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 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 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.

One of the use cases was that a customer had around 10 servers, which stopped working. The customer wanted to replace all those servers with new ones. I proposed that they should use the SimpliVity solution in place of 10 servers with around 100TB of data in a discrete environment. SimpliVity is an on-premise solution. It's not cloud-based.

We have four customers who deal with HP SimpliVity.

What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features.

Once I am into the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node. However, there are certain other providers, like Hitachi and AirDeck, that provide solutions. You can go with any of the hardware infrastructure, and they can provide you with their solutions for HCI itself. HCI is a simple software layer, a hypervisor layer for them.

So, they can add computing, storage, and networking to it that is vendor agnostic. In HP, Dell, VxRail, or Cisco, there is a drawback. I have to go with that brand again, and I have to add a simple load of HCI in place if I want to increase computing, networking, or storage.

SimpliVity is also compatible with all HP appliances, though it is not compatible with other brands or vendors. It could be more compatible and more secure.

I've been using SimpliVity for a couple of years. My core extent is cybersecurity.

HP is renowned for scalability. They're using Nimble and three-part technology for storage and backup.

We have four engineers on our technical team.

There are plenty of hyperconverged solutions in the market like Nutanix, Dell, VxRail, etc.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10. I would recommend HP SimpliVity for people who want to start using it.

Typically, our customers use it to try to consolidate their solutions on VMware with multiple virtual machines — almost more than 15 in every case.

The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.

The price is one of the biggest problems our customers have. The solution is great, but at the end of the day, it's expensive. Compared to other solutions on the market, like Nutanix or vSAN, you are paying for something else. In this case, I have to explain the big differences within HPE SimpliVity. Overall, the biggest issue I have is regarding the price.

The problem is not necessarily with the HPE SimpliVity console itself because it's very easy to integrate with. Sometimes, our customers just want to have the opportunity to have the freedom to choose between Hyper-V and VMware. We love that kind of possibility. 

It's not so frequently that we have a request about Hyper-V, but our customers do ask about the differences regarding licensing prices because at the end of the day, with Microsoft, the hypervisor is included with the operating system — that saves money.

The feature that I would like to see improved in the next release is migrations. There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster. 

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

We have no problems with SimpliVity. If you configure it well, the product works well, but once you consider the possibility of growing a SimpliVity cluster after one or two years, it's not easy for costumers to understand that the original nodes are not available — you have to buy specific new nodes or whatever is available at that moment. You will lose some space, capabilities, or some benefits with the new nodes — you may need to configure a new cluster and migrate the older one. 

SimpliVity should have the capability to integrate with other clusters in the future. Here in Colombia, our customers try it with just one additional node, but although that additional node could be easy to configure, you still will lose some features and characteristics.

The technical support is exceptionally good. 

There's some information missing from the manual. I had to request special help in some cases because the documents are not complete. For example, wherever you go, unless you have some kind of experience with the product, there are some ports on the backend of the servers that are not easily identifiable. When you read over the documents and try to find that information, you can't find it anywhere — you have to contact SimpliVity support.

They need to provide more complete information about the components and their uses, especially the ports on the back.

The initial setup is not bad when you use the OCA. The OCA is a configuration utility but you have to know what you're doing or you could easily drive up the end-price for the customer.

Regarding configuration, it would be nice to have the flexibility to easily select the right low-cost service for any implementation or configuration. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. If the customer has the right environment, I would definitely recommend this solution.

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.

In a thinly provisioned IT staffed environment, we were able to accomplish our work without having to stay after-hours anymore. Our backup RPO and RTO policies are met and done during business hours. Issues are resolved by calling one support line/number. No more headaches and hassles with finger-pointing blame between/among technology vendors. We now have a DR site with the ability to failover our production servers.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or the consolidation of the traditional server stack; i.e., compute nodes, storage, and storage networking were a perfect fit for our environment. Also, SimpliVity's compression and deduplication of data at inception yielded "more" capacity than we expected. Furthermore, the ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain. Finally, the reality of having a remote disaster recovery (DR) site without needing heavy financial investment sealed the deal for us.

Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had. DR "automation."

In the Life Sciences disciplines, we generate a lot of big data 500GB to 1TB in file size. For example, DNA and gene sequencing, image processing (sections of the heart or brain), and other data generated by a scientific instrument. I have not stored any of these data on SimpliVity. Rather, we use a traditional SAN type storage for those data.

I would like to try storing those kinds of big data on SimpiVity and see if the compression and de-dupe would make it work. Currently, I only store user generated data files on SimpliVity and have no issues. As for DR automation, I would like to purchase Rapid DR from SimpliVity, which allows me to automate the disaster recover process/procedure. Currently, disaster recovery is done manually.

We had to update a SimpliVity patch that made the networking compatible with our internal networking.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. We've added nodes into our server federation without issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used a different solution. It was not a true HCI.

The initial setup was almost painless! We had a misconfigured network setting, which the SimpliVity engineer resolved for us at no extra charge.

We have a SimpliVity sales engineer do the installation. I would rate him to be an expert. The installation was completed within four hours.

HCI has indeed reduced the complexities of our server environment. My systems architect/engineer now has more time to work on other pressing projects and investigate new technologies, which he was able to acquire and implement. No need to work overtime to resolve issues anymore.

Talk to your SimpliVity team about it. They will assist you in right-sizing your environment and getting you the correct systems and licenses so that you are able to accomplish the same production or more for less than your current infrastructure.

Before choosing, we evaluated Cisco UCS FlexPod. We also evaluated and did a proof of concept (PoC) of a direct competitor's product after our SimpliVity acquisition. In short, we validated our investment with 100% confidence.

Be open minded and consider a PoC to run some of your production load. You won't be disappointed.

• Redundancy
• Cross-site federation
• Data virtualization
• Integration with vSphere

We introduced OmniStack as a tool in helping effect a datacenter migration and its ability to execute rapid backup and migration of VMs across geographically distant sites was integral in the success of the project. By placing OmniCubes at both datacenters and federating them together, we were able to pre-populate the destination site's nodes with the unique 4K blocks composing our VMs and make the final production move in a matter of hours instead of days.

There are some maintenance features (replica copy load-balancing) that could stand to be automated and/or streamlined for customer execution. Also, the ability to scale compute and storage independently of one another would be a way to add value to the entire product line.

I have used it for 18 months.

We encountered some deployment issues as part of the complexity of hardware refreshes and datacenter moves; none related to SimpliVity's technology itself.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is excellent. Deployment and turn-up was a white-glove experience, with dedicated technical staff (Richard Gay) and very attentive account managers (Ryan Huhtala).

Technical support is excellent. Support staff are responsive and knowledgeable, and we have had all concerns about which we've called in resolved to our satisfaction.

We wanted the advantages of HCI versus legacy stacks as a means of expanding our capabilities, as we are a VMware-based environment and make heavy use of cloning and templates which OmniStack can deduplicate efficiently.

Initial setup was more complex for us than for many, as we had to integrate it alongside our legacy equipment and perform a multi-stage transition from legacy gear at our old DC --> legacy/SVT hybrid at old DC --> legacy/SVT hybrid at old DC with SVT at new DC --> SVT at old DC with SVT at new DC --> SVT at new DC. There was some network expansion required, as well as coordinating planned outages in production systems as we migrated from server to server and site to site.

Customers integrating OmniStack at a single datacenter and gradually retiring old equipment will have a more straightforward implementation.

Implementation was a partner effort between SimpliVity and our own IT. Their expertise was unparalleled, with every point addressed and handled without issue.

HCI is going to be expensive compared to legacy architecture or converged stacks. However, in the case of SimpliVity, the benefit is worth the cost in terms of ease of management and efficient use of storage resources. Licensing is the standard VMware pricing model; no different than with any other solution.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Nutanix, Scale HC3, Nimble SmartStack, and Maxta.

It is well worth seriously considering for any operation that makes heavy use of VMs, particularly clustered servers, VDI, and other highly-redundant data sets. Once installed, OmniStack performs beautifully, integrates painlessly, and can improve virtual datacenter performance magnificently.