HPE SimpliVity and Azure Stack HCI are competitors in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Azure Stack HCI has an upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set, outshining HPE SimpliVity in advanced virtualization and seamless cloud integration.
Features: HPE SimpliVity offers data efficiency, scalability, and integrated data protection. Azure Stack HCI is noted for seamless integration with Microsoft Azure services, excellent virtualization capabilities, and robust storage options.
Room for Improvement: HPE SimpliVity could enhance its cloud service integration and virtualization features. Azure Stack HCI could improve its deployment simplicity, reduce costs, and offer better pricing schemes to enhance accessibility for smaller enterprises.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE SimpliVity offers a simplified deployment process with excellent support, appealing to organizations seeking ease of management. Azure Stack HCI's deployment is more complex due to its extensive integration capabilities, yet offers a versatile infrastructure environment post-deployment.
Pricing and ROI: HPE SimpliVity provides a straightforward pricing structure focused on cost-effectiveness, offering balanced ROI for environments prioritizing simplicity and support. Azure Stack HCI may incur higher upfront costs due to its robust features and integration capabilities but promises a strong ROI over time through enhanced functionalities and cloud integration.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
The technical support from the HPE side is excellent, and I give them 10 out of 10.
With HPE, customers can scale up the HPE SimpliVity solution anytime.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
From HPE's side, it is stable, and customers find it easy to manage and easy to grow.
There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
The greatest benefit is that customers don't need multiple hardware solutions from other vendors. Virtualization comes in a single box.
Azure Stack HCI efficiently integrates software-defined networking and Azure Kubernetes Service, offering a streamlined hybrid setup for VM management while maintaining top performance.
Azure Stack HCI enhances data center operations with high-end processors and storage, optimal Kubernetes support, and integration with Azure Arc and Azure Site Recovery. High application density in four-node configurations improves both time and infrastructure efficiency. Despite its strengths, the platform can improve in areas like software-defined networking, operational management, and simplifying deployments, which currently rely on PowerShell. Users often desire better training and integration with Microsoft Azure Portal, along with multi-cluster capabilities and storage architecture enhancements. Improvements in Hyper V virtualization are also needed to match competitors like VMware.
What are the key features of Azure Stack HCI?In sectors like government, Azure Stack HCI is crucial for running secure on-premise services with selectable Azure features to ensure data privacy. Businesses leverage the platform for VM creation, management, and monitoring through Windows Center, alongside Kubernetes production environments. Connectivity with Azure allows for smoother cloud transitions, appreciated for its dashboard manageability and substantial network capacity.
HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.
HPE SimpliVity Features
HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
HPE SimpliVity Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.
Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.
A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”
PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”
German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
