We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE SimpliVity based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"The solution is easy to use and to learn. It is well integrated with VMware."
"The initial setup was straightforward. With our partners and the consultancy that we had, we knew what we wanted to do. Therefore, we didn't have any problems with the installation and parametrization."
"The ROI we have seen from the high performance that has saved us time and money."
"The most valuable features are scalability and the easy operation - if it works. You can configure everything from just one window."
"Our customers have seen ROI in terms of the time they save troubleshooting."
"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 most valuable feature is the quick restore."
"The solution is scalable."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"It has a proven track record of stability."
"The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups."
"Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud."
"The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"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."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"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"
"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."
"Scalability is something that needs to be improved because if you need more storage then you have to add more nodes."
"Product doesn't scale."
"Needs to improve the cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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