"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The technical support has been very good for this solution."
"The most valuable feature is full integration with Cisco API and UCS, which means you can have complete networking and storage from Cisco."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Stretch cluster allows us to warranty a service for the customer."
"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."
"Its most valuable feature is its flexibility."
"The most valuable feature is the archive to cloud location and the automation around the PowerShell script. There are also reports and dashboards."
"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 feature that I found most valuable is Live Mount. You can either mount a virtual machine from a snapshot, or you can mount a volume from the snapshot. You can mount one disk to the server to retrieve data, or you can mount the whole VM, rename it, and use it as a test VM. If your VM gets corrupted, you just mount one from the snapshot, and you have your production VM's backup. So, Live Mount is definitely the best feature for me as an end-user."
"I would rate the solution's web interface at eight out of ten. It's just fantastic and intuitive. It's so easy to use. I've never done any formal training on Rubrik, but I was able to quickly come to grips with its capabilities."
"Rubrik is highly scalable and is easy to do."
"The most valuable feature is the Instant Recovery, where we can restore a VM or SQL database or any server or application, and have it up and running on their appliance within a few seconds."
"It has reduced our maintenance efforts. The amount of time and effort that would have gone in troubleshooting various issues related a data crash has been addressed by Rubrik. So, it has helped to improve our productivity. The data is being captured about our customers periodically that is secure and safe."
"The solution’s ransomware recovery, from a security perspective, is one of the biggest features of the product. We don't have to worry about the operational complexity of air-gapped backups and can rely more on the immutability approach. It is a highly valued feature in this solution."
"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."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"They have what's called an organization which means different groups of access to Rubrik, but the alerting only goes to the admins. My suggestion to Rubrik is to make sure that the separate organizations or groups of users get the appropriate alerting."
"The Polaris piece could use improvement. When you get a report and you have events that are suspicious, you cannot drill down and find out why it's suspicious. You only know it's suspicious, but you don't know the root cause. Other than that, everything works well."
"Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier."
"They need to find a solution for SMBs. It is currently only suitable for enterprises or big customers. They need to find a solution that suits SMBs."
"There is room for improvement through a further extension of their Office 365 backup platform. In addition, it's still a bit cost-prohibitive to backup NAS. Those would be the two primary areas for improvement."
"The Office 365 protection could be improved."
"The only thing that can be improved is catering for open source databases because at the moment it doesn't cater for Mongo, MySQL, and Postgres."
"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."
Try it today
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 22 reviews while Rubrik is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery Software with 36 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while Rubrik is rated 9.0. 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 Rubrik writes "Easy to use with an intuitive web interface, helpful support, good performance, and saves us time". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity and Sangfor HCI, whereas Rubrik is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Complete Data Protection, Veritas NetBackup and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain).
We monitor all Hyper-Converged (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.
