HPE SimpliVity Reviews

Our primary use case for SimpliVIty was around backup and disaster recovery. We were trying to replace our existing DR service platform, then consolidate our backups from the different solutions, whether that was Veeam on the VMware side, Robocopy for file shares, or Windows Backup or SQL backup for certain applications.

Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to. That has freed up those resources to do more application delivery type functionalities.

• The ease of management in these deployments were some of the most valuable things. 
• The date storage infrastructure that it provides is pretty fantastic.
• The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training.

The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal.

It is very stable. We have had very limited problems. When we do have problems, it is typically not on the SimpliVIty side of the house, but on the hardware side or VMware side. However, the support is phenomenal at getting all of the right resources on the line together, whether they have to call up VMware or your networking provider, whomever it happens to be, to get to the bottom of the problem.

Scalability is fine. We are a fairly small organization, so it hasn't really come up. We fit well into their small end of deployments. From what I hear, it can scale quite high. However, that is not a functionality or feature that we've come across yet.

The technical support is good. We purchased SimpliVIty prior to HPE owning them, so there was a different support when the buyout occurred. However, it is at a level now where it is second to none.

We didn't initially think we needed to invest in a new hardware solution. We really were focused on DR backup. As we went through the use case and worked out the financials on it, we determined that SimpliVIty was the right move for us, as it financially made sense to the point that we had an HPE 3PAR that was two years old and we put that on the shelf. So, it was not hardware refresh related at all.

There were definitely some complexities to the initial setup, as we had to migrate off of our older infrastructure, which was the more complex part. Generally, the SimpliVIty install and migration was pretty straightforward.

We used a reseller, IMP Solutions, to purchase the deployment, but we did the actual install and deployment ourselves with SimpliVIty support. IMP Solutions was fantastic.

When we did our financials, it became a wash based on what we were doing previous with regular hardware refreshes. However, the time savings on the administration side of things is huge. We had somebody who was dedicated pretty much full-time to hardware, and now, they spend about a quarter of their time a year on hardware-related issues.

For the VMware licensing, it is approximately $10,000 a year.

SimpliVIty, HPE's previous hyper-converged solution, Nutanix, and Scale Computing were on our shortlist. 

What made us chose SimpliVity was the tight integration on the backup and DR aspects of the product. Everybody else had that type of capability, but it felt like it was added on after the fact, whereas with SimpliVIty, it was built from the ground up to do these things, which was our primary use case. So, it made sense for us to move forward with that product.

Try to understand your rate of change on your data: When you take a backup, how quickly is your information changing or being updated, and whether it is a database, file server, or whatever it happens to be. This will affect the way that you size the solution and get into those archives. It will affect how much space it starts to take up and how you calculate that. Know your data.

It does everything that we need it to do. The only spot that it falls out is the archival backups. Otherwise, it is a rock-solid platform. It has freed up a bunch of resources to do different types of work, instead of dealing with storage allocations, backups, and recoveries.

We're running more than 40 ESX 6.5 VMs on a two-node SimpliVity system. The SimpliVity nodes are at two different locations and operate in a stretched cluster mode. This provides mirroring of the flash storage in each node. Approximately half of our VMs run on the site on one node and the other half run on the site on two nodes. In the event of a node failure, all VMs will automatically run on the one good node.

• Noticeably better VM performance due to all-flash storage
• Incredibly fast VM backups and restores
• Backups and restores take less than one minute.

• The ability to do frequent full VM backups in seconds
• Currently seeing data reduction ratios of 250:1 with one month of backups
• 2 PB of data reduced to 7.8 TB.

It would be nice if the storage could be expanded by simply adding additional SSD drives. There are unused drive slots but I believe you have to add more nodes if additional storage is required in the future.

SimpliVity updates are a painful and complex process that takes about two hours per node. First, the drivers on each node need to be updated which, although it's a reasonably straightforward process, takes roughly an hour per node. Next, the OmniStack software needs to be updated and this is a complex, Linux command-line process that also takes about an hour per node. Fortunately, as part of HPE product support, they offer remote update assistance but I hope HPE will simplify the update process in the near future.

The system has been very stable and trouble-free for the six months that it has been in service and we expect it to remain this way for many years.

The scalability of the storage and memory are less than ideal. Although there are unused drive slots in the SimpliVity hosts, you can't just add additional drives. You must purchase additional nodes to increase the storage capacity. We needed to expand the RAM after putting the nodes in service, and the only option was to add another 384 GB of RAM, the same amount that the node came with.

We've only placed two technical support calls, and they were very helpful.

Previously, we had a conventional architecture with three host servers and two SANs.

The initial configuration was somewhat more complex than a conventional setup as the OmniStack controller requires additional configuration.

A vendor team did the complete installation from the racking-and-stacking to the SimpliVity and VMware configuration. The vendor team was very knowledgeable and made what would have been a daunting task a piece of cake.

N/A.

While SimpliVity is not inexpensive, we found it was not significantly more expensive than the cost of buying equivalent host servers and equivalent SAN storage. HPE installed and configured the equipment as part of the purchase, so that was painless.

We also evaluated VxRail, vSAN, StorMagic, Nutanix, Pivot, and others.

Day-to-day use. We implemented SimpliVity a little over a year ago. I could not be more pleased with the outcome.

I have saved time and money by moving to this platform. I am happy to share my results on the amount of power, time, and space saved.

The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups. My day-to-day experiences are better now that my backups are no longer running into production.

I would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives.

Not at this time.

No issues. The system was sized right by the SimpliVity engineers

So far, the support has been great. I have not needed to call many times.

I did have another product. I found a need to upgrade due to space issues and the amount of time that it was taking to run my backups at night.

The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services. I had no issues.

The vendor team worked with my managed services team. 

I have proven to my CIO that I have saved more money than expected. I am still calculating how much. 

It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal.

I spent several months looking at different options. I looked at VxRail and Nutanix.

If you are just starting your vetting process, make sure SimpliVity is on the table, you won't be disappointed.

With SimpliVity, we can easily deploy multiple solutions, including storage, and allocate servers as needed. It's quite versatile.

I like the expandability of the solution. We can effortlessly grow the storage and resources without downtime.

The installation process could be simplified. It's a bit technical for non-IT users. 

So, the deployment could be simpler. 

I have been using it for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I faced no issues with stability. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. There are around nine end users in our company using this solution. 

The customer service and support are okay. Compared to Cisco, there is a big difference. Cisco has dedicated engineers. Cisco throws everything at it. An engineer will always be there, which is better.

Positive

Cisco's more about immediate support, like calling them. But HPE SimpliVity is a set-and-forget solution. Once you configure it, it runs itself. 

Cisco requires human intervention for management.

The initial setup was complicated for me. It took me a couple of weeks to deploy the solution.

The pricing is very high. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price. Pricing is another point for improvement. 

I evaluated VxRail. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible.

I don't have any criticisms of SimpliVity at the moment, but I would like to see how it stacks up to vSAN and Data Core. It's essential for the client to have the comparison and be secure that they made a good choice.

I've been using SimpliVity for about two years.

SimpliVity's scalability is good, but you definitely need to opt for two processors if you want scalability. It's limited otherwise.

HPE's technical team helped us implement and support SimpliVity. Sometimes they took too long to respond.

Setting up SimpliVity is pretty easy. You just have to use the consultants from HPE. They handle the initial installation after you do the maintenance and the preparations. I rate the deployment eight out of 10. 

SimpliVity's price is excellent. You can get a good discount on the price, which is important for a small client. However, I'm not familiar with all the latest solutions because I've never implemented them. I only implement SimpliVity. It's not too expensive for a small client.

I rate HPE SimpliVity eight out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing it, I recommend conducting a good evaluation of your existing system so you have a decent understanding of your storage needs. Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things. My second recommendation is about the network. If your network is not up to snuff, SimpliVity will not perform the best that it can.

The primary use is to run the business, production, and Oracle.

It has improved our response time.

The rate of compression for the data in SimpliVity is the most valuable feature.

When we make some upgrades to the platform, it does take time to stabilize the structure again.

We would like a simple interface to use.

The platform works okay. 

The scalability is okay. You only need to aggregate some nodes, then increase the capacity of the structure.

The technical support is okay. However, when we need to escalate issues to the next levels, they first go to India, then the USA. We do have some problems with the time zones.

We needed SimpliVity for our architecture. 

The initial setup was complex, because it was a new way of working. It was a disruption of technology. People has to learn the new way of working with the technology.

We used an integrator for the deployment, who was good.

We have not seen ROI yet.

We also looked at Dell EMC and Cisco.

We chose HPE based on its technology and cost.

I would recommend the product. It is good technology. The time and response of applications embrace the productivity of our enterprise.

At FDF Energy Services, IT is an important differentiator. It allows us to maintain a significant competitive advantage in the market. OmniCube is a perfect fit for our infrastructure because it allows us to simultaneously improve our levels of data protection and disaster recovery capabilities, while significantly reducing our costs. The simplification of our IT environment, coupled with the cost savings, allows us to further invest in the applications running our business.

SimpliVity allowed us to radically simplify our infrastructure. The solution provides superior value and innovation in a converged solution. We chose SimpliVity over Nutanix because OmniCube is architected with inline dedupe and compression. This includes simple backup and data protection for all our VMs, and can be managed centrally from one login and interface through VMware vCenter.

When SimpliVity announced the availability of its solution with Cisco, we jumped at the opportunity. Now, we are running all of our core applications on the SimpliVity/Cisco platform.

The technology is a game changer. It represents the future of convergence. I love the "data center-in-a-box" concept, and it is backed by solid hardware and all the functionality needed, including data deduplication, replication, and WAN optimization.

• Ease of Use
• Disaster recovery
  
• Reliability

IT is the lifeline of the company. Early on, management aligned business strategy with IT strategy, ranging from sales to product delivery. Weekly manager meetings ensured that business strategy is aligned with IT, allowing us to develop processes without bringing IT in later.

It was inconceivable that we could deploy a 2U solution and gain all the server, storage, and data protection functionality that we needed. Scalability was a huge factor, along with ease of use, and management, which was all integrated from within vCenter.

Support has been top notch, both responsive and knowledgeable.

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

We looked at a lot of other converged infrastructure solutions. To be honest, many of them are ‘one-trick ponies’ which didn’t deliver the inline deduplication, scalability, built-in data protection capabilities or superior architecture that SimpliVity’s OmniCube did.

I have a lot of confidence in the SimpliVity OmniCube product. It has enabled us to streamline our data center and improve our ability to rapidly recover from a disaster.

It’s difficult to find a single valuable feature, because all of the features are good. The key point is the Data Virtualization Platform that allows you to achieve great efficiency in storage use, data management, backup and disaster recovery. I appreciated the simple and quickly deployment, the vCenter integrated management features, the backup and DR integrated and finally, but important, performance that is very good.

With the OmniStack system, we can deploy a system in a Stretched cluster configuration with a sync replication and a disaster recovery site with a few clicks of a mouse; all are managed from the vCenter and we don’t need to upgrade the internet connectivity, because the efficiency data management works fine. Management of the system is simplified and the complexity of the system is reduced.

Backup application integration: The backup actually allows creating some independent recovery points of the VM. It’s possible to duplicate and restore the entire VM or restore some guest files. The backup is consistent because the VMware integration and the VSS integration allows having an “application-consistent” restore point, but the restore doesn’t have an application integration function. So if the VM has, for example, installed an Exchange Server, I’m not able to restore a single mailbox or a single item from a specific mailbox. Doing this requires deploying a third-party backup solution. There aren’t specific issues about this, but I think it could be a good improvement.

Support for other hypervisors: Some our customers have installed Hyper-V or KVM; the Simplivity roadmap includes Hyper-V support with the Windows 2016 release. VMware-only support can actually restrict our business opportunity; it’s a business issue, not a technical issue.

I have been using it for one year.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues, but it’s too soon, because I don’t need to expand the systems currently in production.

Support is good and efficient.

The initial setup is very simple; the deployment of the entire system is a one-hour, wizard-guided procedure.

The pricing is not cheap but it lines up with converged solutions. If compared with a traditional system, it is important to evaluate all the features. If all of the features are compared, Simplivity is less expensive than a traditional solution. If you compare it to Nutanix, it is important to compare it to a RF3 solution (five-node minimum), because Simplivity can achieve the same protection level with a two-node configuration; OmniStack is less expensive.

The license depends on the size of the appliance and is affected by the CPU power (number of CPU cores). However, it’s possible to use an x86 external server connected to the Simplivity storage using a 10Gb network and exported by NFS, using the power of the Data Virtualization Platform with the external x86 computational power. This supported configuration improves the computational power without affecting the license.

I choose Simplivity after evaluating Nutanix and Data Domain. I chose Simplivity for its data virtualization platform.

Because the crucial point is the Data Virtualization Platform, the key point is the data type evaluation: it’s important to evaluate what type of data will be stored in the appliance. For example, if the data is video streaming, the platform isn’t good because the deduplication won’t will work well. The other key point is an evaluation of the workload to consolidate. I suggest always monitoring the system performance with some tools for defining the CPU, memory, network and disk workload of the system and an audit of the data type that will be managed. With the generic VM data types in our system, we have achieved data efficiency from 20:1 to 40:1.