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

Cisco and NetApp are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and NetApp HCI [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

July 2026

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

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).

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Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the usability very valuable."

"The most valuable feature is to simplify management, as we can lower the need for people to work on the storage itself."

"This solution has improved my organization because workers are more efficient and the time it takes to complete daily activities has been significantly reduced."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."

"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions on the storage side by having one big storage space for hosting VMs. We do not have to provision other ones. That's a positive aspect of it."

"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."

"Go ahead and do it."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."

"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."

"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."

"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."

"The solution has generally affected storage performance in our organization by adding a high-performance storage option into the environment."

"In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure."

"The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."

"It's simple, flexible, powerful; we've been able to move most of our workload to it and we've seen increased performance across the board."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

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."

"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."

"The initial setup can be a bit complex."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."

"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."

"The storage layer seems to be a little better on the VMware than on HyperFlex side."

"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."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."

"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 NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take a look at that."

"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."

"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."

"In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."

"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The price is a bit high. It could be better, but the product is worth the cost."

"The product is expensive. Other solutions are cheaper."

"The product could be cheaper."

"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."

"We negotiated with Cisco and we got some price benefit from that."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a bit pricier compared to other brands in the market...There is a need to make additional payments towards the maintenance and support of the solution."

"There is a license required to use this solution."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

"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."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"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."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Construction Company

15%

Marketing Services Firm

Educational Organization

Construction Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Marketing Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

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...

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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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 25% of the time

Qualys Exposure Management vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

VxRail vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 6% of the time

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 26% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

August 2026

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

July 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: July 2026.

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