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HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
HCI (6th)
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable
There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.
MB
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup was straightforward."
"It is easy to set up."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"It's a very nice solution. It's a complete solution that we are looking for because we don't have personnel with expertise."
"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 is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."
"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
"It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
 

Cons

"I would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives."
"Our customers are always looking or a discount on the product."
"It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage.​"
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups."
"Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools."
"I have a free project with SimpliVity deployment in the next three months. What can be improved is that in one or two of these projects, I need a cloud backup for the infrastructure and data. As for the infrastructure of the product as it relates to customer size, it is not very good at this moment in Peru. I need a solution for the cloud. In Peru, it's a three or four solution provider for cloud services."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."
"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
"The networking needs improvement."
"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN."
"Licensing costs are on a monthly basis. There are additional costs."
"For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey."
"There is a one-time purchase needed for the license for HPE SimpliVity. The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"The price is one of the biggest problems our customers have."
"We bought this solution as a package that included all of the hardware and all of the software."
"The product is expensive."
"Other vendors fall short on price compared to HPE on this product."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business68
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
What do you like most about HPE SimpliVity?
The solution's technical support is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...
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Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: October 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.