HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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.

The use case depends on what our customers need. We don't have SimpliVity on our infrastructure, but we deploy it at the customers' sites. Generally speaking, SimpliVity is for prediction, SAP, and VDI.

There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers. 

SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings. 

I've been using HPE SimpliVity for five years now.

SimpliVity is pretty stable. 

SimpliVity is a good fit for small to medium-sized companies, but it's not scalable enough for large enterprises. 

HPE support is good. 

Our customers usually have VMware infrastructure already, so we can easily migrate everything with the VMware technologies. It typically takes about two to three days maximum. One systems engineer can handle the whole deployment. 

I rate SimpliVity seven out of 10. I would rate it higher if HPE added file services.

We primarily use the solution for hyper-converged purposes.

It's quite simple to work with. I don't have to configure any other storage system.

The solution is scalable.

The initial configuration could be improved. 

The way that it handles the memory could be better.

The initial setup can be quite difficult. 

Technical support needs to be more responsive. 

I've used the solution for a while.

The product is very scalable.

We use the solution for 15 people. 

We are increasing usage. We already bought some systems that are the same as HPE. However, that's due to the fact that our company has a standard of using HPE. If I could, might choose another solution.

Technical support is not so good. We have some issues with the memory and we still don't have answers for that problem.

This was the first hyper-converged system we used, however, we do have some experience with VMware now. 

The initial is quite difficult for me. That's mostly due to the configuration as it is difficult to understand the configuration.

The deployment process took quite a long time. I cannot remember exactly how many days or weeks, however. 

We only need two engineers for deployment and maintenance.

We handled the solution with the help of a partner. 

I can't speak to the licensing costs. I don't have access to that information.

We did look at some other options. I can't speak to the exact brands, however.

I'm a customer.

This is an overall good product. However, they do need to work a little bit on the support. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. 

The primary use case is its an offsite virtualization. It runs all our servers at an offsite office in Brazil. Our main sites are in New York and London. We bought a company in Brazil that had aging hardware, so we replaced that with three nodes of the SimpliVity solution. Since it is small office and it does everything, you don't need to have a SAN nor a fancy network. It is a one stop shop, which was really good for this particular thing.

The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done.

SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one. It's sort of silly. I feel like it would be like half a day of programming for somebody to write something that would just auto-balance it.

The vCenter integration could probably improve a little. It is just a plugin that you are interacting with, and it feels like it has been largely the same for a while. It could probably get better.

It used to be kind of touchy. Now, it is great. I have not touched it in about six months since it doesn't break.

It is not very scalable. However, I think it is supposed to be like that. It is not supposed to be like a massive solution with about 30 clusters, and that is by design. I don't think that is a flaw. It is designed for small clusters, so it is not very scalable. 

The technical support is not the worst ever. It has changed, because it used to be bad. It used to be where they had amazing techs, but you could never get them on the phone. Now, you can get somebody on the phone but they never know what they are talking about. 

There is pretty good support for upgrades. I got a pretty senior tech the last time that we did an upgrade, so it is workable.

We had an aging infrastructure that we didn't want to replace with a ton of physical servers. We went from a whole mess of old, difficult servers to support to three servers that we never have to touch. Therefore, it has greatly reduced the amount of administration for our site, and we basically don't touch it.

I believe that we bought the solution through some reseller in Brazil.

I feel like all the other companies gave up.

For smaller node clusters, I wouldn't go with anybody else. For small node hyper-converged three-node clusters, it is the best game in town. It was great before HPE bought them. Now, it has a large organization standing behind it. I would definitely recommend SimpliVity. If people are using it for the right purposes, like we are, it is a really good solution.

Our primary use case for this solution is to offer a combination of computing storage services to remote locations. It operates in our data centers.

This solution has improved our organization because it provides ease of management and offers a single management platform for the entire staff.

The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box. The performance is also very good.

The ease of new deployments could be improved. Also, I think that the scalability of the solution may be inadequate for some people.

It would be good for this platform if we could have an independent gross-storage on the computer.

I have good a good impression of the stability of this solution.

In terms of scalability, this solution fits us. However, I think that the actual limitations are somewhat less than what people might want. For our purpose, it's ok.

We did not use a solution previous to this one. It was added to our IT portfolio because there was a need for it.

The initial setup was not extremely easy, so we needed specific skills in order to bring it into production. Once it was up and running, it was ok.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, I think that partnership is one of the most important criteria. We needed a technology that is universally deployable and has the capability of functioning in the cloud. This allows us to use the service not only in our own premise's data centers but with cloud providers as well.

At the time we were evaluating solutions but there were not many players in the market. We considered Nutanix, but it had its own hardware platform. SimpliVity had an OmniStack configuration that could run on hardware platforms that we already had within the organization. We chose SimpliVity because of this. 

There is a massive technology shift now toward software-defined storage, so we are trying to move from a functionality perspective to an abstraction layer above the equipment we buy.

I think that this is a safe investment for anyone who wants to have a straightforward solution that comes out of the box and can be deployed on an appliance. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for our data center.

Disaster recovery, backup simplification, deduplication, and compression features have helped improve my organization. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery.

The upgrades need improvement. 

One to three years.

Our backups are now more efficient and reliable because the SimpliVity system manages them so much better for us. It allows us to replicate them as often as we like to another pair of SimpliVity boxes at one of our remote sites.

Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc. Also, the ability to spin up a new VM within minutes has been a huge time saver.

Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless (or at least be assigned a technician who could walk us through the process for both the SimpliVity software as well as the VMware software).

The SimpliVity solution has been very reliable and stable for us. A few times over the years where we had errors or hardware issues, they were resolved in a timely manner by SimpliVity support.

No.

Customer Service:

It's been pretty good. Before HPE bought Simplivity, I feel the customer service was great. The couple times I have had to contact support after HPE bought SimpliVity, it has been what I have come to expect from large companies.

Technical Support:

The techs that I have worked with have been really good and seem to know their stuff.

This was our first hyper-converged solution. Previously, we had used separate blade servers tied to separate SANs tied to separate backup solutions.

With the assistance from SimpliVity engineers who were on site for the initial deployment, everything went very smoothly.

Our solution was recommended by our trusted vendor and SimpliVity engineers were on site to help implement the solution. Everyone was very knowledgeable.

Make sure you plan for future growth and get a solution that has enough storage/resources for years to come. Originally, we thought we were only going to deploy our most critical VMs using this product, but once we saw how much better it was to manage the VMs, back them up, and deploy new VMs, we started moving a lot more servers over to it. Eventually, we had to buy another pair of SImpliVity OmniCubes to accommodate everything.

No, once we found out about the SimpliVity product and saw a demo, we were sold. We have been very happy with our decision.

If you are looking to consolidate and simplify the management of various servers, definitely look into a solution from SimpliVity.

It removes the complexities of the storage administration.

It has allowed us to reduce our rack footprint. It allowed us to simplify our administration.

I would like to see replication to a cloud solution. I would like to replicate the data so that we have a backup copy off-site. I could then be comfortable getting rid of our existing backup solution. The other feature would be a single copy of the data storage as opposed to a dual copy. In that way, when I do things that automatically have dual copies, such as with our SQL server databases, I would not then be making four copies of the data.

In regards to the HPE Simplivity current offering –

1. Replication of backup to a cloud solution would be advantageous. At present, I’d have to spin up a new site (data center, networking gear, etc.) and place Simplivity nodes there to get replication of backups to meet my offsite requirement. They’ve told me they have a hosting service option, but I’ve not received any real details.

2. Simplivity makes two copies of the VMs on different nodes for redundancy. It would be advantageous to include an option for a single copy. So when there is a product with its own redundancy (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Groups), one is not then making 4 write I/Os for each write – two at the application layer – one to each SQL server node, two at the storage layer – one to two different Simplivity nodes.

When it is properly operated and configured, it is very stable.

When you go past eight nodes, you have to get approval. That has been a concern of ours. Sometimes they say that that it has been approved, and other times, they say that they have to go through the approval process again.

I used tech support prior to the acquisition and it has been good.

We knew that we needed to invest in new solution because we were using a standard, best of breed solution, and it was time to refresh that.

The initial setup was straightforward. Unfortunately, with the deployment services, there was a delay in getting things set up. There's usually a project manager and you have to wait until the gear arrives. The project manager gets involved a week later. After a week, there's a pre-flight. By the time you are up and running, it may be a month from the time you actually had boxes land on the ground.

We didn’t bring in any alternative solutions for a PoC. However, I have done evaluations of other solutions. We chose HPE because it allowed us to get in with a smaller footprint than some of the other solutions, which might require three, four, or five nodes. When selecting vendors, I look for technical feasibility, then operability, and then cost.

I would say that with hyper-converged infrastructure, it's important to understand how the solution is going to meet your needs. It is possible that if the requirements are different, a different vendor would be more appropriate.