HPE SimpliVity Reviews

You have to manage so much hardware if you have IT systems, and each system has a different web interface, log, and reporting service. When you check all of them in a day, you don't have enough time for other work, but I can manage all the services from a single interface with SimpliVity. It saves me time.

The backup and restore features are the most valuable. Because before SimpliVity, I was backing up the data to an external hard disk. It worked slowly sometimes, and I had to wait for hours. But now, I am backing up all my data in seconds.

I think first we should make a hardware upgrade.

No, it's stable.

No, it works well.

I haven't needed technical support yet.

I was using classical storage, server technology, because it's not easy to manage all hardware capacity.

It was straightforward.

The price should be cheaper.

I only looked at Nutanix and VMware vSAN, but SimpliVity is convenient for our systems.

Anyone looking to implement it should do so without losing any time.

VM backup and recovery.

Prior to Simplivity, we struggled to complete weekly file server backups over the weekend, and full VM restores would take hours. With Simplivity we are able to backup file servers every 4 hours and restore them in less than 20 seconds. These file servers are approximately 2TB.

I would like to see Simplivity come out with some sort of Simplivity Engineer certification, which would grant me the ability to handle the more technical issues on my own, without having to call support.

Approximately two years.

No issues with deployment.

None.

Not so far

Customer service has been great.

Technical support has been great. They have improved software upgrades dramatically, allowing me to perform my own upgrades without having to call support.

In the past we were running UCS with a NetApp SAN connected via FC. We were ready for a refresh when we saw Simplivity. It looked like a perfect fit.

Initial setup was very easy. We just input IP addresses for each network and the setup wizard took care of everything.

Pricing is a little high in my opinion. Prices have climbed consistently since our purchase and install.

We did an evaluation with Nutanix, but found their data redundancy was not sufficient for us.

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.

I use the solution for virtualised infraestructure of servers.

HPE Simplivity improved the space of disk with deduplication, reduced the time of backups and recovers.

One of the key features is the solution is really fast for backups and deduplication is amazing.

It would be good to have more compatibility with other solutions as an improvement in the future. As a suggestion, in order to have compatibility with other solutions, there could be a license fee for this, and if you don't need to them then you do not need to pay.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good but you need to pay for the additional nodes that can be expensive. We are currently using the solution for one thousand people in our organization.

They could have better-specialized support for more countries.

I rate the customer service of HPE SimpliVity a seven out of ten.

Positive

I used CISCO.

The setup is very easy.

We have three nodes around the country and it took just one week for the deployment.

3 years.

The solution can be expensive if you are using a lot of nodes.

Dell and Cisco.

I would advise those wanting to use this product to be careful before setting up the solution that you have enough disk space, if you do not, you will have to pay for it which is expensive.

The solution works great, it is amazing.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a ten out of ten.

We are in the hospitality industry with 10 hotels, and all the systems are on HPE SimpliVity infrastructure. We have our 10 systems on the infrastructure, such as a huge hospitality application, finance, and material control systems.

I have found backup and replication to be useful. We have a 10 megabit line between the data center and our main site. The backup and replication are very good. Additionally, the solution runs on VMware which is a benefit.

The interface is good but takes some time to get used to.

I have been using HPE SimpliVity for approximately two years.

The solution is highly stable.

We do not need to scale the solution because we have purchased it with servers, with two processors, and 750 gigabytes of memory per server. We have everything that we need and do not need to upgrade or scale the server or scale the infrastructure.

The technical support is good.

When the Dell PowerEdge infrastructure became old we then decided to switch to SimpliVity. We have also used Dell VxRail and all the other solutions that we had upgraded at that time.

The initial setup is a bit complicated. Setting up the networking and other infrastructure can be difficult if you are have not done it before. There are lots of things that you have to take into consideration, and at that time it was quite new to us. The total time it took for everything to work correctly was approximately four days.

HPE did parts of the implementation with us.

The price of the solution is reasonable. We have purchased a five-year license with all the support and upgrades.

My advice to others is HPE SimpliVity It is a very good system, very stable, and has lots of features that we have not seen work well in other systems. All the features work incredibly well with HPE SimpliVity.

I rate HPE SimpliVity an eight out of ten.

HPE SimpliVity is mainly used for virtualized environments.

The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware.

I have been using HPE SimpliVity for approximately four years.

When it comes to virtualization, SimpliVity is based on VMware, and VMware is more stable than other solutions, such as Hyper-V.

I would recommend this solution to others.

We have approximately 10 customers using this solution.

The technical support has been good. They know a lot of information and are helpful.

The installation is quite easy but it could still be improved.

You have to have the environment set up correctly before the installation of SimpliVity, such as vCenter Server and AD. If you have the environment configured then the installation is approximately 45 minutes.

We have approximately five engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is priced high. However, there are plenty of features as part of the package that other solutions do not have.

The solution comes with the VMware license that you need, but you can also buy the license outside of the initial purchase.

The features SimpliVity has there is no other solution in the market that can match it.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a nine out of ten.

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.

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.