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.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

NetApp HCI [EOL]

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, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

June 2026

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

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).

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Massimiliano Bartolozzi

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a good system to run our virtual machines and services on for high performance and high availability."

"The feature that we are most interested in is the scalability, as when needed we are able to add more nodes and scale it up further, which is the feature we sought for our growing business divisions."

"The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers."

"Go ahead and do it."

"Scalability is easy and simple."

"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."

"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."

"When we use it for VDI solutions, it is very easy to deploy and support."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"The benefits for our organization are the performance that we're able to get out of it, as well as the guaranteed minimum performance from a storage perspective."

"Everything we've moved over runs two times faster and in some cases, a lot faster, far more than twice, which our users noticed."

"We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols."

"NetApp HCI is used for enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure and we are using the standard version."

"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 NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."

"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."

"Because NetApp usually marries capacity, performance, and upgrade planning together, there's not a whole lot that I need to worry about at this point."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

Cons

"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."

"Some of our customers do not want to adopt the Cisco ACI solution. They want to manage Cisco HyperFlex by integrating it with their own management solution."

"There is a VMware plugin for HyperFlex, which sometimes it hangs up in our environment, and doesn't function well."

"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."

"We have not had a good experience with the support. They were not very helpful with the cosmetic error we were receiving."

"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."

"Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors."

"In terms of the stability, we can't get it to work."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"We went with a different solution and having run that for a while, I would say that there is a lot more than they could do to make it more streamlined."

"The networking needs improvement."

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."

"I would like to have more variety, like GPU cards."

"Unfortunately, the solution has not reduced our hypervisor footprint."

"HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."

"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."

"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."

"Its price is high. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Nutanix or VMware are cheaper products, and they provide almost the same functionality. Its price is a big road blocker when we are working with an end customer, and Nutanix and VMware are in competition. If they can reduce its price, it is actually a better choice for customers."

"We currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet."

"We would not have invested if we didn't feel the return was there for our customers."

"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."

"The pricing is a bit expensive."

"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."

"There is a license required to use this solution."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Construction Company

14%

Marketing Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Marketing Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 21% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

VxRail vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 24% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

June 2026

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

June 2026

Download 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

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: June 2026.

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