We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"The most valuable feature is full integration with Cisco API and UCS, which means you can have complete networking and storage from Cisco."
"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."
"It is helpful as a backup solution."
"It's easy to get the tool started."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"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."
"It reduced the total cost of ownership."
"If the network or site is down, you just need to go to a single vendor. You don't have to open up multiple cases with each vendor to get things done. That is one of the financial benefits of this solution."
"The feature I have found most valuable is data protection."
"FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is one of the reasons we chose to look at it and NetApp. That is one of the key components of our infrastructure. That native integration is very important."
"The main advantage is consolidating everything into a single rack, which helps optimize power consumption, especially in CRM."
"The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches."
"FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations."
"One of the most valuable aspects is its integrated convergence infrastructure, particularly the LAN and SAN cloud features that offer a unified fabric."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"They require more media visibility."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by having the documents be more readily available and the support could be more flexible."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to bring it back a little bit, but it's still not great."
"Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance."
"I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be."
"There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options."
"FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing."
"The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates."
"The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 7th in HCI with 24 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 20 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE SimpliVity, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Dell PowerEdge VRTX.
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