Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem
High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources
In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, 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. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."
"The implementation process is okay."
"There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it."
"The software defines networking, storage, and processing."
"It is a hyper-converged solution which integrates with the network instead of the product."
"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."
"The most valuable features are scalability and the easy operation - if it works. You can configure everything from just one window."
"We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure, and this product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers."
"It's simple, flexible, powerful; we've been able to move most of our workload to it and we've seen increased performance across the board."
"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"The most valuable feature is the convergence."
"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."
"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."
"The stability is fantastic; in my mind, it's one of the best storage products and the software around it has got to be the best across all different storage environments."
"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."
 

Cons

"I would like for them to develop integration with other technologies, like SD Access."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"Their technical support is very bad. We had an issue where instead of an engineer we got a PDF "doctor" that didn't know anything about our problem which was very frustrating."
"This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity."
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"Its price could be better."
"Cisco has to continue improve the management tools to provide a better command line interface with more functions. That would be better for administration."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
"My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."
"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco is quite expensive, but not in the initial first buy."
"When we negotiated with Cisco for the HyperFlex solution, they gave us a good price because they wanted to break into the market in Portugal for the first time. However, in general, I think it's a very expensive solution. It's a huge amount of money to acquire this kind of infrastructure."
"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."
"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."
"Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."
"HyperFlex is a little pricey."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"The price is a bit high. It could be better, but the product is worth the cost."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
16%
Educational Organization
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
6%
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...
How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?
VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.