We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The performance is good. It's stable and easy to operate."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"We can scale the solution easily."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"The setup is very easy."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect."
"This operating system offers stability. Setup is straightforward."
"Its most valuable feature is simplicity. It is so easy to use. Upgrades are easy. It is easy in terms of disaster recovery, failover, database provisioning, and reporting. Everything about it is just simple."
"The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management."
"Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation."
"One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots."
"This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"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 only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"We had minor problems with the initial setup but it was with our internal infrastructure."
"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 are some small changes that can be made to the interface to improve it but it typically works well."
"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."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators."
"The product requires a lot of resources."
"The process of migrating from old hardware to new could improve."
"Nutanix needs to improve network features like Passthrough – SR-IOV. It could be improved by supporting SR-IOV, if they had that support, I would not have needed to implement the VMWare vSAN."
"There is a feature that exists used for disaster recovery, but it requires an extra license. It should be included with the regular normal standard license."
"In the future, I would like to see multi-tenancy in Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"The productivity and work efficiency of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve."
"I feel like the flow chart and the automated processes have some room for improvement. They're nearly there, and the rest is fine. They've improved a lot over the past few years."
"The GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved that can be done from the OEM side. It's a very basic stable web browser that they're using. It is not very inclusive."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 6th in HCI with 41 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 1st in HCI with 80 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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You should also consider a few basic details:
- What is the hypervisor that you are going to use? If it's VMware then both of them are good. AHV has limitations and I have seen my customers suffering as they grow. Do not use AHV, let them refine it more.
- Do you want a hardware independent solution? If so, then HPE SimpliVity is out. If you are paying for 3-5 years of support, services, warranty, and licenses then it is irrelevant.
- Accelerator card - one more point of failure apart from OVC with Nutanix is that it is only Acropolis.
- High Availability - Nutanix is faster doing fail-overs
- Backup - more or less the same on esxi platform.
- Replication - Nutanix is better doing replication between the sites and is easy too.
- Storage Cost: Sales team of both the products lie when it comes to tell you how much they are going to consume. But with SimpliVity, at least in their config, they keep around 100-200GB of RAM for buffer.
- Performance - Both the platforms with identical hardware offer more or less the same performance. With SimpliVity, the OAC really gives you a good performance.
- Support - Nutanix is better, no doubts. When SimpliVity used to be SimpliVity, they had good support services.
- Containers - Better to work on Nutanix, however, if you are going to use vRealize Automation then both are OK.
If you like doing stuff by yourself and are well versed with VMware products, then try VMware vSAN with vSAN ready nodes and you will be amazed. Check each and everything that Nutanix salespeople say on the internet.
Similar to Mikes comments above, we evaluated both these products and Cisco Hyperflex and ended up selecting Nutanix. Our legacy platform was all HPE so they had the foot in the door from the start, however, it soon became clear that the roadmap for HPE is vague with SimpliVity and whilst it had some advantages over the others, they were few and relatively minor in our selection criteria. We needed a platform to support HyperV and whilst all three could do this, HPE could only support this with SimpliVity on a very expensive configuration that commercially blew them out the process quite early. Cisco had a good offering and could potentially deliver a good solution although whilst they challenged regularly, we still felt they were playing catch-up in this space. There is a good reason why Nutanix is selling HCI platforms in large numbers and why Gartner ranks them top in the Magic Quadrants, the key differentiator for us was the overall approach to whole lifecycle and support offering that came with the product. Something I think that Cisco and HPE need to take a step back and look at more with customers as well as their technology offerings.
HPE, in my personal research opinion, is struggling to gain momentum within the HCI space. The move from a dedicated hardware card to software enablement was a good move. Yet it does bring the question of do I want to move to an HCI partner that now runs on V1 release software? Do I want to work through the bug list to help HPE improve a product? Financially the product brings no benefit over the other HCI players.
Nutanix for me would be the preferred HCI product between these two. Reasons would be because of multiple stable releases and continued growth. I can choose which Hypervisor I want to run be it AHV, HyperV or VMware. I can also change at any stage should I wish to do so. I could transform applications in AHV using containers and spin up my dev workloads there. In the interim business, I can continue running on the hypervisor trusted for workloads while the teams build confidence using AHV. Nutanix is now focusing on feature richness and transformational approaches while allowing you to choose your hardware vendor of choice with full support.
The negativity of Nutanix is that you pay double hypervisor costs to do the same thing. When acquiring Nutanix, make use of AHV and the strength of the base integration. Thus drop VMware which scares most enterprises, unfortunately. HyperV is not largely adopted in many enterprises thus the double bill on hypervisor is not so bad. Yet when moving to Azure or AWS the hypervisor is not a consideration for technical staff.
You'll notice that HPE doesn't really talk that much about SimpliVity anymore. They also signed a global agreement in April to run AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) on HPE hardware for their hybrid cloud offering. Makes you wonder why they wouldn't use SimpliVity as the platform for that.
Truth is, SimpliVity had some good features (scalable compute, erasure coding and insane data reduction). However, it's limited to VMware for a hypervisor and the impressive data reduction algorithms absolutely kill performance.
On the other hand, Nutanix runs on multiple hypervisors and hardware platforms. Plus AHV has a multitude of features that improve efficiency and performance. And it's going to be around awhile.
The advantage that Nutanix has over SimpliVity is that it is a distributed storage fabric that runs in the application space and is not dependent on any single brand of hypervisor. Nutanix can run on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM or Nutanix’s own Acropolis hypervisor. Nutanix is a scalable software solution whereas SimpliVity is a hardware solution dependent on a specialized ASIC. You can run Nutanix on IBM, HPE, Dell or just about any commodity hardware and the user interface is very simple. Also, with the hyper convergence controller (CVM) decoupled from the hypervisor and hardware, updating Nutanix is non-disruptive.
You should consider a few basic details:
- Hypervisor – AHV vs VMWARE. Although VMWARE is a master in virtualization, for start-ups, AHV can server the purpose (commercial impact).
- Hardware independent solution- If so, then Nutanix is a good option.
- High Availability - Nutanix is faster doing fail-overs.
- Replication - Nutanix is better doing replication between the sites.
- Storage Cost: SimpliVity keep aprox. 100-200GB of RAM for buffer.
- Support - Nutanix is better, no doubt. When SimpliVity used to be SimpliVity, they had good support services.
- Containers - Better to work on Nutanix, however, if you are going to use vRealize Automation then both are OK.
I agree with Shu and Mike. There is a lot more support and more features that Nutanix provides than any other HCI. There are not hardware complexities like in SimpliVity. You can use any vendor of your choice and go with Nutanix HCI, also use one hypervisor for production and another for DR. A way to save costs on a DR hypervisor is to use AHV in production and use VMware or Hyper-V based on your choice. Nutanix also provides native file services for connecting to physical servers, data protection services including DR, which I prefer most. Lately, Nutanix supports even SAP HANA-like workloads.
You should make a final decision based on your requirement, present pain points, specific features on HCI that can help to address any or all of your pain points.
Agree to everything Shu has said. HPE has announced a partnership with Nutanix, that has to be a sign of what's to come for SimpliVity. Nutanix has done a good job of acquiring companies that add value to their portfolio. They have also come a long way with their built-in hypervisor AHV. It has a lot of the same basic functionalities of VMware.