Sangfor HCI and Cisco Intersight both compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure space, each catering to different market segments and use cases. Sangfor has the upper hand in cost-effectiveness and ease of management, while Cisco Intersight edges ahead in integration capabilities and advanced management features.
Features: Sangfor HCI provides a user-friendly experience, highlighting features like auto-scaling, integrated firewall, and management tools that facilitate operations for less experienced staff. Its seamless manageability across platforms using vSAN is noteworthy. Cisco Intersight is strong in cloud integration and offers comprehensive data center orchestration and workflow automation, making it a top choice for environments that demand extensive feature sets.
Room for Improvement: Sangfor HCI could benefit from better compatibility with Kubernetes and enhanced virtual machine tools, including adding object storage. Improved documentation and a simpler licensing model are also desirable. Cisco Intersight needs to address gaps in hybrid cloud management, ensemble integration, and automation, as its complexity sometimes hampers usability.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sangfor HCI is mainly deployed in on-premises environments, with its technical support noted for being helpful, though language can sometimes be a barrier. Cisco Intersight supports deployment across cloud and hybrid environments but faces challenges with technical support, especially due to complications from the pandemic.
Pricing and ROI: Sangfor HCI is considered more economical with comprehensive pricing that includes a significant feature set in its base license, appealing to cost-conscious markets. It delivers positive ROI through savings in power, cooling, and space. Cisco Intersight, priced at a mid-range with additional fees for certain features, provides good ROI attributed to its extensive capabilities, though it is more expensive than Sangfor.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Cisco technical support is helpful.
Cisco provides better support than anyone else.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Cisco Intersight is scalable enough for our needs, allowing management in a multi-environment setup and working remotely while deploying servers.
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
The pricing mechanism sounds fair.
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.
Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.
Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.
Benefits and Features
Use Cases
Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:
Reviews from Real Users
Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."
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