HPE SimpliVity Reviews

Our backups are now more efficient and reliable because the SimpliVity system manages them so much better for us. It allows us to replicate them as often as we like to another pair of SimpliVity boxes at one of our remote sites.

Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc. Also, the ability to spin up a new VM within minutes has been a huge time saver.

Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless (or at least be assigned a technician who could walk us through the process for both the SimpliVity software as well as the VMware software).

The SimpliVity solution has been very reliable and stable for us. A few times over the years where we had errors or hardware issues, they were resolved in a timely manner by SimpliVity support.

No.

Customer Service:

It's been pretty good. Before HPE bought Simplivity, I feel the customer service was great. The couple times I have had to contact support after HPE bought SimpliVity, it has been what I have come to expect from large companies.

Technical Support:

The techs that I have worked with have been really good and seem to know their stuff.

This was our first hyper-converged solution. Previously, we had used separate blade servers tied to separate SANs tied to separate backup solutions.

With the assistance from SimpliVity engineers who were on site for the initial deployment, everything went very smoothly.

Our solution was recommended by our trusted vendor and SimpliVity engineers were on site to help implement the solution. Everyone was very knowledgeable.

Make sure you plan for future growth and get a solution that has enough storage/resources for years to come. Originally, we thought we were only going to deploy our most critical VMs using this product, but once we saw how much better it was to manage the VMs, back them up, and deploy new VMs, we started moving a lot more servers over to it. Eventually, we had to buy another pair of SImpliVity OmniCubes to accommodate everything.

No, once we found out about the SimpliVity product and saw a demo, we were sold. We have been very happy with our decision.

If you are looking to consolidate and simplify the management of various servers, definitely look into a solution from SimpliVity.

It removes the complexities of the storage administration.

It has allowed us to reduce our rack footprint. It allowed us to simplify our administration.

I would like to see replication to a cloud solution. I would like to replicate the data so that we have a backup copy off-site. I could then be comfortable getting rid of our existing backup solution. The other feature would be a single copy of the data storage as opposed to a dual copy. In that way, when I do things that automatically have dual copies, such as with our SQL server databases, I would not then be making four copies of the data.

In regards to the HPE Simplivity current offering –

1. Replication of backup to a cloud solution would be advantageous. At present, I’d have to spin up a new site (data center, networking gear, etc.) and place Simplivity nodes there to get replication of backups to meet my offsite requirement. They’ve told me they have a hosting service option, but I’ve not received any real details.

2. Simplivity makes two copies of the VMs on different nodes for redundancy. It would be advantageous to include an option for a single copy. So when there is a product with its own redundancy (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Groups), one is not then making 4 write I/Os for each write – two at the application layer – one to each SQL server node, two at the storage layer – one to two different Simplivity nodes.

When it is properly operated and configured, it is very stable.

When you go past eight nodes, you have to get approval. That has been a concern of ours. Sometimes they say that that it has been approved, and other times, they say that they have to go through the approval process again.

I used tech support prior to the acquisition and it has been good.

We knew that we needed to invest in new solution because we were using a standard, best of breed solution, and it was time to refresh that.

The initial setup was straightforward. Unfortunately, with the deployment services, there was a delay in getting things set up. There's usually a project manager and you have to wait until the gear arrives. The project manager gets involved a week later. After a week, there's a pre-flight. By the time you are up and running, it may be a month from the time you actually had boxes land on the ground.

We didn’t bring in any alternative solutions for a PoC. However, I have done evaluations of other solutions. We chose HPE because it allowed us to get in with a smaller footprint than some of the other solutions, which might require three, four, or five nodes. When selecting vendors, I look for technical feasibility, then operability, and then cost.

I would say that with hyper-converged infrastructure, it's important to understand how the solution is going to meet your needs. It is possible that if the requirements are different, a different vendor would be more appropriate.

DR, Dedupe, Efficiency Rating.

Simplified our DR Solution.

Lowered the Backup Increment from 1 hour to under 15 minutes.

I would like to ability to install a client on a remote server and download images from the federation service.

3 Years.

No, Very easy to implement.

No, Very pleased with the stability of the solution.

No, We have increase capacity 2X.

Outstanding Customer Service.

Outstanding Technical Support.

I migrated from IBM Blade Servers and traditional SAN infrastructure.

Very Straightforward. It was a much easier rollout than expected.

In House.

Very Economical.

Yes, Nutanix.

As an early adopter of SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure, we’ve seen significant benefits of the solution. SimpliVity reduced our data center footprint from 20U to 4U, increased our application delivery performance by 75%, and lowered operational costs in a major way.

I use the solution for virtualised infraestructure of servers.

HPE Simplivity improved the space of disk with deduplication, reduced the time of backups and recovers.

One of the key features is the solution is really fast for backups and deduplication is amazing.

It would be good to have more compatibility with other solutions as an improvement in the future. As a suggestion, in order to have compatibility with other solutions, there could be a license fee for this, and if you don't need to them then you do not need to pay.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good but you need to pay for the additional nodes that can be expensive. We are currently using the solution for one thousand people in our organization.

They could have better-specialized support for more countries.

I rate the customer service of HPE SimpliVity a seven out of ten.

Positive

I used CISCO.

The setup is very easy.

We have three nodes around the country and it took just one week for the deployment.

3 years.

The solution can be expensive if you are using a lot of nodes.

Dell and Cisco.

I would advise those wanting to use this product to be careful before setting up the solution that you have enough disk space, if you do not, you will have to pay for it which is expensive.

The solution works great, it is amazing.

I rate HPE SimpliVity a ten out of ten.

We sell SimpliVity to our customers along with all products that can be categorized as hyper-converged infrastructure. I'm a consultant in pre-sales, and we are resellers and distributors.

We find the solution exciting and rewarding. When we first began with the product, we realized that it wasn't for larger markets. It was meant for only small business enterprises. But with time, the product expanded to incorporate larger markets and became more appropriate for our market. So it's more of an exciting experience these days.

SimpliVity's ability to scale a product like Vmware to the cloud is one feature we found most valuable. SimpliVity is great for small companies. It's a nice product, and our customers are really happy with it. HPE focuses on VMware, and it really shines as a VMware. It's a very good design, and they've put some serious thought into the infrastructure.

The solution has a complex configuration. So I think they should simplify the con. They should go back to having special hardware for the compression with T2, so you don't need to have a big processor if you use just one processor. 

We've been using it for about five to six years.

The scalability of this solution is great but could be better.

The technical support was excellent.

The configuration was a bit complex.

The pricing is fair. However, there's no need to base the pricing on the number of processors you have. The pricing goes up if you are trying to use two CPU configurations.

It's a great choice for people who run small businesses, and their storage capacity doesn't expand more than the number of their virtual machines. The solution doesn't support storage-only nodes. It only supports compute-only nodes, so you have to buy a new license when you increase storage by buying a new node.

I'll rate it an eight or nine out of ten, I think it is one of the best in the market.

We use it for storage.

The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering.

There are a lot of features that they need to improve on, such as the backup and DR feature sets. I would also like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases. They don't have that right now.

The stability is okay. I'm not that impressed.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is okay.

We were using what is called a traditional conversion solution. We switched to SimpliVity because it enabled us to consolidate our nodes. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used D-Plus. They're pretty good.

We have seen ROI.

It's about $10,000 monthly.

We compared it with other products, such as Nutanix and vSAN, and we weighed the features that we needed. This solution was the one that met the greatest number of our requirements. It's also less complicated to deploy and has a smaller footprint.

The product is good. It might not meet all your requirements, but it is one of the solutions that met most of our requirements. There's no "best product" out there but this is likely the best for your needs.

I would rate SimpliVity at a seven out of ten, based on the features and the requirements that we have.

We are resellers. We change virtual environments and use c7000 plus 3PAR Blades. The repository is for virtual machines.

We have VxRail and are comparing HPE SimpliVity deduplication with that of Vxrail.

Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable. The add-ons are good options.

The customer has 100 virtual machines. We need to offer high availability for their production environment.

We run almost all of our production environment on SimpliVity. This includes Citrix, SQL, file, and production applications.

SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution. Training time has be reduced due to SimpliVity's seamless integration with vCenter Flex and Flash clients.

• The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use. 
• The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus. 
• Managing storage doesn't require a specialized skill set. 
• Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime.

• SimpliVity needs to improve the support for native backups, like SQL and Exchange.
• File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster.  
• SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM.  

HPE has decided to sell the solution in all-flash configurations, which may not be as cost effective for smaller mid-market enterprises.

It has helped to reduce our VMware licensing costs due to host consolidation.