HPE SimpliVity Reviews

• Integrated backup and DR features
• De-duplication and compression
• Management using the vSphere client
• Total ease of management

Backups - policies are built in and managed using the SimpliVity extension in vSphere. It makes working with backups and recovery extremely simple and removes all the complicated tasks of backup storage management. The ability to place backups at any datacenter within the vSphere environment is nice too. These are full backups too, not just snapshots.

Reporting - improvements have been made, but I would like to see some enhancements for recalling historical information: automated reports on storage efficiency over time and backup growth over time.

I have used it since January 2015.

I have not encountered any stability issues. We were able to migrate all of our legacy environment of physical servers and data over to SimpliVity with no issues. Performance was improved and storage efficiency with the deduplication really works. When we had an Accelerator card fail in one host (the card manages the deduplication tasks for the host), we got an alert the card had failed but never had a service interruption. The card on the other host takes over for the failed card until it is replaced. Very resilient.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We initially started out with a 2+1 configuration and then scaled up to a 3+2 with no issues.

Technical support is the best. Their first-line guys know the product and can solve issues. I have always had any issue or support request resolved in a timely manner and by the same guy who was assigned the ticket.

Initial setup was very easy. I actually set up the “Federation” myself one Saturday morning with no help from support. I just followed the instructions for the rack and stack, powered up assigned IP addresses to the networks it required and the embedded wizard did the rest.

The nice thing about SimpliVity is that ALL the features are included in the base price. You don’t have to try to pick and choose and fight the pricing game.

We looked at other solutions before purchasing SimpliVity (Nutanix), but SimpliVity was a better fit for our requirements and had what I judged as features Nutanix could not compete with.

Do your homework and compare them to the competition apples for apples so that you see the value the product has from features, ease of use and pricing.

I have spoken to other customers at SimpliVity road show events and serve as a customer reference for them when asked. I really believe in the product that much.

Deduplication and backup and replication of Vm's.

Our RPO has gone from 8 hours to 3 hours and we can go back to 6 months of datasets.

Backup and replications automation.

6 months.

No deployment issues.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Very good.

Very good.

Veeam and Dell Servers and Storage.

Very straightforward but their engineers are needed to install in our VMware environment.

Vendor and they were excellent.

2.5 years.

Yes. Dell, HP and EMC products. We also looked into Zerto and Recovery Point.

Make sure that you size the memory and CPU's to handle your entire environment.

We are hosting virtual machines on it, and it is performing quite well.

We used to have a lot more units reserved in the rack for virtual machine hosting. Now it is only two units per site.

Another improvement of course is the backup, the disaster recovery functionality, how it behaves, how fast the backups are done. And the reduction of data.

It's very simple to manage. It has reduced the footprint in the datacenters quite a lot.

The stability is also okay.

It scales quite nicely. We are not very big so I don't know if it really scales up that big. But for a small to medium company, I would say it is much better, for example, than the competition. For us, it is the right size. I think it was the right choice.

I can say that the support was better when it was a separate company, when it was SimpliVity. But, now with HPE it has not been quite as good. But that is normal. HPE is a big company. Things are a little bit, I would say, more "official" than the person-to-person communication that startups have. But that is natural.

The support might take a little bit more time, but we are a non-standard support case because we are actually using the HPE software on a non-HPE hardware. 

We have this pre-HPE hardware. We use it on Dell, and Cisco, and that probably can create more confusion for HPE support. So, I'm really hoping that HPE will come up with some on-premise replacement so that we can actually switch to HPE units, so that HPE can have full support on the system.

We were using traditional server and storage based. We switched to SimpliVity because it was looking promising. It was simple. It reduced hardware presence in the datacenter. It increased backup speeds. The simplicity of the SimpliVity.

It was quite straightforward. We didn't see big problems. It was quite easy. It's easy to manage. It was easy to install also.

The other hyper-converged products, they were not that complete.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, that really depends on the vendor. But of course trustworthiness. And it usually comes down to product rather than partner. But, of course partners, and vendors themselves, are also important.

I think it's really complex to focus on a few things. If you bring in something new we usually like to to see what the end product can actually do. But of course the support on top of that is also important. If you have a good product but nobody can install it or maintain it or give support, then it would also be bad.

I've always said to everybody that SimpliVity is one of the best hyper-converged solutions. But, again, it really depends on the business case. Everybody has to evaluate it for themselves, because businesses are different. I've known that hybrid is the thing for years because that's why we bet on that, we had to have datacenters onsite, and then we can put something in the cloud. But, there are companies that could be only in the cloud, that need to be on-premise only. It really depends on the company.

This solution’s most valuable feature is its simplicity.

It allowed me to have a hyper converged system that grows with multiple training centers and data centers.

I would love the solution to be able to move notes between federations. Right now, we use a manual process, but I know SimpliVity is working on a new and improved version of the product. Hopefully, they're going to make some kind of mechanism. In large implementations, it is a very useful tool.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have Platinum support. I give them two thumbs up.

Most of our data center was running on IBM BladeCenter and they just became obsolete. So we started to look into something more advanced, more innovative and simpler to manage.

When selecting a vendor the most important aspect is technical help and their support and simplicity of the system itself.

Setup was very straightforward.

We chose this solution because the product was very innovative. The latest and greatest. I think it's the future of data center technology.

We had a couple other vendors, such as Nutanix, but they didn't really compare to SimpliVity. It's a really great solution.

Really give it a test to understand how solution works and how simple it is to manage.

Backup and DR applications are very good and easy to use.

Due to inline deduplication, optimization and compression of data, very high IO throughput is possible.

No additional training is necessary for support personnel and engineers, as the SimpliVity federation is managed via a plugin in the VMware vSphere client or webclient.

Our company acts as a SimpliVity implementation partner. We also do platform maintenance/management for customers who do not want to do it themselves. We only get positive feedback from customers as to performance, RTO/RPO times, and day-to-day management.

We would like to see more possibilities to monitor the SimpliVity platform. Also, storage balancing between nodes within clusters with more than two nodes could be better. I believe this is solved in the new release of the software, but we still have to test it.

We have used SimpliVity for about three years now and have done several small and midsize implementations on OmniCube and OmniStack server systems.

Overall stability is great, except for some incidental hardware failures with DIMMs and remote access cards. The SimpliVity software and hardware acceleration card has never let us down. As long you use the BOM (bill of material), you are good to go.

The product is very scalable, if you can work with the building blocks. If you need more computing power, you can add computing nodes, which can be any x86 server. If you need more storage, you need to add a SimpliVity OmniCube or OmniStack node.

The technical support is very good, probably the best we have encountered until now.

In the past, we deployed the more traditional systems, such as a hypervisor with shared storage. We see the advantages of hyperconverged solutions and were impressed by the SimpliVity product, so we have shifted our main focus to hyperconverged solutions; in particular, SimpliVity.

The initial setup demands you to think through the IP addressing plan. Once you have that in place, initial deployment and configuration is very simple.

I don't have any pricing and licensing at hand, so no advice here. Please consult a SimpliVity Partner for that.

We did look into Nutanix and also did a few implementations. We found that if you want the same level of performance and protection for your data, you will need to invest in many more Nutanix nodes. Nutanix has much more overhead, is less efficient in the use of storage capacity, and requires much more platform to get VMs running.

ROBO implementations are much easier and efficient to do with SimpliVity.

Carefully look into your workload and discuss this with a SimpliVity Partner or Solution Architect.

We know that a small set of workloads are not suitable to run OK on the SimpliVity platform. Large database servers could be a problem running on the platform.

It’s a great product for most workloads. It may be less useful with very large database server VMs.

We sell SimpliVity to our customers along with all products that can be categorized as hyper-converged infrastructure. I'm a consultant in pre-sales, and we are resellers and distributors.

We find the solution exciting and rewarding. When we first began with the product, we realized that it wasn't for larger markets. It was meant for only small business enterprises. But with time, the product expanded to incorporate larger markets and became more appropriate for our market. So it's more of an exciting experience these days.

SimpliVity's ability to scale a product like Vmware to the cloud is one feature we found most valuable. SimpliVity is great for small companies. It's a nice product, and our customers are really happy with it. HPE focuses on VMware, and it really shines as a VMware. It's a very good design, and they've put some serious thought into the infrastructure.

The solution has a complex configuration. So I think they should simplify the con. They should go back to having special hardware for the compression with T2, so you don't need to have a big processor if you use just one processor. 

We've been using it for about five to six years.

The scalability of this solution is great but could be better.

The technical support was excellent.

The configuration was a bit complex.

The pricing is fair. However, there's no need to base the pricing on the number of processors you have. The pricing goes up if you are trying to use two CPU configurations.

It's a great choice for people who run small businesses, and their storage capacity doesn't expand more than the number of their virtual machines. The solution doesn't support storage-only nodes. It only supports compute-only nodes, so you have to buy a new license when you increase storage by buying a new node.

I'll rate it an eight or nine out of ten, I think it is one of the best in the market.

We are in a stretched cluster environment. So far, it has been really good.

We can get backups faster. We have a smaller footprint for hardware, which takes up less space. So, we use less electricity and floor space.

The storage deduplication, as far as the storage space, is the most valuable feature, then the backups.

It has a smaller footprint. We can restore faster. Things run faster and smoother.

We have only been using it for a little less than a year. So far, it has been good. We haven't had any issues.

Scalability sounds easy, just add nodes. We haven't had to do that yet, since we just started.

The technical support is good. We are in contact with HPE. It seems like anytime that we have problems people are there to help us. 

We went from our old technology to the new technology. So far, it has helped us with backups to save us money from the old technologies.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had help with them doing it.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and our experience with them was good. We have had them for a long time.

I have not seen ROI.

We also looked at Nutanix.

We chose HPE because of the cost savings. With the backup and restore, we didn't have to have a third-party backup solution for it, instead we could use SimpliVity.

Do your research. We talked with many people about it. Do what is right for your environment.