HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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 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.

The product is a hyper-converged solution. We are using this for local databases and application settings.

It's a normal solution and offers all of the typical features of a typical production on the market.

The pricing of the solution is very good.

The solution offers good stability.

There's nothing overly special or unique about the solution.

Overall, SimpliVity has a lot of features, however, those features need to be more precise. It's like a jack of all trades and master of none. It needs to hone in on a few features and really make them shine.

SimpliVity claims to have what you call a compression and dedup ratio, however, in practice, it doesn't really work.

They need to give more controls and more features as far as the backup is concerned.

The initial setup is not that easy.

The licensing could be more clear.

The technical support isn't ideal right now.

I've been using the solution for two years at this point.

The solution is quite stable, however, there's a lot of dependability on VMware. It interfaces a lot with it. Therefore, if there are any changes in VMware, it has to be reflected on SimpliVity as well.

We have not really tried to expand the product, due to the fact that we don't really want to invest more into it. Therefore, I can't really speak to the solution's capabilities in this matter. We're just going to use it and maybe over a period of time, we might just come out of it.

When we had purchased SimpliVity, it was a stand-alone product. Then, HPE acquired SimpliVity. Therefore, whatever support that is there, it is not really the complete, comprehensive support that you would experience with other HPE products. Basically, since this is an acquired system, there are limitations when it comes to support.

We're just customers. We aren't resellers or consultants.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's fairly complex.

The deployment didn't take too long, however, It was done in about a week or so.

In terms of recommending the product, it depends on what a company needs and it depends on what they want it for. It's a solution-driven implementation. What didn't really work for me, might work for someone else. 

I'm not sure if HPE is very keen on SimpliVity, as I don't really see them promoting this product very much. I'm curious to see if they'll continue with it or not.

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

Our solution is on a perpetual license. The pricing itself is okay. It's not too expensive.

There's a bit of confusion around licensing. Initially, SimpliVity did not talk about licensing for the software. However, later on, when the customers tried to update it, then SimpliVity said that they would have to pay for the update. Ideally, HPE should be very transparent about pricing and the licensing of this particular solution. It's not right now.

We use it in a VMware environment that supports VMs.

The most valuable feature is that it's easy to manage.

It also has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam. 

It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline.

If it's not already included, an additional feature I would like to see would be better Storage vMotion. That would be number one on my wish list.

The stability is not good. I have fewer than 20 VMs per node. I have nine nodes in my environment, and when it goes south, 20 VMs will go down, even though there's a replica on other nodes. There's a third copy which is a backup and I can't bring any of those online.

The scalability is very good. It's excellent for a branch office/remote office, instead of a data center.

Most of technical support has been excellent. I can escalate my support case to a developer very quickly, in less than a day. That's unbelievable.

We switched because we have a most-excellent salesperson. He promised something more than what the SimpliVity environment can support.

The short version regarding ROI is that it's not good. It takes two engineers all day to solve an ESXi node-down issue, and it takes between two days and two weeks to bring it back.

We signed a three-year contract.

On our shortlist there were only Vblock, which we didn't need, and Nutanix, which was more expensive. So we chose the least expensive, at least at the time.

Do a proof of concept on everything, instead of just relying upon the salesperson's pie-in-the-sky promise.

I'll rate this solution as a five out of ten. It may not be terribly mature yet. I see disk, for example, becoming all-flash. That may have overcome my painful learning experience.

It frees up time for the other system administrators. We've found better performance. Even our developers are seeing faster response times in executing codes, so they can get their code done more quickly. It has just increased the overall time.

Its ease of use is the most valuable feature. It is just a one-stop shop, a single appliance that I can control through my virtual center. I can manage my storage, my backups, and my disaster recovery. So, its ease to use is the most important feature.

I would like to see more, more, more, more, more storage in the next version. Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14. So, give us those other 10 slots, it is going to increase our density, which allows us to scale out further.

So far, it has been very stable. I've not had any issues as such. I did have some issues with getting the installations to work, but once up and running, it has been stable.

I'd like to see better scalability. For SimpliVity, it's hyper-converged and is limited. It doesn't scale to, maybe, where we would like to see it. However, now the fact that HPE has purchased SimpliVity and it's now HPE SimpliVity, we will start to see that it scales out across other platforms, or at least, hopefully, we will see it scale.

The technical support was great, i.e., prior to HPE purchasing them and not so good, once HPE has purchased them. Also to be fair, it is at a transition point. At least, we have had good meetings with HPE, so hopefully they've heard our needs and will respond accordingly. They've been willing to listen to us, however, whether we see action come out of that is another story.

I saw SimpliVity about two or two and a half years ago, at a VMR user group in New England and it just appealed to me. The very first time I saw VMware I said, "Oh my God, I can't believe you can do that." Later on, I saw SimpliVity and I said, "Oh my God, I can't believe you can do that. That's really cool." We've always used different solutions, we've been an HPE shop, now, for a long time. We have used more traditional solutions, like HPE c7000 Blade Chassis, 3PAR, big storage in the backend not necessarily the hyper-converged.

The setup was complex, networking is not as straightforward. The deployment manager for SimpliVity was, maybe, not in full production, i.e., maybe a step above beta, for at least the version we used. I understand that this is getting addressed with HPE OneView, but I've not seen a OneView product deploy yet.

We have done PoCs with a number of the other competitors. Ease of use, support, price, and durability are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor. That was a big check for us, as far as moving further with HPE SimpliVity; the fact that we can buy it on HPE. Being an HPE shop, we like that we can now purchase the product, a HPE product, and an HPE hardware.

I would advise to go for the All-Flash option, to look at its ease of use. Some of the other competitors have multiple administration consoles where you have to get into this one console to do this one thing and get into that console to do another piece. Really for us, it's having my entire team at one place, i.e., one single-pane-of-glass that they can work out of and it enables all of us to do the same job.

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.