HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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.

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.

SimpliVity is used when a customer is looking to build a private cloud environment.

SimpliVity works well in a UAT environment.

They have made several technology changes. Compared to the previous version, SimpliVity was acquired by HPE and now the product has totally changed.

Initially, the response was great with SimpliVity. After the technology changed the feedback from customers was not good. As a result, we no longer focus on Simplivity.

Our focus is more on Nutanix Hyperconverged.

SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer. They may have to with VMware or something similar.

The flexibility should be present. It should be the customer's choice of what virtualization layer they will choose, and not mandated from the solution that you have to use VMware. VMware is not cheap. It comes with its own cost. 

If the customer has the option to go with the Microsoft Hyper-V then customers should get the flexibility to have Hyper-V in place of the hypervisor.

Ultimately, the hypervisor functionality by default when you go for the data center becomes more cost-effective.

It should have the intelligence, to alert you that a failure of the cache is about to happen. It should be able to give you the predictive alarm and it should create its own backup.

It should have some provision where the cache is being copied to another location. So when one copy has been deleted or a copy has been corrupted, we should be able to recover it from the other site to ensure the office data is secure.

It should have some provision wherein the cache is being copied to some other location so that even if one copy has been deleted or one copy has been corrupted, we are able to recover it from the other location which will keep the office data secure.

From a product perspective, it should be more flexible.

It should allow users to have more data control in areas such as the cache. It should allow the user to have more data reduction flexibility.

Data reduction is something that is completely missing in the current solution, once SimpliVity was bought by HPE. It was the primary reason customers were interested in it.

SimpliVity handles the data. HCI is about how RAID is maintained over the network, and how many duplicate copies have been stored, or whether you are going for RF2 or RF3. Those things have to be taken into consideration.

With VMware,vSAN, and SimpliVity they are more dependent on the cache. If the cache fails then I have to recover the data. It's complete downtown for me. Anytime the data is not recovered, it's business downtime.

We have been providing this solution to our customers over the last year, but overall, we have been working with it for between four and five years.

Now that the technology has been changed, the product stability will always be in doubt.

The more they are integrating and trying to match the flexibility that Nutanix has been providing, and it has become more complex.

The hypervisor is becoming the heart of the solution. It is controlling the complete solution. It is providing you the contour, the storage, and the configuration of the virtual infrastructure.  

This can be problematic when it comes to SimpliVity.

SimpliVity offers built-in scalability but there is an override with the data protection policy that they are providing, what kind of flexibility when it comes to managing the complete virtual machines. 

The cluster has its own limitation. You cannot go beyond 32 or 64 nodes.

You can have multiple clusters and you can share your application across the clusters, but, yes, there are limitations. Though the limitation is not small it allows you to have 32 or 64 nodes in a cluster. When it comes to managing it, the more you add, the more complex it becomes to manage.

We have given it to many customers. Few of the customers are running it for the highest number of possible nodes in the clusters.

They provide good technical support.

If the solution has any fundamental challenges then it is not something that anyone can address.

It will take less than one day to start with a basic three-node cluster.

It is simple to install but it is hard to maintain.

In terms of the licenses, customers do not actually get any benefit. They have to purchase the VMware vCloud Suite as a bundled solution.

There is no flexibility in terms of choosing what license the customer wants to use. Irrespective of the features that the customer needs, they have to pay more for fewer features they want to use.

The difference between the HCI and the basic traditional environment is that it mitigates the bottleneck of the traditional solution. 

Customers are looking to have an environment that is completely scalable. HCI is a platform that you can always choose. That is the flexibility that is in demand when it comes to the private cloud.

Whenever building a private cloud, scalability should be a built-in feature.

SimpliVity does offer it but there is an override in terms of the data reduction policy they are providing. What kind of flexibility in terms of managing the complete virtual machines.

Now when it comes to SimpliVity, they have very limited options for the virtualization layer.

They may have to go with VMware and that is something that I'll say not all the customers will be keen to consider.

If someone asks me today which product to implement, I'll say that if you have a UAT environment, then you try to put it on SimpliVity. But when it comes to the production, or when it comes to a critical application or critical business need, you put it on the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

I only recommend this solution in a UAT environment, but not for production or critical environment.

SimpliVity cannot be deployed on the cloud.

The technical team is good because it is being managed by the HPE team only. The HPE technical team is always good.

It has various limitations and over time, rather than improvising, they have diluted the real essence of the product. I would rate HPE SimpliVity a five out of ten.

We sell HP products. Hyperconvergence with SimpliVity is one of the main products that we are pushing. The virtual application is the main product. It is based on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but it is only an application. We sell this infrastructure to our customers and put the virtual application in this infrastructure.

A solution that provide a simple way to HA , is absolutely efficient and improve the work for the IT team

The access, high availability, and interface are the most valuable and important for us. There is one interface for the whole product, which is very important because you have a single pane to view all the infrastructure of a customer. You can improve your data recovery plan or DRP, or you can make a special emergency plan if a disk has any problem.

It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America.

VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity.

I have been selling HPE SimpliVity for less than one year.

It is stable.

You can easily scale without any problem by adding new nodes, which is a very good part of the product. Currently, my customers don't have a requirement for scalability, but they will have a requirement in the future. They will have to scale the platform, storage, and virtual machines in the near future. A customer is planning to add one or two nodes at the beginning of the next year. My customers are medium-sized and big-sized companies.

They can maybe improve the response time. When a customer has an emergency and is pushing us, we need to respond in the best way. This is not a complaint. Customers always want the solution immediately. We help our customers in getting the most uptime for this service.

No, previously we didn't use a differente solutio , just HP DL nodes separately

It is a new technology, and the setup is a little complicated. The learning curve is not so high, and you can learn to deploy the product easily in a couple of weeks. You have to get people certified in different technologies of HP before the deployment.

Deployment can take from a couple of weeks to a month and a half. There could also be problems with a customer's infrastructure. In some cases, putting the devices is a whole new project because the customer is not prepared.

In Latam is very different a ROI. Depends of the industry and all the return has more time to return

It is expensive for this market. Everyone says that it is a very good product, but the only complaint is about the price. The enterprises must evalute carefully what they want to do and how many people has tod do te job. A simple interface improve operational time

Nutanix, Dell nodes

I would recommend this solution. It is very good for me. 

I would rate HPE SimpliVity a nine out of ten.

One of the most valuable features is the solution is simple. You get everything in one place, one rack for everything. So you don't have to get bits and pieces for a whole solution.

The solution works very well for banking or oil and gas sectors, and for the branch offices. 

One area of the service that could use improvement is that it is an aging solution. The market activity shelf life is over as people are moving toward a more savvy cloud box.

One con to the solution is the expense. A second thing is it has to be tailor-made properly. The presales part has to be done properly. Otherwise, you can misguide the customer.

Another issue is that it's not growing. I don't know what they want to do and apply for that particular solution or if they are looking for something else. I haven't seen many improvements in the last couple of years.

Also, nowadays everything is a very lean architecture, but SimpliVity is not a lean architecture in terms of anything. SimpliVity should be very lean in terms of the solution.

I've been working with the solution for five years.

Once you've taken the right course of action, the solution is quite stable, but it should be in the proper hands to maintain.

Scalability is very good in SimpliVity. Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable.

Compared to NewtonX, technical support for HPE is a lot better. We had a few situations where we need to get connected with them. The usual turnaround time is the next business day or whatever option the customer has. It'll be resolved accordingly in time.

The initial setup is complex. You need experts on that to kick start it, or it would be screwed up.

You need to go with a vendor, or find a niche experts, and there are only a handful of people available in the market.

The solution is expensive; not every budget can fit it. With the technical experts, for after-sales, you need to be a bit careful because it can burn your pockets if you don't expect it because there are only a few people available.

The solution is a one-time investment that the customer has to make, but the scalability is there. The performance is very good on any application you are trying to build on top of it, it performs according to that hardware layer. They offer very good presale support in the region here, if you need to get connected.

Now that AI is changing, hyper-convergence is there, but the hybrid model is applied in any scenario. Everybody doesn't want fully on-prem because SimpliVity is something where you want to convert everything on-prem. So if you are approaching a hybrid model, that solution should be in the cloud as well as on-prem. It should be not hardware agnostic, one solution. Anytime your data is your property, you can move it to any solution.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.

We are using the latest update. 

Our main use case involves the applying of core applications. 

Most valuable features include the data resiliency, backup and ability to capture full VM without the need for additional software, as well as the transfer from Side A to Side B, at a lower bandwidth.

When it comes to upgrading and additional features, it would be nice if the solution had the ability to fully archive data in an external storage solution other than HPE Simplivity. 

I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system. It can go through four sockets, such as the DL580.

I would like to see the ability to do the integration between HCI and dHCI. I understand that there is a roadmap for these, but I have yet to see the release. Hopefully, this will occur soon. 

Other than this, so far so good. 

I have been using HPE Simplivity for five years. 

The overall stability and performance is good. We find it to be simple. 

From a technical standpoint, we would say that the product is reliable. As of now, we have experienced only one hard drive failure. The solution is quite stable and we have not experienced issues in this regard. Considering the time we run, we have had zero downtime. 

The solution is scalable, although one occasionally will wish to have a four socket processor. As we do not possess this, we have had multiple systems running.

We have occasionally contacted technical support concerning the update or when problems arise. We arrange the support. Mostly, problems happen during the hardware failure as the result of normal wear and tear.

The support has been okay thus far. For the last couple of years, so far so good, without problems, although the transition from Simplivity to HP did involve a big hiccup. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We handled the installation entirely on our own.

The solution only requires normal basic housekeeping, such as with data retention time. 

The price is comparatively okay. The solution is affordable and quite reasonably priced in terms of the product one gets. 

The licensing cost is all inclusive. 

There are around 100 people in my company working with the solution. 

The solution simplifies IT life. In terms of resources such as OT and data backup, one can save a lot in cost. Around the clock one need not worry about having comprehensive backup. The entire system remains up and running during office hours and there is no need to wait for anything. Overall, one is assured that all the data is backed up and can be restored. Prior to running HCL, we had to do testing, much more planning and sometimes remain overnight beyond office hours. Nobody wishes to do this nowadays. 

All is good with the solution. 

As we are satisfied with HPE Simplivity so far, I rate it as a nine out of ten.