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.

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.

We use HPE SimpliVity for general corporate IT applications and to support our DevOps automation software.

There are three big improvements that SimpliVity brought to our organization: 

1. The ability to quickly and reliably create and maintain a disaster recovery environment over a relatively, low bandwidth WAN connection.
2. The reduction in physical storage, due to SimpliVity's data virtualization layer, which includes inline deduplication and compression.
3. The consolidation of many technology solutions into one solution, which resulted in lower overall costs in the form of fewer software and hardware purchases, reduced backup costs, lower bandwidth charges between sites, and less administrative overhead.

The ease of setting up our DR site with SimpliVity. It was very simple. I did not have to set up a separate storage, server, and networking environments. There was no additional WAN optimization or backup hardware/software, and it did not choke my WAN link.

I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes. In order to balance this data out, a support call is required and the support technician will spend some time rebalancing the nodes. The access to do this by end users is not given. It is also somewhat difficult to monitor the actual node's physical storage with out-of-the box monitoring tools due to the virtualization of this layer. 

I previously used a traditional virtualization stack with a SAN, compute, and network layers.  I switched because, at the time, we had no DR solution in place for many of our services. We were looking for the best available options to replicate data for a DR site and bring up services at that site. 

SimpliVity provides an all-in-one solution and has been a great addition to our tech portfolio.

It was easy to install.

Upfront costs seems high at first look, but after analyzing all the benefits of SimpliVity, we have come out ahead.

We evaluated other traditional stack options with Zerto as our replication software. We looked at Nutanix and EMC VxRail.

Disaster recovery to a secondary datacenter. In order to do that, all of our server infrastructure runs on Simplivity.

We now have much lower RPOs, from hours to seconds. It is now much simpler for us to deploy additional workloads, since we do not have to take care anymore of storage provisioning. The Simplivity datastores are so efficient that the never seem to fill up, or at least not that fast anymore.

Data replication, backup and recovery of VMs and disks. Data replication happens in the background once the policy is set and takes few seconds. The fact that the data is deduped inline makes this possible, as only the changes not already replicated blocks are written, which is extremely efficient.

We use the Omnicubes to replicate our data to a second datacenter.
By having our company data on the Omnicubes, we ensure that all of our data is constantly replicated within the defined intervals to the remote site. This is the reason why we did choose Omnicubes. We are able to replicate our data in a very simple manner (as this happens in the background) and comply to our business needs.

Simplivity Omnicube is able to replicate data in a simple and reliable manner. There is nothing to be done for the IT Admins and very few to control, as the technology is very stable. The replication is way faster than expected, due to the advantages of the deduplication and compression. Currently we see 3.4 dedup ration 1nd 1.5 compression.
When we manually backup (or automatically replicate by policy) one VM to the remote location, the job is completed within seconds or few minutes in the worst case. The storage footprint is minimal. There are no ‘vmware snapshots’ involved in this technology (which could be left over and create issues, as it could happen with other Backup Technologies).

As a plus of using Omnicubes, we have discovered that we now can perform almost instantaneous recovery of VMs. Cloning a VM is done in few seconds (also across sites), same applies to recovery of VMS or single drives (Vmdk). In one occasion we needed to recover a 2-TB partition of a file server. We completed the recovery in about 5 seconds, the data was recovered from the remote location. We could basically move our whole workloads across datacenters in few minutes, if needed.

We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow. While this is responsibility of Vmware (having killed the c-client), the question is legitimate, because the client is what you need to restore your data in the end, and in such situation you do not have time to waste.

No.

No. When scaling you need to consider that scaling an hyperconverged infrstructure is different from a traditional server stacks, because basically you are tied to adding one building block which adds server, cpu, ram, disk all at once. in a traditional stack you will look at each component constantly and scale them up indipendently. Another aspect is that the indicator which will tell you when it is time to scale might be different from your expectations. In my experience we did in the past scale traditional stacks when the storage was getting full. After implementing Simplivity, my indicator is now the disk latency. The storage itself will almost never get full, but after adding additional workloads for 2 years I have learned that although the disk is not full, you want to look at certain thresholds in your disk latency, or in certain cases at RAM availability on the appliances.

Customer Service:

The level has been very good until now, I know that after HPe taking over some users have encountered delay in being services. This did not happen to me. Update: it's a pity, that no email support anymore is available. Now we have to dial in and create a support case. Before the acquisition, creating a support case was a breeze. I hope HPe will fix this.

Technical Support:

Excellent. Update: Well, good to very good. there is room for improvement.

we did not have disaster recovery in place before.

not at all. Set up takes a couple of hours, and then it's important to have a guideline about which data replication (data protection) policies you want to have in place. Once they are defined (in a matter of minutes), it's done.

Good.

All-in license, simple and fair.

Nutanix, and other traditional storage/server architecture options.

Focus on the right sizing for your application tier. The solution is very simple to administer.

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.

The most valuable feature is inline deduplication. Inline dedup allows us to support more VMs per host, because less IO goes to disk if you use the same OS on the server side. Deduplication at SimpliVity means that metadata caching and the acceleration card support the efficiency of using less SSD and less HDD access. Only unwritten blocks flow through the system; double blocks coming out of cache. This also helps to reduce latency of the whole system, because the acknowledge to requests of servers are supported faster and out of cache instead from disk.

You can manage at this point more and different workloads, but at least not all. So, the newer systems with full flash supports these requirements better than the hybrid systems.

It has less latency (from 6ms to about 1ms).

Other customers want to see Windows Hyper-V Server 2016 support and also open-source VI. In our case, this is not necessary, but could help in the future to get more market share.

I have used it for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues in my environment and situation.

Technical support is perfect for me.

We previously used a different solution and we switched because of total cost (ROI) and efficiency.

Initial setup is easy and can be done by any technician with a basic understanding of VMware.

Calculate all savings and build an ROI. (Have a look at www.holistic3.com.)

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options because it is clear that SimpliVity provides the best ROI out of all the candidates.

Take care with 10gbE networking. To save a lot of space and power with this solution, use VMware as the primary hypervisor.

The built-in ability to do backups to DR, do internal backups, and have on-the-fly deduplication is by far the most valuable to me.

Our organization went from not having DR to having a fully implemented and tested DR and DR plan in 6 months with SimpliVity. Migration off our legacy solution to SimpliVity was seamless.

Being able to balance replicas across nodes on your own (without calling support) would be awesome.

SimpliVity has 2 copies of a guest virtual server on their nodes, a primary “live” copy and a secondary “replica” copy.

SimpliVity has some pretty good algorithms to initially balance those two copies across the physical nodes.

However, if the server size changes dramatically and you have too many large replicas or primaries on one of their physical servers, it will start to fill up.

Right now, you cannot move a replica (to balance storage across cubes) on your own, you have to call support. Support is very good and can do it very quickly, but it would be nice to be able to do it on our own.

We have been creating a lot of new servers lately, so I usually have to call them about once a month to take a look at our balance across cubes.

I have used SimpliVity for about 1 year.

We had no issues with deployment.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

They have the highest level of customer service I have experienced in a vendor. They have great people on at any time of day.

SimpliVity's technical support is great. I've never had an issue that had to be 'escalated'. The first person I talk to is able to quickly fix any problems I have had.

We had an aging infrastructure that was due to be replaced. We wanted our new product to have built-in DR capability.

I already had a good understanding of VMWare, moving to this solution was probably the most straightforward implementation I have ever done.

We implemented with the help of SimpliVity directly. Their expertise was great. Implementation went very smoothly.

I believe in the long run we found the reduced footprint, electricity, and other overhead costs, along with other reduced costs we had a 3 year ROI.

We looked at Dell Compellent and Pivot3.

Inline deduplication, instant recovery of data across datacenters, low latency, easiness of management. The solution is fully integrated in the Virtual center client, which makes for a very lean learning curve. Simplivity adds as a plugin into virtual center and delivers a fully featured dashboard. Backup Policies are VM-centric, but can be applied at a datastore level as well. The dashboard displays live and historic latency values, overall and for each VM, and is used as a GUI for backup and restore. Backup and restore are performed automatically but can be also performedmanually at any time. This is done with a couple of klicks and takes a few seconds.

We consolidated five servers and one SAN with three arrays into two OmniCubes. Our SAN was full with 20 TB at the time of migration, and we accomodate the whole amount of data into less as the half of the disk space. Since then the infrastructure grew constantly, but the data foot print on the Omnicubes barely increases. Dedup is currently around 3.3. Additionally, we implemented DR with a third OmniCube residing in a second datacenter, where we replicate our data. Recovery of VMs is done in a couple of seconds. We now almost never use our backup software to restore data anymore.

Some proactive / predictive monitoring of VMs health would be a plus. Speed in cathing up with Vmware Esxi releases could also be slightly improved.

Proactive monitoring of VMS: this is one item on my wish list. I would like an easy way to receive an alert when a VM is performing badly (due to latency, cpu or memory issues for example). I know there are ways to create alarms or alerts in vSphere or third party tools. But what I am talking about here is some easier way to achieve that, maybe with a few clicks in the GUI. It is not specifically a task which Simplivity must accomplish, but since it has a plugin in VC could be a good place to introduce it.

Regarding Esxi releases. Omnicubes run on Esxi and Simplivity has to officially support each Esxi release for you to go and install it on your Omnicube. This takes obviously a few weeks after each Vmware release. Sometimes it can take longer, so in those cases would be good to speed up the process.

1.5 years

No.

No.

No.

Excellent support.

Perfect, the technical team is great, one of the greatest I know so far.

No, this is our first hyperconverged solution.

Not really, OmniCubes were deployed in a couple of hours.

Through a vendor, their expertise was good.

We looked at Nutanix and vSAN.

We have found no other solution in the market which has the same full set of features. Specifically inline deduplication is unique in its implementation here.