HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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.

As a service integrator we have recommended and implemented SimpliVity for numerous use cases but the product is particularly suited for ROBO and VDI use cases. We are looking at SImpliVity as a solution for Tier 2 and some Tier 1 apps in DC.

Our clients have been very happy with the data efficiency features (OmniCube accelerator card) and the HPE/SimpliVity HyperGuarantee, which is unique. For one of our clients who needed backup capability but did not want to invest in a dedicated backup tool, SimpliVity's native backup with app consistency came in handy. When you do this across more than 80 sites, the savings is significant and the WAN bandwidth efficiency is impressive.

1. Simple management
2. HyperGuarantee
3. Accelerator card
4. Globally federated architecture 

The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it. The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product. The 4KB based dedupe and optimization are definitely helpful as observed by our clients. The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool.

1. For SimpliVity to become a true DC solution, the limit of 32 nodes needs to be investigated. While this may not be a significant deterrent, it brings into question the underlying architecture.
2. HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show.
3. While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it.
4. SimpliVity has little to no integrations. It may have APIs, etc., but there are very few signed on integrations in place. This is necessary to build a solutions ecosystem.

No issues. The product has been performing well. No problems.

The product initially had a limitation of 12 nodes in a federation, which has been increased to 32. Keep this in the back of your mind, particularly when looking at the number of nodes in a single stack.

SimpliVity (before HPE) was pretty darn good. While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence.

Being vendor agnostic, we are not partial to any solution or product. Where we have deployed SimpliVity we have not faced issues. In short, no switching.

The implementation is straightforward when you follow the deployment guide. Stick to the default settings as they work for most setups. If you have the option of having multiple 10Gbps NIC cards, you can explore the option of having a NIC dedicated for storage.

In house. 

• Simpler operations
• No more monolithic SANs
• No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool.

In terms of setup, there are some gotchas and caveats, particularly when discussing stretched clusters. Rapid DR also pretty much goes the same way. Otherwise the process is pretty straightforward. Upgrades were a problem but have been addressed to a large extent. The biggest concern is around support and HPE's apparent lack of knowledgeable people.

Nutanix, VxRail and HyperFlex. Nutanix comes into almost all discussions and is a leader. The only area of concern is the expense as it adds up. VxRail is definitely the number one contender when discussing ROBO use cases but SimpliVity's DVE with its accelerator card is a strong option, particularly from the point of not needing additional hardware to address add-on requirements. SimpliVity also brings capacity savings.

Have a look at multiple solutions before making up your mind. Remember to take a top down approach and start with the app layer first. Your workload decides the infrastructure, not the other way around. Also, for most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly. However ridiculous as this may seem, read the guides and manuals carefully before implementation as they do have points that need to be looked at. If you do not believe me, you will end up going back to the same document anyway, which you want to avoid.

Data protection that is inherent with the system. Speed of deployment and extremely easy to manage. Backup and replications take just seconds! I have a junior level tech maintaining the system!

We update our main pharmacy system monthly at three locations. Standing up a test environment for validation takes just minutes. Also, during the upgrade process after hours our maintenance window has decreased over 50% with blazing fast entire server backups.

Upgrades/Patches to ESXi have to be approved by SimpliVity and their support installs them...along with upgrades to their virtual controller. That's the one downside to having such an easy to manage integrated console...it needs to be validated against ESXi.

2 years

No

No

No

Great.

Technical Support is very knowledgeable and responsive. First Class.

Legacy Dell Equallogic SAN. Needed a datacenter refresh and loved the feature rich all in one SimpliVity solution.

It was very straightforward. Your part is to provide LAN connectivity, Ipmc and rack them. Implementation team pretty much handled the rest including knowledge transfer.

Given we needed a datacenter refresh, we were able to implement SimpliVity at a cheaper cost than replacing our legacy compute and SAN. We inherited true business continuity (priceless)...and were able to prune our preexisting server backup solution. Just the backup solution software costs saved us >$15,000 annually. ROI was instant.

Cisco Flexpod/NetApp, Dell Compellant SAN

This solution protects your data with minimal effort. Due to the deduplication, optimization, compression and small block size; our replication happens every 15 minutes without feeling it. We have a very elaborate backup schedule that allows us to keep various levels of backups for extended periods times without hardly using any physical storage. A savings rate of over 130 to 1!

The solution is used for server consolidation and, with SimpliVity and other hyper-converged solutions, we can reduce the footprint and we can give them added benefits, like backup, DR, compression, and deduplication. The main use case for SimpliVity is for backup and cloning, and rapid DR. If you take vSAN, we can say the selling point is server consolidation, and then you can start your STDC journey.

The backup is the main and most valuable aspect, followed by the rapid DR (Disaster Recovery). With a traditional network, we have to have some WAN optimizers, however, with SimpliVity, we can go with their Omni and the rapid DR software.

Technical support is great.

The solution is quite stable.

We can scale the solution easily.

The initial setup is simple. 

When we failed it, there was a hardware accelerator card, however, now HP is saying the hardware is no longer available, and it will be the end of life. Now, we have only the software. That is a shock for us. When someone is using a hardware accelerator, then he needs some upgrades. Now, we have to say there is no hardware card. Now you have to use the software. There will be a mismatch.

The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU. On the HP selling site, it says Omni Card can offload your CPU and memory, however, in reality, it consumes more memory and CPU.

We have been working with HP SimpliVity for three years. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is quite scalable. 

We closed six deals. The largest one is a 4-node cluster, and another is a 2-node cluster and 3-node cluster. Very recently, we closed a deal with the largest private sector insurance company which is about four nodes. They are going to expand the environment. We have another five HPE SimpliVity references in Sri Lanka. Currently, we are working with a few customers on some upgrades. 

Technical support has been great. We get direct HP support and have had no issues with the HP support.

The initial setup is easy. Nowadays, it is all very straightforward. There is no rocket science involved. We can do a simple installation.

We are able to handle the implementation process for our clients. 

We deal with a variety of products. It's case by case. We are not selling any product. We are selling solutions. If a customer prefers Nutanix, then we can go with Nutanix, however, we can tell them the features and advantages. As a product, SimpliVity is better than others due to the fact that it has its own WAN optimizer optimization technologies then dedupe and compression ratios are high, and we can get support from a single vendor. SimpliVity is the leader.

We are an enterprise partner for HPE and we are dealing with HPE SimpliVity. We are also new Nutanix partners, so we are working with a couple of hyper-converged solutions. In addition to that, we are an advanced partner for VMware. At the moment we don't have any vSAN references, however, we are a certified VMware partner.

We might work with an older version. I'm not familiar with the latest one. Mainly, I'm a part of the pre-sales team. Our implementation guys handle the deployment. They are dealing with the versions and upgrades. I'm involved in pre-sales.

I'd advise potential new users that, if you have large volumes on backups and if you have any plans to go for DR, so you can start with SimpliVity.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.

We use it for optimization of the platform for the virtualization.

The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us.

SimpliVity is simple to integrate with our backups.

We have used it for testing.

• Compression
• Deduplication
• As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us.
• The solution is very innovative.

We would like to have more security with the solution.

It is very stable. We have not had any outages.

The scalability is great.

We have 13 nodes in our data center.

The technical support is very good. We have Tier 2 and 3 support.

We moved to SimpliVity from our previous solution because SimpliVity met our requirements. Our previous solution was four years old.

The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform.

We used a partner, Datavision, for our deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

HPE proposed Synergy and Simplicity. We chose Simplicity, which has been a great platform for us.

We are not looking to change our solution, at least not in the next three years.