We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The price was right."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"Great integration with backup software."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"The technical support has been very good for this solution."
"The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It is helpful as a backup solution."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"The solution has good backup resolution updates."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"There are sometimes issues with memory failure."
"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."
"Unlike other options, you need to pay a subscription to Cisco yearly instead of paying for the hardware outright, which makes it more expensive in the long run."
"If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product. Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by having the documents be more readily available and the support could be more flexible."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"Cisco HyperFlex should decrease the amount of memory needed from the Controller VM that controls the physical discs. They control the discs by using the virtual VM over every ESXi host and the VM consumes memory and consumes more hardware resources. They have to improve that by decreasing the amount of required memory and CPUs to control this disc on the server."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"This solution is very costly."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 28 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 14th in HCI with 6 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 7.6, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "An all-in-one option that is stable and offers good management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes "High performance that gives an advantage over traditional virtualization". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and FlexPod. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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