HPE SimpliVity Reviews

• Backup 
• Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities

We now backup our core VMs on-site every 10 minutes and off-site every 15 minutes.

A better GUI for some functions.

Two years.

No issues.

No issues.

No, but we have only added one node so far.

Customer Service:

Very high.

Technical Support:

Very high.

Traditional stack with storage and compute.

I did not do the actual install. SimpliVity helped.

We implemented using a vendor team. They were good.

I do not have hard numbers.

Do not just go by the minimum. Give a little for growth and storage.

Yes, Nutanix.

I am very pleased with the performance and ease of use.

The inline dedupe and compression has allowed me to run all my servers and appliances (total 60) in an HA configuration while taking up just 8U of rack space (4x2U nodes). There is incredibly fast I/O and with the OmniCubes, my users are spoiled with the super-fast reads and writes. Did I mention that we truly enjoy our 99.999% up time?

The ease of managing this system! Recently added the All Flash CN3400F and oh my goodness are these nodes fast as lighting! I love having a private cloud for my organization. Public cloud will never care for my organizations data more than I do.

I gave it an excellent rating, thus I think it's well excellent! If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups. You have to hunt a bit if you have to restore a file. Index the backups and it would be perfect!

It's been a little dodgy this year on my CN3000s at Prod when they have lost HA Sync. This has only happened when we've lost Internet connection to our DR site. I'm still trying to understand why this happens. It's quite a pain when this occurs.

Slight inconvenience with scaling out with the All Flash nodes. We had to put them into their own datacenter because of compatibility issues with the CN3000s (seriously?). While it's not the end of the world, I unfortunately am not able to do inline vmotion of servers between the datacenters. Instead I have to do a cold storage vmotion with a powered off guest server. Not the end of the world, but is inconvenient to me because it makes for some late nights. A larger server takes many hours to move over my 1GB network. This may just be an issue with my configuration and lack of a 10GB switch.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been slightly impacted since HP purchased Simplvity. The support is still excellent, it just takes them a bit more time to get back to you when you open even a critical ticket. I'll give HP some time to adjust and update this part of the review later.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent +++. The HP purchase of Simplvity has not impacted the skill level of the engineers I have worked with. They are still great.

We had an aging Compellent SAN which was critically close to running out of disk space. Dell would not sell me an additional disk enclosure, thus forcing me to do a forklift upgrade. Moving to the Simplivity HCI allowed me considerably more resources and we came in under budget.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It's almost plug and play! Adding the All Flash node needed a little more effort.

A vendor team implemented it. Expertise was excellent. I couldn't have asked for better.

I'm not in finance, so I don't know the numbers, but I do know that I've since added 10 additional VMs and appliances, and can still add more without having to buy anything. I've saved on VM licensing because I was able to get rid of SRM. I couldn't even imagine how much it would cost to host all these servers in the public cloud!

This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN. Licensing is easily maintained. Keep in mind that you still have to license VMware per processor.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Nutanix and Dell Compellent.

Having my private cloud within my Simplivity infrastructure has given me so much more than I could have ever expected. I love the ability to fire off a full, application-aware backup of a VM and have it complete in just under four seconds. Also, I can now fail my entire data center over to my DR site and have everything up an running in well under 30 minutes, with my mission-critical servers up in under 10 minutes (the servers do have to power on!). It's awesome. You do need EZ-DR by VM20/20 to accomplish this, but it is a fraction of the cost of VMware Site Recovery Manager.

In the world of traditional backups using backup software which writes to either tape or disk, the backup software will index the files to match exactly to how they appear on the server. When performing a native Simplivity backup which allows for file level restoration , the folders, subfolders and files are not indexed but rather are listed in a somewhat, but not totally, random order. More often than not, when I am asked to restore something from backup, it will be a single file that someone has either accidentally deleted or overwritten. I have very large file servers which contain thousands of folders and subfolders. Without the benefit of indexing, it sometimes takes a bit of searching to find the correct folder/file that needs to be restored. It is occasionally easier to just restore the entire file server (renamed of course), which only takes about 10 seconds, and copy the file from the restored VM than it is to find the single file in the backup. This is just an inconvenience, definitely not a deal breaker.

• Scalability
• Ease of setup
• Reduced complexity
• Flexibility

We are resellers, so it allows us to sell our customers solutions that make their work easier. They can make a port more rapidly and fit a broader range of cloud data platforms.

I would like to see more storage options, such as hybrid storage options. We sell other products as well. We run across a lot of customers who are not quite ready to go to all-flash, while it's probably a better idea. Not having an all-flash option right now is probably a hindrance for us, because the customers just get turned off when they see that. Even though what HPE is selling is actually a better option, sometimes convincing customers of that, when they are only looking at the bottom line, is difficult.

So far, stability is great.

Scalability is very good.

We have not really used technical support. It is pretty self-explanatory.

We saw changes in the market and changes in the way applications are developed. The market is going away from what we think of as databases, and is moving toward cloud data applications.

The setup was very straightforward.

We have used HPE, Dell, EMC, and Cisco. Typically, it's the customers' preference. A lot of times we have customers who are very comfortable with their existing HPE equipment. Going forward, if we go to a customer who doesn't have an existing preference, then that is where we are going to start directing them because of the partnership cooperation. HPE shines right now when compared to the other options.

Compared to the protection offerings of the platforms, I think the competing native data protection just isn't there. SimpliVity really got that part nailed down. I would think that's probably an easy way to show the customer that it's the superior product.

In-line data-deduplication and data virtualization. DR Replication. Fast cloning, fast restores, and fast backups.

Our deploy times are greatly reduced, but what I love most is our ability to sync de-duped data across to our DR site quickly and efficiently. I hope I never need it, but I feel much better about our situation now that we have SimpliVity if we ever need to fail over to our DR site.

Ability to add storage incrementally would be nice.

3 months

Minor issues that were quickly resolved with support.

No.

Not yet.

Very good

Very good.

The initial setup was a bit complex. This was made easier with their deployment guide, and Professional Services group, who handled the deployment.

EMC VxRail

Backup and restore.

As a small IT shop we spend less time managing our VMware infrastructure which gives us more time to focus on the front end of our business.

Single file restore capabilities and ease.

18 months

NO -- went up fast and migrated quickly.

Very stable so far...

We added a fourth server with relative ease.

Technical support has been among the best we have dealt with.

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.

I'm a service provider. I install it for my customers. I typically implement it for telecoms.

Once you get the solution up and running, it is very good.

The solution is extremely stable.

The product offers good value for the amount you pay. It doesn't give you any issues once it's implemented.

The solution can scale very nicely.

The interface is very good and is very easy to navigate. You can find everything you need from one central place.

To install or to update it is more complicated than other solutions. 

They can automate a lot of things. We do a lot of things manually and this is somewhat unnecessary. For example, the installation of a plug-in, or VMware, and so on. If you can automate all these things, like Nutanix, you get a better result. It's very simple to install Nutanix. You click and wait. The whole implementation is pretty automatic. SimpliVity will be very, very good if it can automate many aspects of the deployment.

It would be ideal if they could include OpenView managers in one place with all the equipment.

We've been using the solution for two or three years.

While the implementation is difficult, once you get past that, it's an excellent solution. It's an extremely stable product and very reliable. We have no issues with it once it's up and running. It's not buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash. It's great.

The solution is very, very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, they can do so easily.

HP Technical support is great. HP has developed instant AI, artificial intelligence. Support can be automatic now. When we activate the AI, when we have a problem on-site, HP will basically know in advance. If we have to repair something, it will be sent automatically. They do offer on-site support, however, that's something that needs to be paid for.

Overall, we've been satisfied with their level of support.

I have some experience with Nutanix. I've read about it and gone over documentation. I've never installed it, however, I find the implementation in theory easier and more automated than this product.

The installation is not straightforward. It is quite complex. Even updating it is complex. There are many steps you need to account for. It takes some time to get it done.

It's depend on the plan of the client, however, if there is one cluster only, it can go fast and you can deploy in a few days. However, if you add to an existing cluster, you have to update many things, and this will maybe one week or potentially two weeks.

While at first clients always comment on the pricing being very high. However, once it's deployed, and they see how well it works, they don't complain. Therefore, I think it's quite fair.

We are HPE partners.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I would caution others, to implement the solution effectively, you have to go step by step, and with no hurry. The documentation for implementation is very long. If you don't follow it exactly and do every step as described, you'll have a lot of challenges during the implementation, therefore, just go slow. 

Our main idea is to use SimpliVity in a robot scenario. To create a robot, recovery assessment tool for our ranked offices.

It is a very interesting platform, because the operation is very easy. It is integrated with the interfaces which we use every day in all of our platforms. We think it could be a huge advantage for us. 

Probably in the business continuity scenarios, it is going to help us.

The deduplication and compression options integrated with the hardware. 

If we start using the application, there could be data for us to analyze, and we might have more ideas.

My impression is that it is a very nice solution. Very simple to use.

It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage.

Technical support is perfect. They explain to us the solution in a very clear and simple way. When we call them, they know the right answer and get the right person automatically.

No, we have not previously used a different solution. 

We have the need to implement a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in our branch offices. We were looking for different solutions, and one of them was HPE SimpliVity. We are checking it out at this moment.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Right now, we are mainly IBM clients.

Check the solutions on the market. There are a lot of solutions on the market offering this kind of solution. Each solution could have a different approach and different things to offer. 

I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: a strong partner. We think that HPE is a strong partner.