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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
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
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

"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing, its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"Technical support is perfect for me."
"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."
"Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely, allow less experienced admins to perform storage tasks."
"It comes all in one box."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to manage, and it also has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore, so when everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds, which is even better than Veeam."
"As a small IT shop we spend less time managing our VMware infrastructure which gives us more time to focus on the front end of our business."
"The performance is good. It's stable and easy to operate."
"We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols."
"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."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"NetApp HCI is used for enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure and we are using the standard version."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
"The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution."
 

Cons

"SimpliVity needs to improve the support for native backups, like SQL and Exchange."
"The solution must provide other hypervisors."
"Other customers want to see Windows Hyper-V Server 2016 support and also open-source VI."
"The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
"Technical support is not so good. We have some issues with the memory and we still don't have answers for that problem."
"The technical support is weak. It is a layered product."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"The networking needs improvement."
"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Other vendors fall short on price compared to HPE on this product."
"Scaling isn't cheap"
"One big advantage with SimpliVity is that you don't need the higher license cost or VMware to put together a simple SimpliVity solution."
"The licensing cost could be lower."
"It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal."
"For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey."
"The price is one of the biggest problems our customers have."
"Licensing costs are on a monthly basis. There are additional costs."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
6%
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise80
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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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: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.