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

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI.
To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: March 2024).
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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage.""It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls.""In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems.""This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business.""The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks.""The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly.""A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations.""The ROI is great on this product."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"It is helpful as a backup solution.""Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure.""It's easy to get the tool started.""It is a stable and scalable solution.""The automation is a valuable feature, it's interesting.""I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform.""The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect.""The compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."

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"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option.""The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained.""Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period""The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily.""It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number.""Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment.""HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth.""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."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Pros →

Cons
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console.""I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future.""If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs.""There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA.""I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows.""An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration.""It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows""It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"The solution could improve by having more customization.""The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running.""Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly.""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.""It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations.""Their technical support is very bad. We had an issue where instead of an engineer we got a PDF "doctor" that didn't know anything about our problem which was very frustrating.""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.""Its price could be better."

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"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites.""If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything.""It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations.""HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources.""The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products.""I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines.""I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule.""There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Cisco is quite expensive, but not in the initial first buy."
  • "Pricing is better if you buy more Cisco products."
  • "The pricing is a bit expensive."
  • "For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."
  • "If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."
  • "The price is a bit high. It could be better, but the product is worth the cost."
  • "I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
  • "Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."
  • More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
  • "All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
  • "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 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."
  • "Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
  • "The licensing fees are renewed annually."
  • More NetApp HCI [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from… more »
    Top Answer:VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to… more »
    Top Answer:It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier.
    Top Answer:Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market.
    Top Answer:At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    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

    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.

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    Try it today

    Learn more about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series
    Learn more about NetApp HCI [EOL]
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Transportation Company15%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Insurance Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Government12%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise66%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, whereas NetApp HCI [EOL] is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).

    See our list of best HCI vendors.

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.