Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs HPE Hyper Converged comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE Hyper Converged Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it.""You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage.""The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection.""The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete.""We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown.""The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well.""It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly.""One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems.""There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it.""The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is its performance.""It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing.""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 initial setup is easy.""I like Cisco Intersight.""It's easy to get the tool started."

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"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure.""The most valuable feature was its time to delivery.""The HA, which means I have a copy of the VMs always available, and the moment a VM is down, the system tries to power it on again.""Hyper-convergence is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We can avoid downtime when there's maintenance or updates needed. Also, we have homogenous hardware, so we have a lot of trust in the solution's reliability.""It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution.""Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble.""It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE.""The product enables me to use any software or database."

More HPE Hyper Converged Pros →

Cons
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons.""It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support.""We would like to see the documentation more fully developed.""They require more media visibility.""StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct.""If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things.""Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer.""The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"Lacks easy integration with other vendors.""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.""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.""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.""The scalability could use improvement.""It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable.""Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex.""One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue."

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"Scalability requires using additional nodes.""This solution is very costly.""One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open.""One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host.""Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving.""I would like to see more deduplication.""The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better.""In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."

More HPE Hyper Converged Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Cisco is quite expensive, but not in the initial first buy."
  • "Pricing is better if you buy more Cisco products."
  • "The pricing is a bit expensive."
  • "For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."
  • "If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."
  • "The price is a bit high. It could be better, but the product is worth the cost."
  • "I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
  • "Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."
  • More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It could be cheaper, everything could be cheaper."
  • "With this solution, I buy everything together, pre-packaged, pre-installed, and in just 15 minutes, it's installed."
  • "The price per value compared to other solutions, like Nutanix and SimpliVity. (We made the deal before approval of HPE SimpliVity deal)."
  • "Pricing with Dell EMC is double the price which I paid for HPE. However, in the end, Dell EMC is double in performance. This is not an apple to apple comparison though, as I have a four node from Dell EMC and a three node."
  • "It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful."
  • "The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."
  • "The solution is expensive - not only the hardware costs but server costs too. And the more you scale, the more expensive it gets."
  • "There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
  • More HPE Hyper Converged Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from… more »
    Top Answer:VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to… more »
    Top Answer:Most likely, it's a perpetual license. Our customers do not prefer subscription-based solutions, so we typically offer… more »
    Top Answer:In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    HPE Hyper Converged 380, HPE Hyper Converged 250, HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

    • Enterprise-class data management
    • Continuous data optimization
    • Securely encrypted storage
    • Dynamic data placement
    • Clusterwide parallel data distribution
    • Linear and incremental scaling
    • API-based data platform architecture
    • A simplified approach

    HPE Hyper Converged solutions combine intuitive software with the reliability of a world class platform to deliver cloud-like simplicity to your business.

    Now, IT can become an internal service provider to end-users by quickly delivering the resources they need for application development and consumption. With HPE Hyper Converged systems companies can operate with cloud efficiency to simplify IT operations with one comprehensive control panel to deploy, monitor, analyze and update – with a single generalist; consume with cloud flexibility to deliver a cloud-like experience, with multi-tenant workspaces that eliminate stranded resources and flexes on demand; and deploy at cloud speed to empower developers and lines-of-business with a self-service portal that can instantly compose and recompose VMs in minutes. Built-in enterprise grade features, such as performance and resiliency enable HPE Hyper Converged systems to easily handle a wide variety of virtualized workloads, including general purpose virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and cloud.

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    Learn more about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series
    Learn more about HPE Hyper Converged
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest
    North Lindsey College, FireWhat?, HudsonAlpha
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company22%
    Computer Software Company17%
    University6%
    Agriculture6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Government10%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise59%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE Hyper Converged
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE Hyper Converged and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 33 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2. 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 Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.

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    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.