We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and HPE SimpliVity based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better."
"It is easy to deploy, works well, the reps are good, and the support is great."
"The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well."
"The best thing about this solution is the tight integration with VMware, Cisco, and NetApp from both a hardware and software perspective."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager."
"It is the overall collaboration between NetApp and Cisco to come up with a product that is best in class and best in breed. You are bringing together the best things about UCS and NetApp, as well as you are tying it together with the Nexus fabric."
"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."
"It is just a one-stop shop, a single appliance that I can control through my virtual center."
"The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box."
"The access, high availability, and interface are the most valuable and important for us. There is one interface for the whole product, which is very important because you have a single pane to view all the infrastructure of a customer. You can improve your data recovery plan or DRP, or you can make a special emergency plan if a disk has any problem."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"We can scale the solution easily."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"There have been issues upgrading the firmware."
"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."
"It would be great to see some form of interoperability between the FAS units and the E-Series, specifically for replication, even if it is just one more replication from a FAS to an E-Series. That would be amazing."
"There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed."
"Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades."
"We would like more integration with some other HCI solutions so we can take advantage of other opportunities."
"Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution."
"We would like to see a new design that comes with more productivity or graphics. Currently, the vendors, like HPE and Dell EMC along with NetApp, all have very similar products. We want more diversification."
"The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party."
"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."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 150 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". 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". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata and Dell VxBlock System, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell PowerFlex.
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