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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
95
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (4th), Cloud Backup (4th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (5th)
 

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).
AmarpreetSingh - PeerSpot reviewer
Optimal data security and management achieved with smooth deployment and strong support
I plan to expand the number of users for Rubrik in the future. Currently, I have approximately 10 to 12 customers on Rubrik, as we are partners to Rubrik and a service provider, SIS. I am working with large to medium organizations, not small ones. Regarding Artificial Intelligence, Rubrik is in the initial phase, and I am expecting more from them. I can give them seven out of ten for their improvements in that area. I would recommend Rubrik to other organizations because it is easy to install, easy to manage, and very compact in terms of a solution, with good support from Rubrik. These features allow it to match from small scale to large scale customers very easily. The number of people who usually take part in maintenance from my side depends on the customer size. For large customers, we involve four to five people, but for small customers, one person is enough. I rate Rubrik eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The UCS, which is by far the best management tool there is on the market, regardless of vendor. It's the only tool I see that gives you the opportunity to size and scale all the assets and capacity you have in your data center, from a unified view."
"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"The feature that we are most interested in is the scalability. When needed, we are able to add more nodes and scale it up further."
"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."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"We are providing this solution for the customer or converting the customer from a traditional environment to a hyper-converged environment which consolidates all management and support on a single port. This is the main benefit of using the hyper-converged versus the traditional."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"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."
"The web-based approach is the most valuable feature."
"Rubrik provides excellent customer service and technical support."
"Replaces legacy tapes and disk backups which are unreliable, expensive and space consuming."
"For data security, anomaly detection, site monitoring, and threat hunting are very important features that help customers."
"Time dedicated to backup was drastically reduced."
"The main benefit is that we are secured in terms of workloads. We know that if we need to restore any VMs, or even any files inside a VM, that we will succeed 100 percent. This means that we don't need to spend much time administering the backup environment because we know it is self-healing and efficient. So, we are spending that time on something else, which is always a plus."
"Rubrik, when compared to Cohesity, Dell, and Veritas, was the best of the four."
 

Cons

"In the next release, Cisco should add more integration and management capabilities as well as some tweaks to the dashboard that make it more user-friendly. They could also add support for multiple hypervisors."
"We are moving further out with more cloud solutions, so we need HyperFlex to be more cloud-connected. They should develop more connection to Amazon Web Services and Google cloud because our customers use their services and are moving in that direction."
"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"You cannot just apply the VSXi updates. You are dependent on Cisco HyperFlex for metric services, analytics, and everything else. I don't like that dependency."
"Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly."
"If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great."
"Price-wise, Rubrik needs improvement as it is considered expensive compared to similar competitors."
"Collecting logs in Rubrik is very difficult compared to other tools."
"The same test case in Rubrik takes more than six to seven times longer, meaning the on-premises SLA is significantly faster."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. There is always room for improvement."
"It needs to support more applications natively, like MySQL/MariaDB."
"They support Hyper-V and it works with our CloudOut, the cloud DR, but they seem to add features for VMware first and Hyper-V gets added second or sometimes several releases after the VMware feature comes out."
"They should give more access to the backend capabilities. From a customer point of view, you do not have access to all the features on the system. You have to engage their support to perform some of the tasks. It would be helpful for an experienced engineer to be able to go and do some of those tasks prior to contacting the support."
"I would like to have a built-in index searching ability of files/system files within the Rubrik interface to determine if a file or item exists, rather than just recovering it, and then doing a search for the file afterwards."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's roughly $30,000 per Hyperflex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year."
"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."
"Our licensing costs are large, but it is combined between all of the Cisco products that we have."
"There is a license required to use this solution."
"It's much more expensive than rack servers. It was an issue, but when you compare it to the number of people who were administrative assistants before, it's on the positive ROI side. It's much cheaper."
"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 negotiated with Cisco and we got some price benefit from that."
"Rubrik is an all inclusive price. No additional implementation costs or licencing."
"The solution is expensive for small businesses."
"It’s simple, straightforward, and we were able to see 50% hard savings."
"I don't remember the cost, but I know that for Veeam, we were spending almost $250,000 a year for 205 licenses. It was an enterprise version. When we purchased Rubrik, it was just a little bit more. It was not a terribly huge amount, and if I recall, that was for three years of support as well. So, Veeam priced itself out of the market at a certain point in time."
"Rubrik is a little bit expensive, but it's worth the price."
"Rubrik is not the cheapest solution, but we've been happy with the time savings that we have seen. At least from what we have spent so far, we have been happy with the return on investment."
"The setup cost is a bit high, but the solution is an all-in-one solution."
"Rubrik is quite expensive for small businesses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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