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.
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors), Prism cluster manager, Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Flow server management, and is available on the Nutanix NX series of server hardware appliances, as well as third-party OEM appliances.
Cisco HyperFlex is the brain and control for applications and solutions delivered in the ecosystem of customers using Decsis Datacenter in a multi-site, multi-customer environment.
I feel HyperFlex provide a more robust user interface and interaction with your storage. It allows for easy deployment of LUNs and connectivity to your Hosts. The ease of use provides a better end user experience to those new to the storage and virtualization platforms. …
VMware vSAN is more elastic and easy to sell as you can have more flexibility with the hardware and can use or just upgrade hardware already deployment in the client infrastructure and additionally its have no dependencies about the DNS/NTP, what is important..
Hyperflex is that it is a simplified product that assists in the storage of software data and also provides an infrastructure for data optimization and network management quickly and efficiently.
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 …
Compares favorably to Nutanix and SimpliVity. Nutanix however has been around longer and has a bigger feature set than Hyperflex, which is in Nutanix's favor. However, while Nutanix does everything, it doesn't always do everything well.
Cisco HyperFlex is easier to manage than other BladeSystem or Hyper-Converged systems. I would say it is in line with Pure Storage Arrays as far as ease of use goes.
As part of the solution, Cisco HyperFlex gives you more options for managing, monitoring and controlling your enterprise infrastructure. The mobility and flexibility of the services allow administrators full control of the server farm and services. In addition, the availability …
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 …
Interestingly enough, depending on which box you purchased the two may be able to be combined into one setup. The UCS series is great and provides a lot of compute but lacks the storage. Hyperfex has a bit less compute but contains lots of storage space and memory needed for …
HX stacks up well ahead of the competition (we are running all the three HCI's) in terms of performance, stability, seamless integration with network backbone (no conflicts!), unified management of UCSM and most importantly, it helped us setup data centre level HA just with 2 …
Storage - I no need to worry about buying separate products like in VMware LCM - Separate appliance in VMware GPU - Nightmare in updating these software's Planning - Need to have a separate license in ESXI vROPS; I can use cost analysis and capacity runaway in Nutanix 3-Tier - …
The HPe solution we looked at was not as good, this was only introduced as one of the aquired companies used it and we. after we took over and looked under the hood, we felt that it was not a very ideal solution for use and that is what prompted use to abandon that infra and …
vSAN on VXrail and a Cisco Flashstack was our two existing systems before bringing in a Nutanix cluster. The performance of Nutanix HCI was far better than vSAN's performance (hybrid vs. hybrid and AF vs. AF.) However, Pure does deliver on its claim of being the fastest storage …
We've decided to go for both VxRail and Nutanix AOS to make sure we can get the best deals from both sides. I appreciate this may not be a path most companies can go down, but always good to have a bit of healthy competition between vendors to ensure you're getting the best …
Enterprise Cloud (EC) is made of three core components: Prism, Acropolis, and Calm. Prism is the management plane that provides a unified management interface that generates actionable insights for optimizing virtualization, infrastructure management, and everyday operations. …
The only other hyper-converged I have used is Rubrik so my comparison here won't be very good I am afraid.
The two products seem comparable in terms of them just being a service in a box but of course one of them is a very good backup solution and the other is a very good …
I've been a big Nimble fan and would consider it if I was deploying in a green field site (it always comes down to price of course). Nutanix are an existing supplier so for now it makes the choice easier. We did look at VxRail but again for the VDI solution Nutanix won out.
We used UCS before, which is a little complicated to setup. There are multiple devices need to connect together (for example two FIs and main process chassis needs to cross-connected first), and there is no storage built-in. But once all setup and configured, it is good. The …
We really haven't done much with the other modules. Our organization is small enough that implementing most of them would have been overkill and rarely utilized. It doesn't mean we never will, but it wasn't a need as we stand today. With our next refresh, I would like to look …
We made benchmarks and evaluated other storage solutions. But the HCI component and the integration from storage, computer, virtualization are what mostly made the choice clear for us.
Nutanix is not as a mature product but the ability to automate through using their API is one of the strongest reasons for choosing this platform. Automation helps remove human error and this leads to more time for deployment teams to spend on other activities. Their feature …
Other HCI products used or evaluated have been Acuity, HC3, Hyperflex, Maxta, Overt, Proxmox, Simplivity, Symphony, VXRack. Nutanix was really first to market and has had many first features available in their product, familiarity with the product, and our organization's track …
We were looking at Simplivity before they were bought out by HP. We liked Nutanix because of the included hypervisor and file services - we were paying way too much for VMware licensing to continue using it.
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.
For an organization that requires top-notch performance HCI, Nutanix is the best. You may start with 3 nodes and expand the cluster as required. The management through Nutanix Prism Central and Element was so easy that even a Junior Engineer was able to handle it. The Nutanix platform is not suitable for organizations with a small budget and fewer requirements for high-performance infrastructure, as the Nutanix solution itself is suited for enterprises.
"Nutanix is an operating system playing inside an existing, rich IT ecosystem." Listen to Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix, as she shares game-changing results with the implementation of infrastructure-as-code.
With one-click simplicity, Nutanix AOS streamlines IT operations and relieves budget pressures by integrating storage, networking, and compute services into a single solution managed by IT generalists. Start small and scale without limit to meet business demands.
Deliver applications with the highest possible performance throughout the full lifecycle, not just day one. Provide reliable performance SLAs without worrying about workload changes or growth in application demands.
Too much integration with Cisco UCS fabric interconnects is required, which makes the product most useful for customers who already have Cisco UCS. Options without fabric interconnects are limited.
Hyper-V integration is way behind (but to be fair I think that's true for most vendors in this space).
The one downside I have working with Nutanix is the sales team. They seem to try to add in extra goodies to sales quotes or push for extras that you don't really need and you have to tell them to take them out. Don't be afraid to push back on them.
Need to analyze sizing with sales team to ensure right sizing.
AOS definitely make our dev/test virtual environment management much easier than before. And the consolidation the test/dev environment from Azure and Cisco UCS, we have less need to transfer large amount of data between different hardware platforms which was very big challenge. To expand the capacity is very easy to archive as well.
It's not out of the box easy, but once you get the fundamentals the steep learning curve flattens out and the processes to get things done and how it works becomes very apparent. It's wrapping the slight change in workflow from prior VM management methods took time to unbox and apply the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure way
Nutanix AOS performance is light years ahead of HPE. We were nervous about using Nutanix AHV but it has been a vast improvement and saves on cost. Applications has been much improved and end users have commented. It has also freed up time for our Network Administrators and made their lives easier.
I never contacted Cisco support for any problem. I cannot skip this question. It provides good hardware for my organization to using this product. All the updates will be made promptly. Anything happen we just need to open a ticket to the helpdesk team. We can get new info from a team in Malaysia.
Nutanix provide top tier support - their only rival in this field in my experience is Rubrik. Their sales and the aftersales team really put the effort in to make the initial install an easy process to complete and support we've required post that has been expertly handled. Their support's first point of contact is the equivalent of 3rd line at other vendors and they're always more than willing to explain concepts to help us better understand the issue/solution provided.
IPv6 is needed for link local discovery. We do not have IPv6 configured on our network so the easiest way to get our nodes configured and discovered by foundation was to configure the IPv4 addressing within the node prior to trying to discover with foundation.
VMware vSAN is more elastic and easy to sell as you can have more flexibility with the hardware and can use or just upgrade hardware already deployment in the client infrastructure and additionally its have no dependencies about the DNS/NTP, what is important..
vSAN on VXrail and a Cisco Flashstack was our two existing systems before bringing in a Nutanix cluster. The performance of Nutanix HCI was far better than vSAN's performance (hybrid vs. hybrid and AF vs. AF.) However, Pure does deliver on its claim of being the fastest storage possible, which is true. However, the flashstacks management and complex setup do not compare to the ease of using Nutanix HCI.
HX made positive impact on our overall business objective and helped in reducing operational and capital expenditures almost by 60%
We used to have huge footprint of FC SAN storage and highly skilled SME's to manage the FC SAN environments. HX helped in getting rid of costly SAN investments and we could move the skilled SMEs on higher work stack. With HX, we are able to effectively manage day to day operations with less skilled resources.
We also benefitted largely from the single OEM support (Cisco end to end for HX, network fabric and hypervisor). In earlier case, we used to log service requests to SAN vendor, Hypervisor vendor and network fabric vendor separately. In case of inter-related issues between the vendors, our business used to suffer. These all challenges are removed by HX adoption. This is helping us support the business with maximum uptime ever. Our service SLA's are also improved by 70%
Found an immediate reclamation of time. SAN's are a pain to manage and update - Nutanix made turned a couple hours of work into one click.
They are a software company. Every Time they come out with an update I find my performance improving, or a new feature added. Soon I'll be able to give my developers controlled self-service capabilities. I originally bought hardware and it's evolving on me into a private cloud in a box.