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.
"It's quite easy to manage."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"I find the replication feature valuable."
"Our clients are very comfortable with the single management of the complete stack. The creation of VM systems is also very fast."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"The performance is good. It's stable and easy to operate."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion."
"The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform."
"The solution remains stable across versions."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its software Move, which we use to migrate virtual info from another platform to the Nutanix platform."
"The speed of the operations and of creation of VM is fantastic."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The documentation could be better."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"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."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
"The solution wasn't able to connect to the cloud, and there's no micro-segmentation. The configuration of this solution is also complex."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"SimpliVity's data management could be better. Nutanix's interface is a bit more user-friendly."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"We would like to see a cloud version of Acropolis AOS. Currently, we're trying to implement an AWS environment for some solutions, but we would like to use another technology also to enhance our organization, so we are looking for another technology for this, especially a cloud solution."
"The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP."
"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."
"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."
"I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface."
"This solution would be improved with built-in integration with Rubrik."
"Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 60 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 1st in HCI with 85 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 "Serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Sangfor HCI, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Hyper-V. 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.