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."Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"Easily facilitates remote work opportunities with storage and compute resources."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the connectivity, consistency, and that we now have fewer vulnerabilities on the network."
"The software defines networking, storage, and processing."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"It's easy to get the tool started."
"The overall versatility and validate designs are great. We previously used a different platform, but we gained a lot of utilization with FlexPod."
"The storage efficiency and performance are valuable."
"I see the most value in the UCS portion. I love Cisco UCS."
"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."
"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."
"It simplifies everything. It gives you a single place to go if you need support or if you need to expand."
"All-flash storage and low latency I/O enhance performance."
"The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"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."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."
"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"The utilization needs to be better. It needs more options."
"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."
"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential."
"The cost may be high compared to other solutions."
"Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution."
"NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons."
"The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it."
"We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM."
"Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back."
"There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it."
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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