"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."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"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."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"It's quite easy to install."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"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."
"We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"The setup is very easy."
"I don't know if it is the best or the worst but it's very easy to install and very easy to balance. Sometimes that it's a problem because the installer of these data gets extremely scared because it's so easy. The product is easy to install, easy to balance, and easy to work with. Another really good point is the instant recovery."
"We do like the instant recovery... Now, we say, "Okay, give me 15 seconds and I can get this back up for you." And within that 15 seconds it's on and the only thing that we have to do afterwards is vMotion it off of the Rubrik storage back to where it should rest."
"The feature that I found most valuable is Live Mount. You can either mount a virtual machine from a snapshot, or you can mount a volume from the snapshot. You can mount one disk to the server to retrieve data, or you can mount the whole VM, rename it, and use it as a test VM. If your VM gets corrupted, you just mount one from the snapshot, and you have your production VM's backup. So, Live Mount is definitely the best feature for me as an end-user."
"It has reduced our maintenance efforts. The amount of time and effort that would have gone in troubleshooting various issues related a data crash has been addressed by Rubrik. So, it has helped to improve our productivity. The data is being captured about our customers periodically that is secure and safe."
"There is a live-restore feature, their Live Mount, and the way it works we can instantly recover a VM, a past backup, to be directly attached to our VMware environment. Rubrik will act as a disk for it. It's like an instant restore. Within a few minutes our VM is up and running. And then, if we want to restore it, we can just migrate it to our actual storage."
"I would rate the solution's web interface at eight out of ten. It's just fantastic and intuitive. It's so easy to use. I've never done any formal training on Rubrik, but I was able to quickly come to grips with its capabilities."
"The management and ease of installation are the most valuable features."
"I value the options it has for storage tiering (i.e. whether it should be a flash, SSD, or pushed to the cloud) depending on the data provided."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"The product is expensive."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"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."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"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."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"The price of Rubrik is too high, especially when you are considering a change in the total backup solution."
"The reporting, in particular the customization of reports, needs to be improved."
"The licensing cost is quite high. That is something that needs to be worked out, because so many times it happens that the team does not have the budget or there are other issues at that time. Cost has become an important factor in deciding whether to continue with the Rubrik solution."
"I would like to see the entire Office 365 product suite backed up by Rubrik. For instance, they do SharePoint and Exchange online, but they don't back up Microsoft Teams. So, I would like to see more of the Office 365 suite added into their backup capabilities."
"If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough. They can't remote it to the peer site and manipulate it back up in order to move it over, take a copy of production, slap it over, and test it out. As I understand, they are working on it. Replication works. We also get spoiled by how good things are now. We get to a point where it is so easy but when something isn't instant gratification, it seems that everything else is so amazing, why isn't this right?"
"The Office 365 protection could be improved."
"Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier."
"The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement. They do work with us whenever we mention anything that needs to be done or anything that we want. We find that bringing up the management interface is a little slow and not as intuitive as we would like, but it's been getting better as it evolves."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 4th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 60 reviews while Rubrik is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery Software with 36 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2, while Rubrik is rated 9.0. 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 Rubrik writes "Easy to use with an intuitive web interface, helpful support, good performance, and saves us time". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas Rubrik is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Complete Data Protection, Veritas NetBackup and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain).
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