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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/ACisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017). Cisco's modern HCI solution is Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix.N/A

    FreeNAS

    Score5.4 out of 10
    N/AFreeNAS is an open source operating system that allows nearly any hardware serve as a network-attached storage device. It was developed by iXsystems.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    iXsystems
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    24 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    22 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Small Businesses
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    DiskStation
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    DiskStation
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    DiskStation
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.2
    (28 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.2
    (27 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    FreeNAS is well suited for most storage serving scenarios, whether it be for an office file server, backup destinations, data replication across the internet, or as backend storage for virtual machines. It can serve various types of clients via a plethora of standard protocols and can easily integrate with existing infrastructure using LDAP authentication and so on. It's pretty simple to use (it helps to have at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) and almost maintenance-free. One scenario that springs to mind that it may not be appropriate for (yet) is as S3 storage. However, S3 functionality was added in a recent release and may have improved greatly since then. I'm sure it will eventually work very well for this.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    • The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
    • The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • 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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    • Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
    • Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    We are doing it in the current moment. The platform expansion will be twofold.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Cisco
    Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Fast, powerful, flexible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    FreeNAS effectively uses all resources really well and it is highly recommended for in premises NAS. It has unlimited ROI as it is really free and open-source. The only payment we need to pay is when we need any support from those guys. FreeNAS helps us to effectively do our work with the legacy systems as it manages all the components really well. FreeNAS although rebranded to TrueNAS will still be there until our legacy systems run.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • 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
    iXsystems
    • Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
    • Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
    • FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots