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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

"HyperFlex is flexible for various projects and we have a lot of vendors doing projects where HyperFlex has been good at solving issues."
"The solution is stable, it has been able to perform all the tasks we have used it for, and it is very reliable."
"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 compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."
"It is pretty easy to set up."
"Cisco provides the ability to configure BIOS, something that no one else can do, on a remote basis. That's really helpful sometimes. The bus-snooping alteration tool for BIOS is fantastic. That's one of the game-changing features that Cisco alone has at this point."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"Technical support is good but we need it for every piece we do."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"We have seen two to three million dollars of OPEX savings by deploying this and getting rid of older equipment."
"HCI has provided us with efficiencies and mobilities similar to that of the public cloud."
"Now you don't have to be a storage administrator to provision or do anything, and any VMware system administrator, with the ease of a button, would get storage provision, which makes their lives easier."
"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."
"It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do."
"The solution is very scalable."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
 

Cons

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is stable. However, this solution has a lot of dependencies, and if there is a single point of failure the solution will be impacted."
"We had a bit of complexity to think about how to migrate our legacy infrastructure into Cisco HyperFlex."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any."
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"The initial setup is very complex because there were some issues. It is not clear to how set up this solution."
"Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag."
"It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable."
"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 NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take a look at that."
"It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like."
"The reason I give it a nine instead of a ten is because of the need for pre-check work. While it is simpler than most products, there is still a lot of configuration that needs to be done."
"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive.""
"We are on an annual subscription and the price is fair."
"We have a yearly license."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount."
"Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."
"Its price is rather fair when compared with other solutions like VxRail, vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity. We got a fair amount of discount from Cisco for Cisco HyperFlex. It is cost-effective. We have renewed storage till next year, and we have already paid the vendor. When we talk about HyperFlex or any HCI solution, storage is the part where we can reduce a lot of costs. At the current moment, we are already using NetApp storage, which did not allow us to go for a full Cisco HyperFlex setup. We are planning to go to a larger scale next year. Then we will be able to see how cost-effective it really is for us."
"The pricing is a bit expensive."
"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."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"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."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
14%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
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
 

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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, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: June 2026.
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