We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The ROI we have seen from the high performance that has saved us time and money."
"The technical support has been helpful. We are always able to get through to the right person."
"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."
"It allows us to authorize our residents to come in using their own personal devices to access any of our clinical applications and ensure that the PHI is secure and protected."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"All of our main applications run on this solution, and it has done a stellar job."
"The tool provides a single point for storing applications and it increases the availability of them. It also has improved the way we handle applications within VMware."
"The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches."
"I am happy with the stability. I haven't had any major issues with it in four years. This includes upgrades."
"For our DR, we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM."
"For us as an IT department, it helped us a lot. Before we implemented FlexPod, we were using different solutions all based on a virtual infrastructure. On VMware, before implementing FlexPod, we had a lot of problems doing backups with disaster recovery. After integrating it, it enabled us to have shorter maintenance windows, instant backups, instant recovery, which also minimized the number of alerts that we get from the application team and from the employees who were working on the application that something is not working."
"Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is the ease of actually setting it up and learning it."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"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."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"The documentation could be substantially better, but the product itself does everything it needs to do."
"The utilization needs to be better. It needs more options."
"I would like to see more analytics. It could use better infographs in the HyperFlex Connect on how traffic is running in the network. If you were reaching any capacity issues on the Fabric Interconnects, it should be able to cool all of the servers and Fabric Interconnects, then possibly integrate it with, e.g., Nexus Series switches. This should all be available in a single pane of glass."
"We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products."
"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"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."
"I would like a lighter product; something which can be carried by a mere human. The typical size still looks like a stack of data center-sized servers, which is typically fine, but not so good if you want to carry it around."
"Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that."
"A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process."
"Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately."
"For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things."
"There are too many drivers and software combined all together, and we need to have compatibility between all of them."
"FlexPods can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. They can evolve and grow by connecting pods together."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. 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 FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and HPE ConvergedSystem.
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