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

Cisco and NetApp are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of NetApp users who would recommend it.
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews
    88% willing to recommend
     

    Comparison Buyer's Guide

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    Executive Summary
    We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and NetApp HCI [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

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    To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: May 2025).
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    May 2025
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    Helped 860,632 peers since 2012

    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
    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).
    Read full review
    MB
    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.
    Read full review

    Quotes from Members

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

    Pros

    "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."
    "The feature that we are most interested in is the scalability. When needed, we are able to add more nodes and scale it up further."
    "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."
    "It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors."
    "The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
    "You can administer things easily. E.g., if you need more power, you can add a system."
    "It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."
    "The flexibility is its most valuable feature; the ability to quickly deploy a number of help machines. It is not constrained by what we want to do."
    More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros
    "The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
    "It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
    "Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
    "Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
    "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."
    "The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
    "The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."
    "It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
     

    Cons

    "The price could be better. I think it's more expensive than VxRail. In the next release, I would like to see a better level of protection and availability with six clients."
    "We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution."
    "The storage layer seems to be a little better on the VMware than on HyperFlex side."
    "HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
    "There are sometimes issues with memory failure."
    "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."
    "Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
    "In the next release, Cisco should add more integration and management capabilities as well as some tweaks to the dashboard that make it more user-friendly. They could also add support for multiple hypervisors."
    More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons
    "The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
    "Its stability is 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 crash."
    "The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
    "There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."
    "The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
    "I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."
    "At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
    "It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
     

    Pricing and Cost Advice

    "There is a recurring cost for the VMware license and the HyperFlex licenses."
    "One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."
    "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."
    "HyperFlex is relatively expensive, but you get good value for money."
    "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."
    "It's much more expensive than rack servers. It was an issue, but when you compare it to the number of people who were administrative assistants before, it's on the positive ROI side. It's much cheaper."
    "Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is expensive. It's a standard license, and we pay for it yearly. I think we pay about 700."
    More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
    "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."
    "Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
    "Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
    "The licensing fees are renewed annually."
    "Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
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    Top Industries

    By visitors reading reviews
    Computer Software Company
    23%
    Financial Services Firm
    9%
    Government
    8%
    Manufacturing Company
    7%
    Financial Services Firm
    18%
    Real Estate/Law Firm
    18%
    Computer Software Company
    11%
    Manufacturing Company
    9%
     

    Company Size

    By reviewers
    Large Enterprise
    Midsize Enterprise
    Small Business
     

    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...
    See all answers
    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...
    See all answers
    What do you like most about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series?
    It's easy to get the tool started.
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    Comparisons

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    HPE SimpliVity vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]
    Compared 47% of the time
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Logo
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]
    Compared 30% of the time
    VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Logo
    VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]
    Compared 23% of the time
    More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors
    No data available
     

    Product Reports

    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]
    June 2025
    Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reportDownload Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report
    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp HCI [EOL]
    June 2025
    NetApp HCI [EOL] reportDownload NetApp HCI [EOL] product report
     

    Overview

    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
    Cisco

    NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

    NetApp
     

    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
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    May 2025
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