Cisco HyperFlex vs. Pure Storage FlashArray

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco HyperFlex
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017).N/A
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.N/A
Pricing
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
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 HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
Considered Both Products
Cisco HyperFlex

No answer on this topic

Pure Storage FlashArray
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
Cisco HyperFlex
-
Ratings
Pure Storage FlashArray
9.3
154 Ratings
2% above category average
Flash Array Performance00 Ratings10.0154 Ratings
Flash Array Integration00 Ratings9.0144 Ratings
Data Compression00 Ratings8.0153 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades00 Ratings9.9148 Ratings
Simplicity00 Ratings10.0154 Ratings
Power Savings00 Ratings9.0131 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
Small Businesses
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.6 out of 10
Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued)
Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued)
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 9.0 out of 10
Dell VMAX
Dell VMAX
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(28 ratings)
10.0
(207 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.1
(25 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(16 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(27 ratings)
9.3
(75 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(3 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(6 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco HyperFlexPure Storage FlashArray
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.
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Pure Storage
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
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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.
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Pure Storage
  • The Pure Array does data reduction particularly well. We've seen a 7x reduction on some of our volumes.
  • It is easy to get used to the system after coming from other storage arrays.
  • It has some welcome additions such as a smartphone app that makes it easier to view your cases, etc.
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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
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Pure Storage
  • Reporting is too general. Being a tech nerd, I want to be able to see the nitty-gritty details. I also need to be able to define canned sets of reports for problem application systems.
  • Pricing is a bit higher then some of their direct competitors .
  • Seriously, I have nothing else.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
We are doing it in the current moment. The platform expansion will be twofold.
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Pure Storage
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
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Usability
Cisco
Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
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Pure Storage
The install went smoothly, and the engineer explained every step along the way. The next couple of days he checked in to make sure that migration was running as planned. The user interface is designed with usability in mind. You don't need a dedicated "Storage Silo" to manage this product. For smaller IT departments that need to support many different workloads, this could not be a better feature
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Pure Storage
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
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Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Pure Storage
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
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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.
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Pure Storage
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
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In-Person Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Pure Storage
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
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Online Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Pure Storage
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
Fast, powerful, flexible.
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Pure Storage
The install was very quick. The engineer that Pure sent said that if we started by 10 am we would be done by lunchtime, and he was not kidding.
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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.
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Pure Storage
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Pure Storage
The product suite scales well and the FA in particular can service any need for all but the most demanding file protocol environments
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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.
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Pure Storage
  • Thanks to the deduplication that is built into the product we are seeing great reduction in total space required by consolidating similar data types on the same array.
  • Our users are very pleased with the performance.
  • The replication allowed us to move our workload from to another data center with minimal downtime.
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ScreenShots