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.
I honestly don't see an area where the PureSystem couldn’t fit in and be of a great use due to its ability to integrate a multitude of technology, (some that are outdated even) to create a stable network platform. I think if a corporation is seeking to upgrade their system but is financially disadvantaged they couldn't make a better investment for more bang for the buck than buying the IBM PureSystem.
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.
Data reliability- by monitoring and increasing load balances PureFlex has made data and applications available more readily across departments.
PureFlex- has increased data integrity. By insuring that data is transported with greater fluidity, PureFlex has increased our data integrity by many folds. By helping us to be more precise in our data delivery, our customers have been more satisfied.
PureFlex- Integration within and scalability has been seamless. We have not experienced very many issues and the ones we have experienced were readily mitigated with the expert help of IBM technicians.
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
Efficiency- PureSystems has enabled our users to work more efficiently with customer orders, providing the requested data in a far less turn around time than ever before.
Scalability- We have already have had to scale up our memory storage due to a successful agreement with a data warehouse and it was a seamless effort completing the project with the assistance of expert IBM technicians at our call when we had any questions.
Combinability- PureFlex's ability to pretty much accept any other technology and incorporate it into a single network has saved us a tremondeous amount of money and time to stable platform.
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.
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.
Well there was a lot going for the vCE block systems we considered the 200 and 300 series. These two series seemed to overlap each other just about right where we are at in our IT needs. The 200 series leaned more to the less side of our needs and the 300 leaned to the farside of our needs. The vCE didn't appear to be compatible with a lot of our current configured components, while the PureSystem did. So that was the real clincher for us. We spent maybe a week integrating everything and testing to insure things had integrated as expected but it was well worth the effort and time.
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.
We were seeking a means to better leverage what we had without rebuilding the entire system, the PureSystem enabled us to do just that.
At first we were very hesitant of the system's robustness, it was to be honest a little intimidating, however with IBM always ready to hear our question no matter how small they might of seemed, we got rolling very quickly, I won't say effortlessly but very quickly.
When it came time on short notice that we needed greater storage and flexibility to incorporate some new application, the new system performed very well with incorporating the new applications and the increase of storage.
