HPE SimpliVity Reviews

The main reason for the selection was that SimpliVity ensures high availability, and, with the static cluster configuration, we are reasonably protected as we have two nodes with synchronous replication. That's why we feel comfortable enough to use this technology.

The simplicity of the solution is its most valuable aspect. It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view. It's easy to use.

The pricing is reasonable.

I've found the solution to be stable. 

We haven't had any issues. Recently, we purchased new SimpliVity nodes. We are pretty confident with the platform. We are using it more than in the beginning.

The installation was a bit complicated. 

There may be issues around scaling. 

Technical support could be better.

SimpliVity has to evolve into a solution that is more integrated with the public cloud. At the moment, this is not the case. It's not our case, however, if we wanted to make some kind of hybrid integration between private cloud and public cloud, SimpliVity is not well prepared for this. 

I started using the solution nearly three years ago. The first installation was before the pandemic, that's for sure. It was likely in the spring of 2019.

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Scaling is problematic. It's not as scalable as other solutions, such as Nutanix. In our scenario, it's not a big point for us as we have a medium enterprise. Therefore, we don't need to scale straight to tens of nodes. We only have four nodes at this time. For us it's not a problem, however, maybe for larger organizations, it can become a problem.

We've had some issues, such as typical disc faults, however, on the same day, we open a ticket in the super-portal and we receive the new piece. It's very, very useful and affordable. However, for more technical issues, it's a little bit difficult to find the right person. Eventually, finally, you will find him.

The product is a little bit more complicated. That said, SimpliVity always is installed with certified personnel from the HPE, so it's a question of time. You always have to give them space in the racks for the servers. That's all.

We have certified HPE personnel install the solution on our behalf. 

The cost of the solution is pretty good. It's not too expensive. 

Before choosing this solution, we looked into Nutanix which was the competitor at that moment.

The main reason for our decision in 2019 was the price. Nutanix was a higher cost - much higher than SimpliVity. Nowadays, I think the price has reduced. Maybe, nowadays, we would decide on something else. However, at that moment, it was very, very clear for us.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others, however, it depends on the environment. For a company of our size, it's a very good solution.

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.

Disaster recovery to a secondary datacenter. In order to do that, all of our server infrastructure runs on Simplivity.

We now have much lower RPOs, from hours to seconds. It is now much simpler for us to deploy additional workloads, since we do not have to take care anymore of storage provisioning. The Simplivity datastores are so efficient that the never seem to fill up, or at least not that fast anymore.

Data replication, backup and recovery of VMs and disks. Data replication happens in the background once the policy is set and takes few seconds. The fact that the data is deduped inline makes this possible, as only the changes not already replicated blocks are written, which is extremely efficient.

We use the Omnicubes to replicate our data to a second datacenter.
By having our company data on the Omnicubes, we ensure that all of our data is constantly replicated within the defined intervals to the remote site. This is the reason why we did choose Omnicubes. We are able to replicate our data in a very simple manner (as this happens in the background) and comply to our business needs.

Simplivity Omnicube is able to replicate data in a simple and reliable manner. There is nothing to be done for the IT Admins and very few to control, as the technology is very stable. The replication is way faster than expected, due to the advantages of the deduplication and compression. Currently we see 3.4 dedup ration 1nd 1.5 compression.
When we manually backup (or automatically replicate by policy) one VM to the remote location, the job is completed within seconds or few minutes in the worst case. The storage footprint is minimal. There are no ‘vmware snapshots’ involved in this technology (which could be left over and create issues, as it could happen with other Backup Technologies).

As a plus of using Omnicubes, we have discovered that we now can perform almost instantaneous recovery of VMs. Cloning a VM is done in few seconds (also across sites), same applies to recovery of VMS or single drives (Vmdk). In one occasion we needed to recover a 2-TB partition of a file server. We completed the recovery in about 5 seconds, the data was recovered from the remote location. We could basically move our whole workloads across datacenters in few minutes, if needed.

We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow. While this is responsibility of Vmware (having killed the c-client), the question is legitimate, because the client is what you need to restore your data in the end, and in such situation you do not have time to waste.

No.

No. When scaling you need to consider that scaling an hyperconverged infrstructure is different from a traditional server stacks, because basically you are tied to adding one building block which adds server, cpu, ram, disk all at once. in a traditional stack you will look at each component constantly and scale them up indipendently. Another aspect is that the indicator which will tell you when it is time to scale might be different from your expectations. In my experience we did in the past scale traditional stacks when the storage was getting full. After implementing Simplivity, my indicator is now the disk latency. The storage itself will almost never get full, but after adding additional workloads for 2 years I have learned that although the disk is not full, you want to look at certain thresholds in your disk latency, or in certain cases at RAM availability on the appliances.

Customer Service:

The level has been very good until now, I know that after HPe taking over some users have encountered delay in being services. This did not happen to me. Update: it's a pity, that no email support anymore is available. Now we have to dial in and create a support case. Before the acquisition, creating a support case was a breeze. I hope HPe will fix this.

Technical Support:

Excellent. Update: Well, good to very good. there is room for improvement.

we did not have disaster recovery in place before.

not at all. Set up takes a couple of hours, and then it's important to have a guideline about which data replication (data protection) policies you want to have in place. Once they are defined (in a matter of minutes), it's done.

Good.

All-in license, simple and fair.

Nutanix, and other traditional storage/server architecture options.

Focus on the right sizing for your application tier. The solution is very simple to administer.

I work with medium-sized clients who have around 200 users. SimpliVity is a general-purpose solution for all kinds of VMs. With SimpliVity, because we can own the VMware, you can have all VMs of any type of VDI. 

What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good. We just renewed and will receive new equipment in November. So even the price is really attractive compared to other solutions.

It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc. Now it's a proprietary solution for HPE, but it's difficult for them to improve because they have both solutions. But it's the same with Nutanix, I will say. 

I'm a consultant I've been I'm using SimpliVity for many years, about five. With my current client, I've been using it for two years now.

SimpliVity is definitely stable. I'm running infrastructure with six nodes, so it's always the same. It's small but all six are running very well. Maybe if you have 60 or 100, you might have a different point of view, but for me, it's absolutely stable.

SimpliVity's support is great. I was doing some experimenting last December and I had a strange problem, so got in touch with a woman from tech support and it was solved. So I only had one problem based on one experiment. Of course, if I had more than that, maybe I would experience some disappointment. But for me, I had only one problem.

Setting up SimpliVity is straightforward. In one day, you can have a complete solution up and running.

I think it's a complete package. We buy the license with support for five years. It's a subscription, I will say, but it's included when you buy the SimpliVity solution from HPE. You have a contract with the software warranty and upgrades. You can choose a license for one, three, or five years, and it's all included.

For me, SimpliVity is a 10 out of 10. I would recommend it, but also you have to follow the best practices. Like a lot of things, I can imagine that if you think you know what you're doing but you don't know, you can have some trouble. But if you follow the best practices and the rules, you will have no issues. 

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.

We are using HPE SimpliVity for our organization's backup and recovery solution.

The solution is user-friendly.

I have been using HPE SimpliVity for approximately five years.

HPE SimpliVity is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 80 people in my organization in France and we work together with 2,000 other regions that all use the solution.

The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell.

We were previously using the HPE MSA solution.

The installation is easy and the basic installation takes two days.

We have the certifications to do the implementation ourselves, but it has to be checked by HPE.

There is not a license required for the solution.

I have evaluated other solutions from Dell.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a nine out of ten.

We have a virtualized environment and we use it for backups and disaster recovery and to be able to store all of our data locally and replicate.

It's allowed us to be more efficient in disk space usage with a reduction of 47 to 1 in hard drive space.

• It's a complete solution
• Easy to use
• Not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution

I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install.

3+ years

The stability is very good. It has 100 percent uptime, other than regularly scheduled maintenance.

We're a relatively small organization so it was able to scale down to our level. We understand it can scale up exponentially.

We get very good technical support.

We used EqualLogic SAN with independent host but that solution was nearing end-of-life. By moving to SimpliVity we were able to reduce our hardware footprint.

The setup was complex to me, but to the integrator and the SimpliVity people, it was routine.

We used Advanticom out of Pittsburgh. Our experience with them was very good. They were very knowledgeable and worked well with SimpliVity's SEs and implementation people.

We have not done a true calculation, but based upon the support needs and the reduction in the footprint, there's definitely an ROI.

We're paying $3,000-$4,000 a month.

Nutanix was on the list. We chose SimpliVity - and this was about three years ago - based upon the simple deployment and interconnectivity ability.

Ask people who have already implemented a solution for their opinion and you'll likely find that most of the SimpliVity customers would put the solution in again if they had to do it over.

I would rate SimpliVity a nine out of ten due to the fact that it needs little intervention on a daily basis, the uptime is excellent, and it works.

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.