We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and Dell PowerFlex based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"The solution is stable."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Cisco technical support is very skilled. From what I've had to access, there were quick responses and the necessary escalation."
"The automation is a valuable feature, it's interesting."
"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the time to deliver a VM takes me five minutes. In comparison, my cloud team's response is a couple of days based on all their overhead policies, procedures, and ticket requests. This is substantial."
"We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The program is stable."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept."
"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."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"The product does not have a cloud version...The product should be made more flexible in terms of integration capabilities."
"It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The installation is complex."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2. 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 Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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