We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Dell PowerFlex 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."StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"It's quite easy to install."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system.. It saves money in the long-run."
"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."
"We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers."
"It is very scalable. It is also very secure. Cisco's security portfolio is integrated with it, which makes it secure. It is a platform-based device. Its performance is also fairly good in comparison to any other solution."
"Cisco offers very good quality."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The program is stable."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by having the documents be more readily available and the support could be more flexible."
"They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out."
"Its price could be better."
"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."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"Cisco should combine its features with its prices."
"The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running."
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The installation is complex."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while Dell PowerFlex 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 Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. Dell PowerFlex report.
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