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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
154
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 performance is good. It's stable and easy to operate."
"Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely."
"SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution."
"The ease of managing this system."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"The most valuable feature is the convergence."
"It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"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."
"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."
"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."
"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
 

Cons

"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"The interface is good but takes some time to get used to."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"I can say that the support was better when it was a separate company, when it was SimpliVity. But, now with HPE it has not been quite as good. B"
"One thing that I would like to see improved is the flexibility of the node expansion."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"Its stability is 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 crash."
"They could improve the packaging."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"The networking needs improvement."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."
"It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The time savings on the administration side of things is huge. We had somebody who was dedicated pretty much full-time to hardware, and now, they spend about a quarter of their time a year on hardware-related issues."
"Licensing costs are on a monthly basis. There are additional costs."
"There is a one-time purchase needed for the license for HPE SimpliVity. The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"I think it's a complete package. We buy the license with support for five years. It's a subscription, I will say, but it's included when you buy the SimpliVity solution from HPE. You have a contract with the software warranty and upgrades."
"It is not too expensive, but it is quite expensive for me."
"There is not a license required for the solution."
"For most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly."
"​Investing less time in configuration and management means that you will have more time to focus on what is really important: Your company's innovation and rapid commercialization.​"
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"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."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
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?
The price is almost equal to VMware vSAN, making it not much cost saving. However, the time-saving during upgrades is notable.
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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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.