Likelihood to Recommend Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
Read full review All in all this series great in addressing issues applications that need flash storage as a backend storage supply. It addresses the need for fast, responsive servers that need to boot quickly. It is easy to use and for the most part there are few issues and none that can't be addressed/fixed quickly.
Read full review Pros UCS manager in HX is truly helping us in doing one touch firmware upgrades. Scaling of HX cluster (in few minutes) is too seamlessly due to service profiles. HX does not hold you back by creating a single data store unlike other HCI products. With HX, you can create multiple data stores and allocate those to desired services. This help logically separate the install base on HX and removes confusion for the admins too. We run high IOPs workload on HX, and we never felt latency issues due to the Cisco backbone (as you get FI as a TOR switch and options to choose 10G or 40G speeds). With HX you truly enjoy a single window support from Cisco including for the top of the rack switch (FI in HX case). In other HCI infra, you certainly have to bank on to network switch vendor for support and bring HCI and switch vendor at one pane for troubleshooting latency related issues. While we increased our footprint on HX, we didn't added additional administrators to support the landscape. This was possible because of the simplicity in managing HX clusters. With HX we had setup stretched cluster between two near site data centres. This is a unique proposition in HX (we have 2 nodes in each data centre) and data centre failover works absolutely seamless. Read full review Dell Compellent support (Co-Pilot) and the add-on service (Optimize) are critical services that Dell Compellent does very well. Alerts from the array are sent to Co-Pilot where tickets are automatically generated and customers are notified of events. Of greater importance at times is the proactive support Co-Pilot and Optimize provide by contacting us of inefficiencies in the array and consulting on resolutions. Enterprise Manager (Dell's "single pane of glass" management framework) is a useful tool for configuration/evaluation of the array and other Compellent products. Ease of management. From firmware upgrades to managing server volumes the process is much simpler than with other arrays. Read full review Cons there is the problem with starting cluster where there are not outside DNS and NTP services so we need to workaround this with additional storage or hosting it on the local storage.. many clusters has internal DNS/NTP services not available from outside and they need to be hosted on the HX there is not RBAC or user mgmt on the CVMs so it is difficult to not add full permission for the people responsible for just shutdown and power on the cluster native snapshots support with ibm backup products running from not the only last snapshot in all use cases Read full review The GUI could be a little more updated with a lot more information regarding usage. There could be some assistance with high I/O times where snapshots go to consolidate. There seems to be issues when that attempts to occur, and there will times where the virtual machine stuns due to the I/O intensity. Modification of multiple volumes or the creation of multiple volumes is a pain in the DSM management console. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are doing it in the current moment. The platform expansion will be twofold.
Read full review Usability Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
Read full review Support Rating More documentation is available now than when the product initially came out (which was an issue early on). Because it only supports UCS hardware, I think it does help with support issues. Nutanix has to support much more hardware. At the same time, you're dealing with the Cisco TAC, which can be mixed at times.
Read full review This is not solely based on the support engineers themselves but more so that the logging and gotcha's that their array has. There have been multiple times where logs are pulled, but the folder is not large enough, and it crashes the array. Other times there are certain aspects that support either does not know of or isn't knowledgable about how to look at particular issues that could be causing problems.
Read full review Implementation Rating Fast, powerful, flexible.
Read full review Alternatives Considered HyperFlex is built on top of Cisco UCS infrastructure, which allows us to manage other non-HX servers attached to the same UCS environment. This allows us to tie everything together via Intersight and see all of the servers in our data centers. Other platforms don't really have a comparable offering.
Read full review We selected Compellent solely based on price. Honestly I would rate it only slightly better than a QNAP we used (which was even cheaper). If performance and reliability are factors in your decision (and they should be) I would recommend looking at something like a VNXe.
Read full review Return on Investment The simplified management makes it easier to operate and prevents mistakes. Guided installation using the installer VM means you don't have to configure every component by hand. Improves deployment speed and lowers the risk of configuration issues. Performance increase of 40-90% compared to our previous compute/storage cluster. Read full review The SC9000 has been able to serve our current and futures needs well enough to not need to upgrade anytime soon. Read full review ScreenShots