We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and HPE SimpliVity based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both of these HPE solutions are part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise brand of excellent data management products. Users say HPE SimpliVity is the more comprehensive product. It is a very user-friendly, simple product to use, implement, and manage. The storage virtualization layers and super fast backups make it extremely valuable. Some users say HPE Nimble Storage dHCI can be a bit buggy and should provide better file-level restoration and DVX system options.
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"Artificial intelligence is built into the product. If there's a failure, HP support will proactively call the client about the issue."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."
"The technical support services are good."
"The solution is useful for taking storage snapshots, has high performance, and the CASL architecture is good for optimizing workloads."
"Simply being able to move objects and the duplication feature have been quite effective."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery."
"It has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam."
"SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well."
"Its performance and availability are most valuable."
"It is a stable solution."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"The product's active controller feature needs improvement."
"Their documentation needs to be simpler to read yet more detailed so it's easy to compare models and easier for clients to pick."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's website does not open properly or work consistently."
"The product does not support file services."
"Software upgrade is still more complicated than the competitors, so that's an area of improvement."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"It can be made cheaper."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time."
"The ease of new deployments could be improved."
"I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 13th in HCI with 23 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and VxRail, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Rubrik. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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