Cisco 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
SUSE Rancher
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost…
$7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Pricing
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
SUSE Rancher
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Subscription license
7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Standard Subscription
11,234.99
per year 10 nodes
Priority Subscription
30,514.99
per year 10 nodes
Management Server Priority Subscription
41,830.99
per year 1 instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
SUSE Rancher
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
SUSE Rancher
Features
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
SUSE Rancher
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.
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.
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
No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.
Overall it deserves an 8 out of 10. The platform is very easy to use as long as the UI is stable. We have had a few buggy versions in the past. However the CLI is excellent and the platform is simple to manage and maintain. It is easy to deploy and offer for company wide use which increases utilization and ROI.
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.
The documentation is quite complete and there is a very active community that is willing to collaborate and answer questions for those who are just starting out.
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.
We started using SUSE Rancher in the early days and spent a large amount of time getting to know and love it. This was before the days of some of the likes of Amazon Web Services who may now provide a cheaper but less feature-rich alternative to SUSE Rancher, however we have yet to explore this.
The investment for small environments is quite significant. There has to be a compelling case to enhance the areas where SUSE Rancher brings in value to make such a financial leap. There is also a free version to test the value propositions, which will help support the user's buying decisions. More clusters, more volume, more tasks and more complexity in the environment equals more value that Rancher can provide.
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.
Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications
