We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE SimpliVity 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."The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"Support is very responsive."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"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."
"Cisco technical support is very skilled. From what I've had to access, there were quick responses and the necessary escalation."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"We can scale the solution easily."
"What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware."
"Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"It has reduced my data center activities."
"The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place"
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"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 on-prem was quite difficult."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it."
"The initial setup was a little complex because we were in the first version, fresh releases."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while HPE SimpliVity 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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