We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."
"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."
"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."
"Cisco provides the ability to configure BIOS, something that no one else can do, on a remote basis. That's really helpful sometimes. The bus-snooping alteration tool for BIOS is fantastic. That's one of the game-changing features that Cisco alone has at this point."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."
"The implementation process is okay."
"This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked."
"We have had great support, and this is when we have called for any problems, which have been very minimal to start with."
"It's a kind of one-stop shop as far as support goes."
"The main advantage is consolidating everything into a single rack, which helps optimize power consumption, especially in CRM."
"The solution's granular scalability and broad application support helps us to meet the needs of diverse workloads."
"One of the most valuable aspects is its integrated convergence infrastructure, particularly the LAN and SAN cloud features that offer a unified fabric."
"FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important to our organization... Especially in healthcare, it is absolutely critical that we have a validated performance platform. It has to work every time."
"The system is designed for easy scaling. Because we define everything clearly. So when we plug the system in, we apply the profile, and it scales easily."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue."
"The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve."
"Lacks easy integration with other vendors."
"We would like HyperFlex to connect the storage directly into Fabric Interconnect along with the features of the solution. We have enough ports in HyperFlex. We don't want to buy another set of switches to connect to Fabric Interconnect, complicating the solution."
"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."
"This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity."
"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."
"Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any."
"The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it."
"There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options."
"There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it."
"They should have an easier user interface to get it up and running."
"I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective."
"We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM."
"Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved."
"Possibly the UCS could get a bit better. Other than that, overall I don't necessarily have any sorts of constraints or issues with it. It's done the job that it's been bought to do."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata and Dell VxBlock System.
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