We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex Hx Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Cisco Hyperflex Hx Series seems to be a superior solution. All other things being more or less equal, our reviewers found Nutanix Acropolis AOS to be more difficult to deploy than Cisco Hyperflex Hx Series. Additionally, Nutanix Acropolis AOS lacks the level of integration that Cisco offers.
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"The management from the switches to the hyper-convergence solutions are quite good and well-developed."
"It is very scalable. It is also easy to scan."
"Easily facilitates remote work opportunities with storage and compute resources."
"The ROI we have seen from the high performance that has saved us time and money."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."
"It offers very useful data protection."
"The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features."
"The architecture of Nutanix is the best, and the virtualization we get, out of the box, is an advantage. Also, dedupe and compression are done natively, inside the platform, so there are no additional licenses. That adds value to it."
"The most valuable features are the RBAC, role-based access control, and the reporting. NCI also provides a single platform, a single pane with a dashboard, to manage the entire infrastructure. We have complete information about overall utilization, performance, and a forecast for our platform in that single pane."
"Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues."
"What's best about Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its simplicity. It's simple to install and simple to understand. The technical support and support portal for this product are both very good and very helpful."
"Ease of deployment"
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"The initial setup 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"
"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."
"Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag."
"The product does not have a cloud version...The product should be made more flexible in terms of integration capabilities."
"There should be the opportunity to create more than one div group"
"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."
"It needs improvements in terms of I/O. Sometimes I have felt it is slightly slow while we are trying to provision VMs or access VMs."
"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."
"In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles."
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future."
"We would like to see it support other systems outside of the compute stack from which it was built."
"I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but I'm actually very satisfied with this product. There may be some possibilities to move the virtual server dismounting points or to move the server from one group to another, but I can't think of any special improvements or update features."
"There is a need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads."
"The name of the solutions offered by Nutanix does not indicate what the tool does."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 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 Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Dell PowerFlex.
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With Nutanix you have the freedom of choice. You can deploy it with several server hardware vendors or completely in the cloud.
I don’t know Hyperflex at heart, though.
Also, support at Nutanix is outstanding.
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS
Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper-converged infrastructure at scale. We looked into it but then ultimately chose Nutanix Acropolis.
We liked Hyperflex’s virtualization feature and the unified network fabric it provides. The Integrated Managed Controller was a nice feature to have. It is expandable, stable, and has good redundancy. If you require more processor cores per box, Cisco HyperFlex is a good solution for you. Support will depend on the type of contract you have, with some requests taken care of immediately and others taking longer according to the engineer’s expertise.
While Hyperflex is designed for any company size, I wouldn’t recommend them for small businesses. It also requires a solid knowledge of Cisco products, as the UI can be difficult to manage. Upgrading to a newer version can also be cumbersome and could use some improvement.
We chose Nutanix because it is easier to use and is more cost-effective. Nutanix allows us to deploy, run and scale applications both on-premises and in the cloud. It has excellent support. You can log the query straight to a technical expert, which is good if you have staff not familiar with AOS. It is easy to scale by adding new nodes, and the company is constantly adding new features.
Nutanix is not for everyone, though. The Nutanix Cloud System can be complex to maneuver when at the command line or when troubleshooting.
Conclusions
Nutanix is better for medium-sized companies and when you need a cost-effective solution. Cisco Hyperflex is a complete solution but is better suited for large enterprises. It works better if you are already a Cisco user.