HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We use it for our production system. We have many production systems.

It has helped us a lot. HPE SimpliVity reduces the administrative tasks for the system admin. It doesn't require many people for support. One or two guys are enough.

The feature that I like the most is the backup feature embedded inside the HPE SimpliVity. When we have any activity, within five minutes, we have a backup. It also has PDR for performing disaster recovery.

We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better.

They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time.

Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has good stability.

It is easy to scale. We have more than 2,000 users.

We contact a local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes time.

We used vSAN for the VMware solution.

The initial setup is complex. It is not easy like other solutions such as Windows Server. You need to have enough knowledge to set up SimpliVity. Your normal staff won't be able to do it. Only someone with experience and knowledge of SimpliVity can set it up. Each phase of deployment took around two hours.

We have a local consultant and a vendor. We work directly with the vendor. If there is any issue, they resolve it, but it can take time because if they aren't able to resolve it on their own, they have to create a ticket with global support. For its maintenance, we have two people.

We are seeing a return on investment.

The licensing is on a yearly basis. The licensing cost also includes vCenter at a cost in the cloud solution.

It is a good solution. It is a good hyper-converged solution as compared to other solutions like Cisco or Dell because they don't embed software inside the solution. SimpliVity is more useful for us because, during the month-to-month activity, it provides good features to back up, install, and roll back everything.

I would rate HPE SimpliVity an eight out of ten.

We use SimpliVity in our retail stores as a backup solution.

We had an incident once where one of our primary servers in a retail store went down. It took us less than a second to do a restore. It came back up and we were up and running. It used to take us days to restore those servers.

The most valuable feature is the quick restore.

There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site.

It seems pretty stable in regard to the way it's working with the Federation and in the local copies.

The scalability is good. It's scalable to what we need it for.

The technical support is amazing. It's really good. We've gotten the white-glove treatment from HPE and CDW.

We were running on antiquated equipment and older solutions that required a lot more hands-on work. We used a piecemeal solution. We had two Dell servers and a VNXe storage unit and we backed it up through Commvault. So we had a bunch of different providers, different supports that we'd have to call for the three different things. With SimpliVity it is all just one.

Initially, it was pretty complex for us because we didn't know anything about it. But once we got the hang of everything, it actually became pretty simple.

We used a reseller, CDW. Our experience with them has been great. They've been an awesome reseller for us. We do almost all of our stuff through CDW.

We haven't really seen ROI yet because we're still fairly new to the product.

Our shortlist included Dell and Commvault. We chose Simplivity for the simplicity of the way it works and the true hybrid converged appliance which was there. We didn't have to buy a bunch of equipment. We bought two nodes and were able to do everything with those two nodes.

If you're a retail company that has a bunch of stores, I would actually highly recommend this for your stores - for the simplicity of it, the ease of the restores, and keeping your environment up and running.

We use it as a backup solution and so that the nodes don't fail. When the nodes fail, it's all governed through SimpliVity. It's been working really great. We haven't had too many issues with it.

With SimpliVity, we can easily deploy multiple solutions, including storage, and allocate servers as needed. It's quite versatile.

I like the expandability of the solution. We can effortlessly grow the storage and resources without downtime.

The installation process could be simplified. It's a bit technical for non-IT users. 

So, the deployment could be simpler. 

I have been using it for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I faced no issues with stability. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. There are around nine end users in our company using this solution. 

The customer service and support are okay. Compared to Cisco, there is a big difference. Cisco has dedicated engineers. Cisco throws everything at it. An engineer will always be there, which is better.

Positive

Cisco's more about immediate support, like calling them. But HPE SimpliVity is a set-and-forget solution. Once you configure it, it runs itself. 

Cisco requires human intervention for management.

The initial setup was complicated for me. It took me a couple of weeks to deploy the solution.

The pricing is very high. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price. Pricing is another point for improvement. 

I evaluated VxRail. 

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

We use it for servers, like the domain controller, DHCP, print server, file server, and distribution server as well as application servers.

We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt. This means that we didn't require an additional storage device. Everything is backed up in a single box and that always makes it easy to manage.

I think the licensing cost could be lower.

I've been using HPE SimpliVity for more than two years.

HPE SimpliVity is definitely a stable solution.

I think it is scalable.

I have found technical support to be good and have appreciated their immediate response.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We currently have a yearly license, and I think the cost could be lower.

If you go with a single node only, then you may encounter some issues if you don't have any backup nodes. However, if you go with at least two nodes, then you will be able to manage a disaster well.

If one of the nodes goes down, then the server and data center will be moved to another node. This will ensure that you don't lose anything.

I am very satisfied with HPE SimpliVity and would rate it at ten, on a scale from one to ten.

The biggest benefit of this solution is that if you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it.

It's a very fast system and the deduplication features are very interesting. You lose no performance when using the deduplication and compression because it depends on a separate card and this card is used for the compression and deduplication so you have no impact on the CPU.

The greatest benefit is the optimization and performance.

The price is quite high and the system could also be more scalable.

It would be great if SimpliVity could offer more hardware options. At the moment we have only a small choice of the systems you can buy. I think it would be better to sell it or buy it if they are more options.

I think it's a high stability solution because all the data will be synchronized with all the systems. You can also use some additional services like snapshotting your data and this doesn't add any performance impact. 

The solution is not so scalable, because you have only a few options to expand the system.
We have between 100 users and 500 users.

The support is quite good. If you have a question or a problem with the installation you can call on your implementation partner, or you can also call directly to HPE and open a support call. It works quite well.

We previously used a different solution, but SimpliVity is a fully integrated system. You have one vendor who is responsible for the hard and software. That is the main benefit.

The initial setup was quite easy.

We used a consultant to help with the implementation.

We did evaluate other options. The best solution will depend on the customer. But SimpliVity is a very interesting system especially if you have any need in also in recovering your data.

On the one hand, I think the price is really high for the solution. On the other hand, it's got a very user-friendly GUI because it's fully integrated with each center.

I would rate this solution eight out of 10.

It is for the production virtual environment. I have virtualized almost 99 percent of my servers, and I'm using SimpliVity as a host for those virtual machines.

It does what needs to be done for us. The main thing for us is to make sure that we can recover a failed VM on a different site if the primary site fails. We need to be able to recover on the DR site. The performance was the main focus.

The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour.

We aren't using a lot of space because it does everything that we need it to do on the back-end, which is a good thing.

• The performance
• The backups
• The DR strategy
• The deduplication is great.

My main problem with the solution is that it is taking too much memory for something that we don't build. We are not creating the VM; it is created by the deployment. It is the SimpliVity solution which is using the memory that I was counting on for my production part. This is the biggest problem that I have. I know that the VM has to built there, but I would hope that they have a different area in the system to use this different type of memory. The production memory should stay with the customer when the machine is built, and during deployment, it should use different memory.

We just implemented the lightest cluster a month ago.

So far, the stability is good. We don't have any issues. Everything is running 24/7.

Scaling isn't so hard.

We have not had many technical support calls. However, we had one call which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. Are they capable of answering that question or not? Based on that particular call, we didn't receive the right answer.

I used a three-tier solution, meaning SAN, hosts, and the network fabric. I wanted to move away from the three point failure environment into the single mirror environment, especially for performance.

I didn't know what exactly what I was looking for in the beginning. I knew we needed to move away from our legacy environment into the hyper-converged world. Therefore, I was looking at different solutions. I knew that Nutanix was the big one out there, and is still the big one out there. Somehow, I landed on the SimpliVity site.

Initially, the setup was complex for us. Once you know the product, we are planning to do the deployments ourselves now because we understand everything (most of it). We recorded what we needed and can redeploy the systems to a different clusters going forward.

We used an integrator through HPE. Our experience with them was great. Everything worked well. We didn't have any hiccups.

For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey.

Nutanix was the closest to the HPE SimpliVity product. I had better conversations with the salespeople from HPE. They were able to explain how the solution worked and how it does everything I needed, so that naturally helped me with my decision.

The solution is great. Make sure you are aware of everything before you commit to deploying or purchasing it.

We went from having our core data spread across tapes that would have come down to days of downtime to working with SimpliVity, where we can lose an entire datacenter and still be fully operational within minutes.

I can also now have my IT generalist do daily tasks easily as it is very easy to use.

• Inherent data protection
• Backup
• Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort.

The upgrade path used to be a challenge, but it has gotten much much easier.

Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue.

No, not at all.

No, but we sized correctly in the beginning and have not needed to since.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

First hyper-converged solution that I have ever used.

It is very straightforward to migrate existing VMs into the SimpliVity environment. Just VMotion the servers across and realize the benefits immediately.

It was implemented in-house.

Not sure.

But in comparison to other solutions, SimpliVity gave us all we need bundled into one at a much cheaper price point.

Try to do a true comparison.

SimpliVity includes backup, deduplication, and WAN optimization, so it is only fair to compare that with solutions having the same (or added in) features.

ESXi licensing is a big part of initial investment if you do not already have that covered.

Nutanix and traditional SAN solutions (NetApp and Compellent).

It truly is as good as it seems, which three and a half years ago was a bit of a leap of faith. We are very happy that we made the leap.

• 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.