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Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) vs. NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

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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

    NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

    Score9.5 out of 10
    N/ANetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    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)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    NetApp
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    90%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    24 Answers
    80%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    90%
    Happy with the feature set
    9 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    22 Answers
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    Small Businesses
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    HPE 3PAR StoreServ
    Score7.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.2
    (28 ratings)
    10.0
    (15 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.2
    (27 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
    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
    NetApp
    It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
    Incentivized
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    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
    NetApp
    • The selling point for NetApp FAS is the application and data protection integration capabilities they provide.
    • We have been able to use NetApp FAS in a variety of use cases with a standard set of management tools.
    • NetApp FAS has evolved over the years from just NAS to also include block protocols. At this time they support almost all industry standard protocols.
    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
    NetApp
    • Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
    • Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
    • Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"
    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
    NetApp
    It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
    Incentivized
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    NetApp
    It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
    Incentivized
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    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
    NetApp
    NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Fast, powerful, flexible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    NetApp
    Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.
    Incentivized
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    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
    NetApp
    NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
    Incentivized
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    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
    NetApp
    • The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about.
    • Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either.
    • Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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