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 StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"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."
"By configuring networks, we are saving power."
"The storage system is its most valuable feature. It has eliminated our entire need for having to worry about storage. We were storing a lot of syslog data and using a lot of templates in our data center. With the storage system, we are now saving an enormous amount of space."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."
"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."
"Most of our users are Cisco customers, so it fits in within the suites we use. Primarily for me, as a solution architect, it's the technology and architecture that is the most valuable. I know from my technical colleagues that it's easy to use and for the customer, the up-time is the most valuable asset. It's running, has low failure, and so on which is why we use it."
"The management from the switches to the hyper-convergence solutions are quite good and well-developed."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"The solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"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."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly."
"The additional feature I would like to see included in the next release of this solution is more security. We want to add more data servers to all the hosts all over the world. We have 140 hosts that connect to one data center in Manila."
"One of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application."
"If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product. Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors."
"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."
"The solution's price could be affordable."
"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."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"I think that they should have their own hyper-converged system."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"Needs to improve the cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"The initial setup was a little complex because we were in the first version, fresh releases."
"I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 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 Rubrik. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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