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

"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."

"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."

"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."

"The solution is easy to use and to learn. It is well integrated with VMware."

"The technical support has been helpful. We are always able to get through to the right person."

"By configuring networks, we are saving power."

"I like Cisco Intersight."

"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."

"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."

"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."

"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"

"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."

"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."

"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."

"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."

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

"The initial setup is very complex because there were some issues. It is not clear to how set up this solution."

"Cisco HyperFlex should decrease the amount of memory needed from the Controller VM that controls the physical discs. They control the discs by using the virtual VM over every ESXi host and the VM consumes memory and consumes more hardware resources. They have to improve that by decreasing the amount of required memory and CPUs to control this disc on the server."

"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."

"You have to get the same servers with the same storage; they need to be identical. However, in vSAN or in VMware we don't have to do that. We can just add storage and manage it in the same server."

"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."

"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."

"The solution could improve by having more customization."

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

"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."

"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."

"I would like to see the implementation process improved."

"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."

"The networking needs improvement."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."

"It is relatively expensive, but it can easily return value by freeing up other resources."

"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."

"We are on an annual subscription and the price is fair."

"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."

"The pricing is a bit expensive."

"Here in Brazil... it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution."

"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."

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

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"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."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

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

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."