HPE SimpliVity Reviews

Most of the installations are for branch offices that need an integrated solution for backup.

It helps branch offices in having an integrated solution for backup. That's the greatest benefit of SimpliVity.

Its performance is quite good, and it is also easy to use. One of the biggest benefits is the included backup solution.

The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time.

Its scalability can also be improved.

It is stable.

If I compare it to our recent solution, it is not so scalable. We have had about 10 customers. Normally, it is in a branch office, so there are less than 200 users.

Their support is customer-friendly. You can use the support portal. You can call them through telephone or web interface. There is an interface for an automatic call if there is an issue in the hardware system.

It is straightforward and easy. It takes one to three days. Our SimpliVity installations are not so big. Therefore, it takes a little bit less time.

We need an engineer or an admin guy from the storage team, and sometimes, we also need a networking guy.

Its licensing is quite easy. There is a model license, but it depends on the system you buy. 

There are no extra costs. There is only one license.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

The main use cases for this solution are consolidation and virtualization.

The main way the solution improves an organization is it simplifies daily use, and it cuts costs for the customer, because they often come from a silo-based storage and computer environment. That equals a lot more components, and you have to be more knowledgeable to be able to administer a traditional storage and computer-based solution. With SimpliVity, you have a hyper-converged infrastructure, which means everything is server-based and storage is software-based.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.

I would like more extensive deployment orchestration where the vCenter is deployed initially without being a separate thing. I feel that the deployment process of the vCenter should be included in the initial deployment to make it easier. Also, there are some issues when it comes to VMware's attaching and upgrades because HPE doesn't support all versions of VMware, and it can take some time before they have tested the latest versions. 

So the lifecycle management can be improved, and also the initial deployment to include vCenter.

I've been working with SimpliVity ever since HPE acquired the company.

I think the solution is very stable.

The scalability of the solution is very good. It's quite scalable, but one problem with all HCI solutions is that maybe the customer is just growing on storage and not on compute or memory. Then you have to add more nodes although you don't need more compute or memory. But with SimpliVity, you can actually upgrade your storage in the nodes, so you can go from a medium-sized SimpliVity node to a large or an extra-large. In that case, you don't have to buy more nodes, because more nodes requires more VMware licenses, and that's a big cost for a customer.

I've had a good experience so far with the technical support. There can be days where you don't feel you get support, but mostly it works fine.

The initial setup for the solution is more complex than setting up hyper-converged VxRail or vSAN solution in VMware. Dell VxRail is built on VMware technology; the software-based storage is built in VMware, so VxRail is really VMware on Dell hardware. What I feel is simpler with VxRail is setting it up, but also the life-cycle management, upgrades, and things like that.

But SimpliVity has been improved over the years, and they also released a new version on SimpliVity now in December. They have really simplified both the upgrades and the installation. I wouldn't say it's very complex if you know what you're doing, but that's almost always the thing. If you've never done it, of course it could be complicated, but one big problem is that you always need to have a pre-deployed vCenter to set up a SimpliVity solution.

I do everything for the implementation myself, because I'm a certified SimpliVity consultant.

Return on investment could be quite good if you look at the five-year investment compared to other HCI solutions, because other HCI solutions don't include backup built in. If you take into account that you can consolidate even your backup solution, you have a solid TCO case. Backup is a quite big part of the cost of a data center, and if you can have that built in without any extra costs. SimpliVity backups are very efficient. Because you don't store backup, you don't need extra capacity in the same way as in a traditional backup solution. But if you can't include the backups in SimpliVity, it's much harder to motivate the solution.

One big advantage with SimpliVity is that you don't need the higher license cost or VMware to put together a simple SimpliVity solution. You can run it as VMware essentials plus licensing. For the small customers, that's really quite affordable. But on top of that, you pay for SimpliVity licensing, so depending on how large your solution is, that could be quite a big part of the solution when it comes to cost.

You can start very small. You can have one node as the smallest, but the recommendation is to have at least two nodes to get some redundancy when it comes to upgrades and things like that.

There are certain things to take into consideration regarding whether to buy SimpliVity: that everything is compressed and deducted, and not every application is deductible or compressible, which could lead to you not getting the efficiency you first wanted.

One thing that separates SimpliVity from VxRail is the InfoSight portal. That's a cloud-based management tool, which you hook up to your SimpliVity solution, and this sends telemetry data to InfoSight. You can use your portal to maintain your solution and to monitor it for growth. And you also have the SimpliVity support team. They get the support data all the time, so if you have a problem with your solution and you are unaware of it yourself, HPE SimpliVity team will contact you and tell you that you have a problem.

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

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.