TrustRadius Insights for Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Efficient Deployment Process: Users have praised the platform for its quick server deployment, stating that it takes less than 30 minutes to build a server to support their business application.
Ease of Use and Scalability: Reviewers found the platform easy to install, manage, and expand, emphasizing its user-friendly interface and scalability options.
Excellent Storage Capacity: Many users appreciated the platform's excellent storage capacity, which contributes to cost reduction in companies and makes implementation very straightforward.
Seamless Maintenance Processes: Users highlighted that updates and repairs could be done without disruption, showcasing the platform's seamless maintenance processes.
Integration with Cisco Ecosystem: The platform was described as efficient, fast, and integrated well with other Cisco products in the ecosystem.
User-Friendly Interface for End-Users: Users noted that the platform is easy to understand for end-users in terms of technology understanding and activities on both Day-0 and Day-1.
Efficient Snapshots in VMware: Praise was given for efficient snapshots in VMware provided by the platform, enhancing data management capabilities.
Reliable Storage Capabilities: The platform was commended for providing reliable storage solutions that meet user expectations.
In my organization, we design HyperFlex Solutions and sell them to our customers. We solve a multitude of their business and operational problems, via our Cisco HyperFlex solutions. Some of those problems are lack of computing power in their environment, lack of storage, or primarily network connectivity upgrades.
Pros
Easy to install
Easy to manage
Easy to expand
Cons
Centralized management
A 3D visualizing tool for partners to show customers while pitching the solution
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco HyperFlex is well suited for general-purpose scenarios in enterprise companies, as well as niche situations such as gaming companies, off-shore companies, etc. I couldn't fault it.
My organization Decsis, manages Cisco HyperFlex for public customers providing a cloud of multi/services to shareholders in a multi-site and multi-service ecosystem. Cisco HyperFlex provides the integration, manageability and resilient framework to achieve optimal results and performance for users.
Pros
Managing
Integration
Scalability
Resilience
Cons
Expansion
Multivendor
Likelihood to Recommend
Multi-services, multi-org scenario. Complex ecosystems, critical infrastructures like hospitals.
VU
Verified User
Director in Human Resources (Information Technology & Services company, 201-500 employees)
good integration with the rest of the Cisco ecosystem
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
mainlny HX + IBM FlashSystem (viia FC where there are NTP and DNS and some VMs with huge amount of not used frequently data) where we host VMs with traditional applications and control plane for Kubernetes/OpenShift.
I've deployed HyperFlex to provide compute and storage resources in remote sites and small data centers. It provided a solid platform that was both cost-effective and scalable. This allowed us to move some services closer to users, improving their performance. It was also easy to deploy and manage.
Pros
Scalable
Easy to use.
Performance
Cons
If anything, AMD processor support.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 10,001+ employees)
We utilize Cisco HyperFlex to provide our XaaS product to our customers. The interoperability with the various OS versions is a plus. HyperFlex allows us to centrally manage our hardware and customize the hardware to meet our evolving demands via a hyperconverged platform. The ability to virtually add vHBAs and vNICs is invaluable as performance needs grow.
Pros
Software-defined hardware
Centralized management
Broad interoperability
Cons
Price-point
Training
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco HyperFlex is great in XaaS environments that need to expand and shrink depending upon demand. The movement of Service Profiles between blades provides uptime stability during hardware failures or troubleshooting.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 10,001+ employees)
We wanted to deploy an agile, efficient, and hybrid IT infrastructure, Cisco HyperFlex met our expected criteria. Cisco HyperFlex supports end-to-end "Intelligent" Automation. Because of this, we simplified the deployment process by configuring intelligent automation. Cisco HyperFlex's Hyperconverged Infrastructure helps us to keep the storage and networking management in a single component. Because of these features, we have reduced the cost of spending to avail multiple storage disks. The encryption/security provided by Cisco HyperFlex is too secured, and the VDI and DAAS(Desktop as a Service) are literally great.
Documentation of the deployment process is simple and easy to understand for new users.
Will be able to automate the deployment process
Will be able to provide the support to business faster as it is based on the "Hyperconverged Infrastructure" principle
Cons
Small organization can't afford the cost of Cisco Hyperflex as it's yearly subscription
Virtual controller should be little more powerful
Integrating the graphics card feature is not available, it would be great if they make this so that it will enable the users to improve acceleration
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco HyperFlex is well suited if you are looking for agile, efficient, and Hybrid IT infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex exclusively supports Hyperconverged Infrastructure, so we can gain agile, efficient, and quick deployment. If you are looking to reduce the power and cooling costs, then it's the ultimate solution to avail. When comes to any software supporting the business with high efficiency and speed is important and these can be achieved by HyperFlex. As it is Hybrid infrastructure will be able to manage everything in one place and we can eliminate the extra costs spent for buying other physical disks.
We used HyperFlex to replace our separate server and storage environments. We are moving from Cisco UCS and Fiber Channel storage to a truly hyper-converged solution that will host thousands of virtualized machines for our customers. This is a Virtualised Server Infrastructure based upon VMWare ESXi for apx 6000 end users.
Pros
Ease of installation
Quality of product
Ease of operation
Cons
It can be overwhelming. There's a lot going on with compute storage network and hypervisor combined.
Some minor repeating warning messages when performing maintenance tasks.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for both private and hybrid cloud environments. Can support both general virtualized workloads and specific workloads (including SAP HANA). Strong hyperconverged offering which solves a lot of issues you have with other solutions by providing a complete solution including network and bespoke hypervisor images.
KPIT uses HyperFlex for hosting production VM workload that demands high IOPs and compute. We run workloads like VDI, SAP, Oracle, SQL/MySQL, MongoDB and Redis Clusters, Microsoft Exchange 2013, Pivotal Cloud Foundry etc. Services running on HyperFlex are consumed by entire organisation of 12000 users. With HX, we have provided high availability to business critical services between the nearby data centres, and also have set up Disaster recovery for business critical applications across our regional data centre. Data de-duplication capability of HX helped us optimise storage space for services like Virtual Desktop Infra (VDI), file servers and FTP Servers.
Pros
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.
Cons
I feel that Cisco team should work hard in simplifying the HX version upgrade process. Currently there are many dependancies to be taken care of and the process is felt to be quite complicated.
We have automated teething issues in day to day operations using PowerShell. However, when it comes to the HX Controller VM, we could not fetch desired details. Using PowerShell, we were looking to fetch the details like which is the master controller VM (truly useful while troubleshooting and while performing upgrades).
Finally, if Cisco could give an option to add a datastore using PowerShell, it will help automate ops processes and provide a faster turnaround to business.
In a nutshell, Cisco should open up more so that organisations can use scripting for automation and setting up custom alerts.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have a varied workload (as mentioned earlier, right from SQL and NoSQL databases, VDI, Microsoft Exchange, SAP Oracle, Cloud Foundry etc. etc.) and for all our types of work, we've found HX absolutely stable in all aspects. HX finds great suitability if you are looking for creating a data centre with a high level of availability (stretched cluster - that too with just 2 nodes per data centre). Not only are we early adopters of HX, but since its implementation we have shared our success stories with many customers of ours, as well as in the reference calls from Cisco. Those who adopted HX on our reference have shared very good feedback.
