HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We use it for financial applications. We are a small organization, so it has all of our servers, financial applications, SQL database, file servers, etc.

I believe we are up to date with the latest version for our hardware specs.

The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds.

The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf.

I have probably been using it for three years.

It is stable. We haven't had any issues.

It is not easy to scale. In our instance, we would probably have to upgrade to a whole new hardware platform.

In terms of end-users, our company is small, but we support school districts. There are probably 500 users.

I have used their support. They're good.

We didn't use any other hyper-converged technology. We just moved from a VMware system that was kind of the old school type with two servers, a disk array, and a separate disk.

It was kind of complex. There were just a lot of pieces. I wasn't so involved in the networking piece, but it seemed like it was a little bit more complicated.

We did get some quotes from Nutanix, and they were ballparks. So, it is not cheap, and there is nothing free, but those two were comparable.

I would advise others to just be sure and do their homework and compare. I'm not sure if we made the best decision, but I'm not dissatisfied with it. I'm pretty comfortable with the way it operates. I don't know enough about the other products to compare it in terms of the ease of doing updates and things like that. Usually, we get a support vendor involved when we do anything major. 

I would give HPE SimpliVity an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case for this solution is to offer a combination of computing storage services to remote locations. It operates in our data centers.

This solution has improved our organization because it provides ease of management and offers a single management platform for the entire staff.

The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box. The performance is also very good.

The ease of new deployments could be improved. Also, I think that the scalability of the solution may be inadequate for some people.

It would be good for this platform if we could have an independent gross-storage on the computer.

I have good a good impression of the stability of this solution.

In terms of scalability, this solution fits us. However, I think that the actual limitations are somewhat less than what people might want. For our purpose, it's ok.

We did not use a solution previous to this one. It was added to our IT portfolio because there was a need for it.

The initial setup was not extremely easy, so we needed specific skills in order to bring it into production. Once it was up and running, it was ok.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, I think that partnership is one of the most important criteria. We needed a technology that is universally deployable and has the capability of functioning in the cloud. This allows us to use the service not only in our own premise's data centers but with cloud providers as well.

At the time we were evaluating solutions but there were not many players in the market. We considered Nutanix, but it had its own hardware platform. SimpliVity had an OmniStack configuration that could run on hardware platforms that we already had within the organization. We chose SimpliVity because of this. 

There is a massive technology shift now toward software-defined storage, so we are trying to move from a functionality perspective to an abstraction layer above the equipment we buy.

I think that this is a safe investment for anyone who wants to have a straightforward solution that comes out of the box and can be deployed on an appliance. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for our data center.

Disaster recovery, backup simplification, deduplication, and compression features have helped improve my organization. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery.

The upgrades need improvement. 

One to three years.

The most valuable features are the backup and restore capability, the speed with which it can back-up, and restores can be done in seconds.

It makes it more efficient for us. Instead of having to get support for multiple different solutions like storage, compute, network, and having to contact individual vendors, it's all one solution. We can contact one person, get support over the phone without having to call multiple vendors, and not have them point fingers at each other.

Additional features would be more visibility into the overall infrastructure and what's happening with the VMs.

Stability has been rock solid. We've put it in. The transition was easy and it stayed up the whole time, with no issues at all.

We have not done a whole lot with scalability. We've upgraded a little bit, but from everything that we've seen, it's easy, simple, and it can scale as much as we need it to.

I've used SimpliVity technology support a lot. In terms of HPE technology support, I've only used them a little bit in the last few weeks. Once I get a hold of them, they're great. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to get a hold of them, but once we get a hold of them, their technicians are great.

We were using a different solution and we were reaching end of life. That's when we started evaluating different vendors and different products. We didn't know much about HPE. We saw their solution, saw the backup restore, and the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold. We chose HPE because we did a test between this and one other competitor. We tested some dry failures and that type of thing, and found out that the data protection was much better with SimpliVity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are functionality, performance, and support. We looked at all of those and that's why we chose SimpliVity.

The initial setup was very simple and easy. We had it up in half a day. We were up and running and migrating our VMs over.

I would have them take a look at it and do a proof of concept. Take a look at the backup and restore capability and the ability to restore very large VMs in seconds.

It is a hyperconverged system with all the benefits that can lead to.

It was an important step to add this product to our portfolio because it meets our customers needs and demands.

The graphical interface and reports need to be improved compared to other brands.

We have been using SimpliVity OmniCube for 2.5 years: 1 in internal evaluation and 1.5 in reselling and supporting it for our customers.

We have a lot of implementations and until now, we never found any issue due to the product itself. Only in one situation we encountered some sort of problem not caused by the OmniCube subsystem. It was due to Dell hardware.

We have absolutely not had any issues with scalability. A customer just has to buy another box and plug it into the system if they need more logical space. Or, if they need more memory or cores, just attach a non-SimpliVity system.

We rate technical support 4.5/5 based on their professionalism and time of resolution.

We evaluated different solutions, but SimpliVity was the best choice in performance and scalability.

It takes just 20 minutes to have an entire SimpliVity federation to be operative in a production area. There is nothing simpler.

Compared to other brands with the same functional levels and structure, SimpliVity has lower implementation and licensing costs regarding a VMware environment infrastructure, for example.

We even evaluated software solutions such as DataCore, which we support and manage as well. But, software-based solutions cannot be on the same level as a 3.0 hyperconverged system.

We advise everybody to invest in evaluating the product directly. For example, we can do a PoC where we implement SimpliVity in an existing environment without interruption of customer services as a test for a couple of weeks. Then the customer is free to decide.

It removes the complexities of the storage administration.

It has allowed us to reduce our rack footprint. It allowed us to simplify our administration.

I would like to see replication to a cloud solution. I would like to replicate the data so that we have a backup copy off-site. I could then be comfortable getting rid of our existing backup solution. The other feature would be a single copy of the data storage as opposed to a dual copy. In that way, when I do things that automatically have dual copies, such as with our SQL server databases, I would not then be making four copies of the data.

In regards to the HPE Simplivity current offering –

1. Replication of backup to a cloud solution would be advantageous. At present, I’d have to spin up a new site (data center, networking gear, etc.) and place Simplivity nodes there to get replication of backups to meet my offsite requirement. They’ve told me they have a hosting service option, but I’ve not received any real details.

2. Simplivity makes two copies of the VMs on different nodes for redundancy. It would be advantageous to include an option for a single copy. So when there is a product with its own redundancy (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Groups), one is not then making 4 write I/Os for each write – two at the application layer – one to each SQL server node, two at the storage layer – one to two different Simplivity nodes.

When it is properly operated and configured, it is very stable.

When you go past eight nodes, you have to get approval. That has been a concern of ours. Sometimes they say that that it has been approved, and other times, they say that they have to go through the approval process again.

I used tech support prior to the acquisition and it has been good.

We knew that we needed to invest in new solution because we were using a standard, best of breed solution, and it was time to refresh that.

The initial setup was straightforward. Unfortunately, with the deployment services, there was a delay in getting things set up. There's usually a project manager and you have to wait until the gear arrives. The project manager gets involved a week later. After a week, there's a pre-flight. By the time you are up and running, it may be a month from the time you actually had boxes land on the ground.

We didn’t bring in any alternative solutions for a PoC. However, I have done evaluations of other solutions. We chose HPE because it allowed us to get in with a smaller footprint than some of the other solutions, which might require three, four, or five nodes. When selecting vendors, I look for technical feasibility, then operability, and then cost.

I would say that with hyper-converged infrastructure, it's important to understand how the solution is going to meet your needs. It is possible that if the requirements are different, a different vendor would be more appropriate.

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.

Our backups are now more efficient and reliable because the SimpliVity system manages them so much better for us. It allows us to replicate them as often as we like to another pair of SimpliVity boxes at one of our remote sites.

Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc. Also, the ability to spin up a new VM within minutes has been a huge time saver.

Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless (or at least be assigned a technician who could walk us through the process for both the SimpliVity software as well as the VMware software).

The SimpliVity solution has been very reliable and stable for us. A few times over the years where we had errors or hardware issues, they were resolved in a timely manner by SimpliVity support.

No.

Customer Service:

It's been pretty good. Before HPE bought Simplivity, I feel the customer service was great. The couple times I have had to contact support after HPE bought SimpliVity, it has been what I have come to expect from large companies.

Technical Support:

The techs that I have worked with have been really good and seem to know their stuff.

This was our first hyper-converged solution. Previously, we had used separate blade servers tied to separate SANs tied to separate backup solutions.

With the assistance from SimpliVity engineers who were on site for the initial deployment, everything went very smoothly.

Our solution was recommended by our trusted vendor and SimpliVity engineers were on site to help implement the solution. Everyone was very knowledgeable.

Make sure you plan for future growth and get a solution that has enough storage/resources for years to come. Originally, we thought we were only going to deploy our most critical VMs using this product, but once we saw how much better it was to manage the VMs, back them up, and deploy new VMs, we started moving a lot more servers over to it. Eventually, we had to buy another pair of SImpliVity OmniCubes to accommodate everything.

No, once we found out about the SimpliVity product and saw a demo, we were sold. We have been very happy with our decision.

If you are looking to consolidate and simplify the management of various servers, definitely look into a solution from SimpliVity.