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.
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"They offer top-tier support."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"It's a very nice solution. It's a complete solution that we are looking for because we don't have personnel with expertise."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"Best for companies just starting out."
"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 solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"The interface is very good and is very easy to navigate. You can find everything you need from one central place."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good."
"I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software."
"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."
"It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process."
"It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface."
"In terms of scalability, adding a number of nodes, I find that it will not be any issues."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"They should optimize the administration stack because it is consuming too much memory. It ends up consuming 20% of memory. They have another product for this feature, but I would like to have this feature within HPE SimpliVity."
"The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"It would be better if it could integrate more easily with other vendors."
"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."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"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."
"Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps."
"The compatibility and integration of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved. For example, we have a WAF application firewall and it does not work on this solution. Not all the OS's run on AOS. You need to have a newer version of an operating system if you want Nutanix to perfectly run all the different options."
"In the next release of this solution, they could improve by being more competitive with VMware. I would like all third-party solutions to work well with Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them."
"I believe that improvements could be made in regards to the DR in addition to deduplication and integration with others platforms. They also do not offer opportunities for network virtualization so it would be nice to see that in the future."
"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."
"Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all."
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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 86 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.