Item: Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco HyperFlex

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HyperFlex was selected to replace aging infrastructure, for its built-in redundancy and reliability. It hosts the VMware environment including web servers, application servers, and database servers.
The challenge we faced with Cisco at the time was that our configuration was the largest deployed. It took time for firmware and other issues to be resolved.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Uptime.
Redundancy.
Small footprint in the data center.

Cons

Expansion is a pain. Because storage is dedicated to each cluster, you need to do capacity management for each cluster.
Probably better for smaller implementations.

Return on Investment

Great discount.
Very flexible financing from Cisco.
Dedicated support personnel were very helpful.

Alternatives Considered

HPE BladeSystem

Cisco was selected due to more favorable financing. HPE financing was more difficult to obtain. Hyperflex is very different from other solutions - highly redundant with a fast backplane, but many techs are not familiar with the solution and typically prefer the more traditional blade and fiber attached storage solutions.

Support Rating

Great support in most areas, but very difficult to get resolutions for odd performance problems.
At the time of implementation, our installation was the largest Hyperflex install - which led to some unusual performance issues that support had never seen before.
I recommend researching the installation size you would need and how that compares with other Hyperflex users before purchasing.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) go as expected?

Would you buy Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi

Likelihood to Recommend

Smaller-scale implementations. It seems to have challenges when you have a lot of nodes in a cluster. SSD storage performs well. If you do have performance issues, they can be very difficult to find. We spent months trying to figure out why copying VMs from other clusters to one specific cluster took so long. Firmware and software updates resolved issues.

Cisco HyperFlex - good for smaller, high availability implementations