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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

    SANsymphony

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ADataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and accessed. The vendor states users can ensure business continuity with just 2 nodes, easily scaling out to 64 nodes, and achieve productivity for performance-demanding workloads by improving I/O processing and reducing…N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)SANsymphony
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)SANsymphony
    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)SANsymphony
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    DataCore Software
    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)SANsymphony
    Small Businesses
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    StarWind Virtual SAN
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    StarWind Virtual SAN
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    IBM Storage Scale
    Score9.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)SANsymphony
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.2
    (28 ratings)
    9.1
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.2
    (27 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)SANsymphony
    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
    DataCore Software
    Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.
    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
    DataCore Software
    • Fast pools should go to your most used data, and not static files.
    • Redundancy is a must for all aspects of our IT jobs. Who wants to explain when there's no data?
    • Works on Windows server 2012/2016 much better. Solid stability.
    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
    DataCore Software
    • Our needs are very small when compared to what this product can do. We don't use all of what it is capable of doing. Honestly, I have no cons.
    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
    DataCore Software
    I'm currently in the process of renewing my support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    DataCore Software
    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
    DataCore Software
    In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Fast, powerful, flexible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    DataCore Software
    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
    DataCore Software
    DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.
    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
    DataCore Software
    • More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime).
    • Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows.
    • All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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