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 solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The initial setup was straightforward. With our partners and the consultancy that we had, we knew what we wanted to do. Therefore, we didn't have any problems with the installation and parametrization."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"Support is very responsive."
"Cisco HyperFlex is helping us to put everything in centrally so that we can manage in one place."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"The implementation process is okay."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"It allows you to take advantage of the unique platform of computing, cloud management, storage, and integrated networks, as well as software-defined data management, which is easy to use. "
"Offsite backup, replication, and duplication of data are important for our plant environment since we are hard on our equipment."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"Among the valuable features are that it's a complete solution, it's easy to use, and there is not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution."
"Our clients are very comfortable with the single management of the complete stack. The creation of VM systems is also very fast."
"We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt."
"What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features."
"The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"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 system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."
"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."
"You cannot just apply the VSXi updates. You are dependent on Cisco HyperFlex for metric services, analytics, and everything else. I don't like that dependency."
"We would like HyperFlex to connect the storage directly into Fabric Interconnect along with the features of the solution. We have enough ports in HyperFlex. We don't want to buy another set of switches to connect to Fabric Interconnect, complicating the solution."
"We are moving further out with more cloud solutions, so we need HyperFlex to be more cloud-connected. They should develop more connection to Amazon Web Services and Google cloud because our customers use their services and are moving in that direction."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"You have to get the same servers with the same storage; they need to be identical. However, in vSAN or in VMware we don't have to do that. We can just add storage and manage it in the same server."
"They can bring more awareness about this product. In this part of the world or this region, people normally don't know about SimpliVity and its capabilities. The company we have it sold to hasn't been able to fully utilize all the features or understand the features. So, product awareness should be improved."
"I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads."
"HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
"It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc."
"Product doesn't scale."
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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