We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The price of the solution is good, especially when it comes to complex network solutions, such as UCS and Connect."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution can scale up and out."
"When we use it for VDI solutions, it is very easy to deploy and support."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the connectivity, consistency, and that we now have fewer vulnerabilities on the network."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"With our four HyperFlex HX hosts (consisting of processor, memory, and disk), the performance is very fast and we have no problems at all. In all of the five years that we have been using HyperFlex, we haven't needed to increase our budget to buy additional hosts."
"It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint."
"The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping."
"FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can parter and look for a solution together."
"The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies."
"Provides unified support: Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue."
"Integrated support: It is all under one support contract."
"It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution."
"Gives us a single point of contact for support."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"We are operating two clusters for site resiliency. I would like to support running redundant/resilient vCenter server instances on each rather than a supported external server."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."
"Lacks easy integration with other vendors."
"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place"
"I would like for them to develop integration with other technologies, like SD Access. It's still lacking an enhancement management player."
"The product needs work in the area of deduplication which currently is inefficient."
"Cisco is a bit more challenging in terms of deployment. The admin must be knowledgeable in order to complete the task. Without that knowledge, it will be difficult to complete."
"Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved."
"Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available."
"Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back."
"Perhaps the automation interface could be improved."
"NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons."
"I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received."
"Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layer. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was."
"We would like to have a single pane of glass available for it. It is something that the management in the business would like to have."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata and Dell VxBlock System.
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