HPE SimpliVity vs SteelFusion comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Riverbed are both solutions in the HCI category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while Riverbed is ranked #30. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 5.5% mindshare in HCI, compared to Riverbed’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

HPE SimpliVity

Read 155 HPE SimpliVity reviews

12,842 Views
12,328 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

SteelFusion

Read 2 SteelFusion reviews

1,414 Views
1,244 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HPE SimpliVity

SteelFusion

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

HPE SimpliVity and SteelFusion compete in integrated IT solutions, focusing on data management and processing. HPE SimpliVity holds an advantage by enhancing operational efficiency through performance and management optimization, while SteelFusion has strong points in data centralization for operations demanding frequent remote access.

Features: HPE SimpliVity offers hyperconverged infrastructure, optimizing performance while simplifying management. It provides strong data efficiency and integrated data protection capabilities. SteelFusion is recognized for enabling data centralization, minimizing latency, and ensuring robust performance for remote access operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE SimpliVity offers a streamlined deployment process with highly reliable support. SteelFusion focuses on simplicity in deployment but requires specialized support services, maintaining smooth service despite customer feedback favoring HPE SimpliVity in deployment ease and service satisfaction.

Pricing and ROI: HPE SimpliVity presents competitive pricing and strong ROI through its data optimization that reduces costs. SteelFusion involves higher initial investment for centralized data management benefits, which can lead to significant long-term savings. However, HPE SimpliVity provides better immediate ROI, with SteelFusion's value centered on strategic long-term benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

November 2026

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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

Ranking in HCI

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

155

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SteelFusion

Ranking in HCI

30th

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE SimpliVity is 5.5%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SteelFusion is 1.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
HPE SimpliVity	5.5%
SteelFusion	1.4%
Other	93.1%

HCI

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen

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.

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it_user866178

Chief Technology Officer at MAZZETTI+GBA

Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices

The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are the backup rate and the backup transfer; you don't have to purchase any other licenses other than Microsoft or for VMware, everything is included in your box, and you can move one TB of VM data in one minute, which is one of SimpliVity's benefits."

"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."

"The backup and restore features are the most valuable."

"PCX card implementation improves speed."

"Customers have moved to SimpliVity for ease of use, consolidation of vendors, reducing cost, improving performance, improve data protection capabilities, and even managing storage at multiple sites."

"The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box."

"The configuration capabilities are good."

"You have to manage so much hardware if you have IT systems, and each system has a different web interface, log, and reporting service, but I can manage all the services from a single interface with SimpliVity, and it saves me time."

More HPE SimpliVity pros

"That is why Riverbed SteelFusion has delivered a masterclass technology that not only abstracted and virtualized the storage vendors’ unique logical storage structures, it has made it logically closer and seamless to the branch applications from a performance and experience perspective."

"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."

Cons

"I would like some reporting about backup and replication."

"SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one."

"The local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HP doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here."

"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."

"The stability is not good. I have fewer than 20 VMs per node, I have nine nodes in my environment, and when it goes south, 20 VMs will go down, even though there's a replica on other nodes."

"While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it."

"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."

"SimpliVity updates are a painful and complex process that takes about two hours per node."

More HPE SimpliVity cons

"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable and quite reasonably priced in terms of the product one gets."

"It's a costly solution and is more expensive than VxRail."

"It's about $10,000 monthly."

"The pricing of HPE SimpliVity is comparable with other solutions so the price is good."

"The licenses from the product are expensive compared to the other solutions in the market."

"Cost of this product is high."

"We're paying $3,000-$4,000 a month."

"Scaling isn't cheap"

More HPE SimpliVity pricing and cost advice

"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	67
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	80

No data available

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 ...

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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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What needs improvement with HPE SimpliVity?

I haven't noticed anything that should be better in HPE SimpliVity, as I haven't done extensive work on this platform; I have only completed a couple of projects recently. Pricing could be an area ...

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Comparisons

VxRail vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 22% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 15% of the time

VMware vSAN vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE SimpliVity Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs SteelFusion

Compared 16% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs SteelFusion

Compared 8% of the time

Pivot3 vs SteelFusion

Compared 6% of the time

IBM PurePower System vs SteelFusion

Compared 5% of the time

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs SteelFusion

Compared 5% of the time

More SteelFusion Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE SimpliVity

October 2026

Download HPE SimpliVity product report

Buyer's Guide

HCI

November 2026

Download SteelFusion product report

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI

No data available

Overview

HPE SimpliVity provides businesses with advanced features such as inline deduplication, compression, and instant recovery, enabling efficient backup and scalability. Its integration with VMware and centralized management fosters ease of use, establishing a streamlined IT infrastructure.

HPE SimpliVity stands as a comprehensive solution for organizations seeking a robust infrastructure capable of handling diverse workloads. Its features like integrated backup and disaster recovery ensure quick restores and high availability. Known for its efficient use of storage and data processing capabilities, it helps reduce operational costs. This system offers a reliable framework for virtualized environments, enhancing disaster recovery processes, IT operations, and application hosting while supporting workloads such as Oracle, SAP, and SQL.

What are HPE SimpliVity's key features?

Inline Deduplication: Minimizes data redundancy, enhancing storage efficiency.
Compression: Optimizes storage, reducing space requirements.
Instant Recovery: Facilitates rapid restoration of data and applications.
Centralized Management: Simplifies IT operations with unified management.
Scalable Architecture: Adapts to business growth seamlessly.

What benefits should users seek in HPE SimpliVity reviews?

Cost Reduction: Achieves savings through efficient data processing and storage utilization.
High Availability: Ensures consistent service and data accessibility.
VMware Integration: Provides compatibility and smooth operations in VMware environments.
Quick Disaster Recovery: Enables swift restoration processes for continued business operations.

Organizations deploy HPE SimpliVity mainly for virtualized environments, focusing on disaster recovery, IT operations, and application hosting. Extensively used in sectors for VDI, backups, and data center tasks, it supports major workloads like Oracle and SAP, simplifying infrastructure management while ensuring high availability.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

SteelFusion is a high-performance converged infrastructure solution designed to streamline and secure data management in branch office environments, combining server, storage, and network functionalities in a single platform.

SteelFusion enhances efficiency in remote IT operations by integrating with existing IT systems to deliver seamless data centralization and protection. Its architecture supports diverse applications without compromising on performance, making it essential for enterprises looking to optimize their remote branch office operations. Organizations can reduce data footprint, improve resiliency, and ensure data compliance across dispersed locations.

What are the key features of SteelFusion?

Edge Servers: Deliver high-speed performance with robust compute capabilities.
FusionSync: Offers real-time data replication to maintain data consistency.
Virtual Services Platform: Simplifies branch IT with centralized management.
Branch Recovery: Minimizes downtime with rapid recovery options.
Hybrid Cloud Support: Integrates seamlessly with cloud services for extended scalability.

What benefits can users expect in reviews?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces overall IT costs by consolidating infrastructure.
Data Security: Enhances data protection through centralized monitoring.
Operational Simplicity: Lowers complexity in management and deployment.
Performance Optimization: Ensures consistent application delivery across branches.
Risk Mitigation: Decreases risk with improved disaster recovery processes.

SteelFusion is prominently implemented in industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, where secure data access and rapid recovery are critical. These environments benefit from its robust data management capabilities, enabling them to maintain continuous operations while reducing operational burdens. Its deployment allows businesses to adapt quickly and remain competitive in fast-paced markets.

Riverbed

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House

Roxtec, Engen, Bobst, CBP, IUCN, Mahoning County, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, StarWind and others in HCI. Updated: November 2026.

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