, not just the expensive classes that require purchasing Rubrik credits."
"If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough. They can't remote it to the peer site and manipulate it back up in order to move it over, take a copy of production, slap it over, and test it out. As I understand, they are working on it. Replication works. We also get spoiled by how good things are now. We get to a point where it is so easy but when something isn't instant gratification, it seems that everything else is so amazing, why isn't this right?"
"Capacity reports could definitely be improved. It's hard to determine what is using the space and why. For instance, you can see that some host is using 2 TB on the Rubrik node and the disk space on that host is 400 GBs. It's hard to explain how there can be 2 TBs of data on local storage when nothing has changed on the host for the past three days."
"There is room for improvement through a further extension of their Office 365 backup platform. In addition, it's still a bit cost-prohibitive to backup NAS. Those would be the two primary areas for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"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.""
"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."
"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."
"Our licensing is Hybrid. We have all of our applications for billing and outage management through this."
"The product could be cheaper."
"The solution is expensive for small businesses."
"Rubrik was probably the most expensive solution but in the long run, it's justified by the value of the data that it protects."
"There are additional costs like maintenance, and there are some features on their central management piece that don't come with our licensing."
"We are on an annual license to use Rubrik and it is priced well."
"Originally, we bought the units on perpetual licenses. Now, we have switched to Rubrik Go. I think the Rubrik Go subscription is a better model, where it is based on your onsite environment and you consume what you use."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten."
"Rubrik is a little bit expensive, but it's worth the price."
"We do perpetual licensing... It was all based on the amount of storage we needed to use. We did a cost analysis compared to Tivoli and it was in line with other solutions."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
 

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...
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...
Which would you choose - Rubrik or Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication provides an easy-to-set-up solution to the issue of data storage and recovery. Setting it up is a relatively simple affair. For the most part it prompts you from scre...
What do you like most about Rubrik?
It's easy to manage and has an innovated solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rubrik?
Regarding pricing, Rubrik is a costly solution, and I would rate it an eight.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest
Driscoll's, Red Hawk Casino, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Wabash National, Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, Galliker Transport & Logistics
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: March 2026.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.