HPE Hyper Converged Reviews

With the primary data center of clients where we do virtualization, Hyper Convergence basically gives them a little advantage over the traditional virtualization. The solution is used on-premise.

There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high. It's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking about the SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution. With the competition, if two hard drives fail, they're out of the picture. Whereas with HPE Hyper Converged, in each node, even if three hard drives go down, they're better. There's continuity.

In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM. I'm specifically talking about certain propositions in the dHCI that only support VMware as the Hypervisor. They could have all different layers of Hypervisors, like the KVM or X, Y, Z.

Currently dHci Nimble offers only VMware as native hypervisor and will be great if it can support others  like Red Hat, KVM etc too. Although this is not a limitation as one can install Red Hat & other operating systems as a Virtual machine on top of VMware hypervisor. 

I have been using HPE Hyper Converged for more than five years now.

The solution is very stable. I haven't seen any failures with the deployments we have in the Hyper Convergence environment.

If I talk about HPE Enterprise SimpliVity, the scalability is there because you can add on nodes. If you're talking about the Converged level, there could be a lot of improvements because if I do an upgrade on one node, I need to do that similarly on the second node, which increases costs.

The support layer from HPE is pretty good. If you are purchasing that from HPE Enterprise at the time of purchasing the equipment, the support is pretty smooth.

Positive

Initial setup is pretty easy. It's not that complicated.

If I'm comparing the solution with Dell, HPE Hyper Converged is definitely cheaper in my experience.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

dSCI is Disaggregated Hyper Convergence. For the existing investment that a customer has done on a HPE platform, for example, they don't need to throw away that investment because they can re-utilize them in the dHCI configuration. Secondly, it's more scalable at the component level. That means I can upgrade when required for storage or computing needs separately. I don't need to do the same, like what they used to do in SimpliVity.

Until recently, I was selling HPE SimpliVity. After dHCI has come in the picture with Nimble, we started promoting that because they have better features. When it comes to Hyper Convergence only, the features in SimpliVity and dHCI are different.

It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well.

Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes.

I've been working with this solution for more than five years.

The stability is ten out of ten.

The scalability of HPE Hyper Converged is limited, and I'd rate it at five out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good, and I'd give them an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is okay, and I'd give it a seven out of ten. We have it deployed on-premises, and I recommend it because cloud deployment can be expensive.

The deployment takes an hour to a couple of hours at maximum.

I would rate the price at seven out of ten. There are no additional licensing fees, but it would be cheaper to go with a dHCI solution.

This solution is for small- or medium-scale organizations and not for large scale companies. However, I would strongly recommend not going with HPE Hyper Converged because of the availability of a dHCI solution, which is the new technology.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate HPE Hyper Converged at eight. If scalability is not an issue for an organization, then this solution will meet their requirements.

These days, most of our customers prefer Hyper Converged because of its performance and because it's an all-in-one solution. It's easier to manage. Our current client has 200 users.

Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure.

We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME. 

We have been using Hyper Converged for nearly four years.

Hyper Converged is highly stable because it's installed on our VMware platform. It's well designed and integrated with our Hypervisor software. 

Hyper Converged is scalable but there are some complications.  If we want to scale, we have to scale to the full capacity. We cannot go for granular upgrades. You can mention that we can upgrade, but for scalability, we need to add more notes. There is no granular options to upgrade the system.

I rate HPE Hyper Converged eight out of 10. I rate Hyper Converged eight because there are still some competing solutions doing better than HPE on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. 

We like that HPE Hyper Converged requires only information about the solution.

It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability, and its HPC technologies and workflow provide downtime and increase the technology. It is an investment that improves profit margins to achieve breakthrough results.

This solution has optimized utilization and efficiency that simplifies the administrations for the cluster and close and supercomputers. It is also beneficial to maintain the HPC workload.

We like the fact that it is reliable.

This solution is very costly.

We have been using this solution for about three years.

It is a stable solution. 

The scalability is fair. 

We have had no issues with the technical support. 

I rate this solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for infrastructure and VDI environment. I'm an infrastructure architect.

I like the backup resolution updates.

I think the solution could be more secure and more economical.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The customer support for HPE is good, I'm happy with it. 

I deployed the solution and it was straightforward. Deployment time depends on the customer's network. We work with integrators to implement in other organizations and there can be anywhere between 30 and 12,000 users. The solution requires one maintenance person. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

My primary use case is as an all-in-one solution for SMB.

The features I've found most valuable are manageability, integrated backup solution SimpliVity, and deep integration.

An area for improvement would be the ease of installation and setup.

I've been working with this solution for a number of years.

I have not heard of any concerns or issues with stability.

Technical support is fairly good.

Installation takes anywhere from a few days to weeks.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.