HPE SimpliVity Reviews

DR, Dedupe, Efficiency Rating.

Simplified our DR Solution.

Lowered the Backup Increment from 1 hour to under 15 minutes.

I would like to ability to install a client on a remote server and download images from the federation service.

3 Years.

No, Very easy to implement.

No, Very pleased with the stability of the solution.

No, We have increase capacity 2X.

Outstanding Customer Service.

Outstanding Technical Support.

I migrated from IBM Blade Servers and traditional SAN infrastructure.

Very Straightforward. It was a much easier rollout than expected.

In House.

Very Economical.

Yes, Nutanix.

As an early adopter of SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure, we’ve seen significant benefits of the solution. SimpliVity reduced our data center footprint from 20U to 4U, increased our application delivery performance by 75%, and lowered operational costs in a major way.

I use the solution for virtualised infraestructure of servers.

HPE Simplivity improved the space of disk with deduplication, reduced the time of backups and recovers.

One of the key features is the solution is really fast for backups and deduplication is amazing.

It would be good to have more compatibility with other solutions as an improvement in the future. As a suggestion, in order to have compatibility with other solutions, there could be a license fee for this, and if you don't need to them then you do not need to pay.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good but you need to pay for the additional nodes that can be expensive. We are currently using the solution for one thousand people in our organization.

They could have better-specialized support for more countries.

I rate the customer service of HPE SimpliVity a seven out of ten.

Positive

I used CISCO.

The setup is very easy.

We have three nodes around the country and it took just one week for the deployment.

3 years.

The solution can be expensive if you are using a lot of nodes.

Dell and Cisco.

I would advise those wanting to use this product to be careful before setting up the solution that you have enough disk space, if you do not, you will have to pay for it which is expensive.

The solution works great, it is amazing.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a ten out of ten.

HPE SimpliVity is mainly used for virtualized environments.

The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware.

I have been using HPE SimpliVity for approximately four years.

When it comes to virtualization, SimpliVity is based on VMware, and VMware is more stable than other solutions, such as Hyper-V.

I would recommend this solution to others.

We have approximately 10 customers using this solution.

The technical support has been good. They know a lot of information and are helpful.

The installation is quite easy but it could still be improved.

You have to have the environment set up correctly before the installation of SimpliVity, such as vCenter Server and AD. If you have the environment configured then the installation is approximately 45 minutes.

We have approximately five engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is priced high. However, there are plenty of features as part of the package that other solutions do not have.

The solution comes with the VMware license that you need, but you can also buy the license outside of the initial purchase.

The features SimpliVity has there is no other solution in the market that can match it.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a nine out of ten.

SimpliVity is used when a customer is looking to build a private cloud environment.

SimpliVity works well in a UAT environment.

They have made several technology changes. Compared to the previous version, SimpliVity was acquired by HPE and now the product has totally changed.

Initially, the response was great with SimpliVity. After the technology changed the feedback from customers was not good. As a result, we no longer focus on Simplivity.

Our focus is more on Nutanix Hyperconverged.

SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer. They may have to with VMware or something similar.

The flexibility should be present. It should be the customer's choice of what virtualization layer they will choose, and not mandated from the solution that you have to use VMware. VMware is not cheap. It comes with its own cost. 

If the customer has the option to go with the Microsoft Hyper-V then customers should get the flexibility to have Hyper-V in place of the hypervisor.

Ultimately, the hypervisor functionality by default when you go for the data center becomes more cost-effective.

It should have the intelligence, to alert you that a failure of the cache is about to happen. It should be able to give you the predictive alarm and it should create its own backup.

It should have some provision where the cache is being copied to another location. So when one copy has been deleted or a copy has been corrupted, we should be able to recover it from the other site to ensure the office data is secure.

It should have some provision wherein the cache is being copied to some other location so that even if one copy has been deleted or one copy has been corrupted, we are able to recover it from the other location which will keep the office data secure.

From a product perspective, it should be more flexible.

It should allow users to have more data control in areas such as the cache. It should allow the user to have more data reduction flexibility.

Data reduction is something that is completely missing in the current solution, once SimpliVity was bought by HPE. It was the primary reason customers were interested in it.

SimpliVity handles the data. HCI is about how RAID is maintained over the network, and how many duplicate copies have been stored, or whether you are going for RF2 or RF3. Those things have to be taken into consideration.

With VMware,vSAN, and SimpliVity they are more dependent on the cache. If the cache fails then I have to recover the data. It's complete downtown for me. Anytime the data is not recovered, it's business downtime.

We have been providing this solution to our customers over the last year, but overall, we have been working with it for between four and five years.

Now that the technology has been changed, the product stability will always be in doubt.

The more they are integrating and trying to match the flexibility that Nutanix has been providing, and it has become more complex.

The hypervisor is becoming the heart of the solution. It is controlling the complete solution. It is providing you the contour, the storage, and the configuration of the virtual infrastructure.  

This can be problematic when it comes to SimpliVity.

SimpliVity offers built-in scalability but there is an override with the data protection policy that they are providing, what kind of flexibility when it comes to managing the complete virtual machines. 

The cluster has its own limitation. You cannot go beyond 32 or 64 nodes.

You can have multiple clusters and you can share your application across the clusters, but, yes, there are limitations. Though the limitation is not small it allows you to have 32 or 64 nodes in a cluster. When it comes to managing it, the more you add, the more complex it becomes to manage.

We have given it to many customers. Few of the customers are running it for the highest number of possible nodes in the clusters.

They provide good technical support.

If the solution has any fundamental challenges then it is not something that anyone can address.

It will take less than one day to start with a basic three-node cluster.

It is simple to install but it is hard to maintain.

In terms of the licenses, customers do not actually get any benefit. They have to purchase the VMware vCloud Suite as a bundled solution.

There is no flexibility in terms of choosing what license the customer wants to use. Irrespective of the features that the customer needs, they have to pay more for fewer features they want to use.

The difference between the HCI and the basic traditional environment is that it mitigates the bottleneck of the traditional solution. 

Customers are looking to have an environment that is completely scalable. HCI is a platform that you can always choose. That is the flexibility that is in demand when it comes to the private cloud.

Whenever building a private cloud, scalability should be a built-in feature.

SimpliVity does offer it but there is an override in terms of the data reduction policy they are providing. What kind of flexibility in terms of managing the complete virtual machines.

Now when it comes to SimpliVity, they have very limited options for the virtualization layer.

They may have to go with VMware and that is something that I'll say not all the customers will be keen to consider.

If someone asks me today which product to implement, I'll say that if you have a UAT environment, then you try to put it on SimpliVity. But when it comes to the production, or when it comes to a critical application or critical business need, you put it on the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

I only recommend this solution in a UAT environment, but not for production or critical environment.

SimpliVity cannot be deployed on the cloud.

The technical team is good because it is being managed by the HPE team only. The HPE technical team is always good.

It has various limitations and over time, rather than improvising, they have diluted the real essence of the product. I would rate HPE SimpliVity a five out of ten.

We use it for storage.

The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering.

There are a lot of features that they need to improve on, such as the backup and DR feature sets. I would also like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases. They don't have that right now.

The stability is okay. I'm not that impressed.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is okay.

We were using what is called a traditional conversion solution. We switched to SimpliVity because it enabled us to consolidate our nodes. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used D-Plus. They're pretty good.

We have seen ROI.

It's about $10,000 monthly.

We compared it with other products, such as Nutanix and vSAN, and we weighed the features that we needed. This solution was the one that met the greatest number of our requirements. It's also less complicated to deploy and has a smaller footprint.

The product is good. It might not meet all your requirements, but it is one of the solutions that met most of our requirements. There's no "best product" out there but this is likely the best for your needs.

I would rate SimpliVity at a seven out of ten, based on the features and the requirements that we have.

We are resellers. We change virtual environments and use c7000 plus 3PAR Blades. The repository is for virtual machines.

We have VxRail and are comparing HPE SimpliVity deduplication with that of Vxrail.

Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable. The add-ons are good options.

The customer has 100 virtual machines. We need to offer high availability for their production environment.

We run almost all of our production environment on SimpliVity. This includes Citrix, SQL, file, and production applications.

SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution. Training time has be reduced due to SimpliVity's seamless integration with vCenter Flex and Flash clients.

• The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use. 
• The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus. 
• Managing storage doesn't require a specialized skill set. 
• Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime.

• SimpliVity needs to improve the support for native backups, like SQL and Exchange.
• File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster.  
• SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM.  

HPE has decided to sell the solution in all-flash configurations, which may not be as cost effective for smaller mid-market enterprises.

It has helped to reduce our VMware licensing costs due to host consolidation.

Valuable features include ease-of-use and being all-in-one-box. That is what I needed at the time. I wanted storage compute, speed, and performance.

The only problem I had was that when we initially purchased SimpliVity, I didn't know that the OmniCube took up 60 GB of RAM. I ordered a server with 260 GB of RAM, thinking I would have 260 GB of RAM. The OmniCube then stole 60 GB. That's the only problem I had. Now that I know that going forward, I just know I need to over provision the box when I buy it.

The stability is good. I haven't had any problems with it so far.

I haven't tried to scale it.

I needed an all in one solution. I had looked at Nutanix and SimpliVity and between the two, Nutanix would only sell me in nodes of three and SimpliVity was willing to sell me a box by itself. 

When you're a vendor, I look for support. That's the most important thing. I like that SimpliVity ran on a Dell backend. Now that it is going to HV, we'll have to see how that runs, but the support that I knew I could get from SimpliVity was very important.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was pretty simple.

Understand how the product is actually writing to the hard drives. That's the biggest thing when you're getting to the hyper-converge space where you could lose performance over a direct connect system. Understand what each product is doing differently.