HPE SimpliVity Reviews

General purpose fertilization is our primary use case. 

This IT solution covers our hardware. We are using it in our VMware virtualization aesthetic to cover all the workloads within our region.

If something goes wrong with a patch, or whatever, and we need to make a recovery, it takes about six seconds to recover and get it back to normal. Previously, it could take hours.

We are a bit more productive with this solution because we don't have to spend as much time managing backups and recoveries.

It is easier to manage than what we are doing before.

Speed and recovery are its most valuable features.

The solution has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. It is designed to take advantage of deduplication strategies, which means we don't have to have as much disk in the system to do the job that we used to have to do.

The upgrade path needs to be better defined on the spec sheets. I would like hard numbers to be revealed to me, instead of being hidden by, "We have to go to HPE to get you a special request, then fill a part number for me."

Right now, the stability is good. There has been no degradation of the product.

What has really been affected is our ability to keep our workloads running and playing safely.

I haven't had to try and scale it yet.

It is pretty good for a small to medium-sized business.

The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us.

Our previous solution failed, which is why we switched. We were using the HPE HC380. We had already started examining the SimpliVity solution as a replacement for that stack, but then it failed. So, we had to put SimpliVity in as an emergency.

The initial setup is straightforward. It just runs according to a script.

Our primary use case for this solution is to offer a combination of computing storage services to remote locations. It operates in our data centers.

This solution has improved our organization because it provides ease of management and offers a single management platform for the entire staff.

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

The ease of new deployments could be improved. Also, I think that the scalability of the solution may be inadequate for some people.

It would be good for this platform if we could have an independent gross-storage on the computer.

I have good a good impression of the stability of this solution.

In terms of scalability, this solution fits us. However, I think that the actual limitations are somewhat less than what people might want. For our purpose, it's ok.

We did not use a solution previous to this one. It was added to our IT portfolio because there was a need for it.

The initial setup was not extremely easy, so we needed specific skills in order to bring it into production. Once it was up and running, it was ok.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, I think that partnership is one of the most important criteria. We needed a technology that is universally deployable and has the capability of functioning in the cloud. This allows us to use the service not only in our own premise's data centers but with cloud providers as well.

At the time we were evaluating solutions but there were not many players in the market. We considered Nutanix, but it had its own hardware platform. SimpliVity had an OmniStack configuration that could run on hardware platforms that we already had within the organization. We chose SimpliVity because of this. 

There is a massive technology shift now toward software-defined storage, so we are trying to move from a functionality perspective to an abstraction layer above the equipment we buy.

I think that this is a safe investment for anyone who wants to have a straightforward solution that comes out of the box and can be deployed on an appliance. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for our data center.

Disaster recovery, backup simplification, deduplication, and compression features have helped improve my organization. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery.

The upgrades need improvement. 

One to three years.

We're running more than 40 ESX 6.5 VMs on a two-node SimpliVity system. The SimpliVity nodes are at two different locations and operate in a stretched cluster mode. This provides mirroring of the flash storage in each node. Approximately half of our VMs run on the site on one node and the other half run on the site on two nodes. In the event of a node failure, all VMs will automatically run on the one good node.

• Noticeably better VM performance due to all-flash storage
• Incredibly fast VM backups and restores
• Backups and restores take less than one minute.

• The ability to do frequent full VM backups in seconds
• Currently seeing data reduction ratios of 250:1 with one month of backups
• 2 PB of data reduced to 7.8 TB.

It would be nice if the storage could be expanded by simply adding additional SSD drives. There are unused drive slots but I believe you have to add more nodes if additional storage is required in the future.

SimpliVity updates are a painful and complex process that takes about two hours per node. First, the drivers on each node need to be updated which, although it's a reasonably straightforward process, takes roughly an hour per node. Next, the OmniStack software needs to be updated and this is a complex, Linux command-line process that also takes about an hour per node. Fortunately, as part of HPE product support, they offer remote update assistance but I hope HPE will simplify the update process in the near future.

The system has been very stable and trouble-free for the six months that it has been in service and we expect it to remain this way for many years.

The scalability of the storage and memory are less than ideal. Although there are unused drive slots in the SimpliVity hosts, you can't just add additional drives. You must purchase additional nodes to increase the storage capacity. We needed to expand the RAM after putting the nodes in service, and the only option was to add another 384 GB of RAM, the same amount that the node came with.

We've only placed two technical support calls, and they were very helpful.

Previously, we had a conventional architecture with three host servers and two SANs.

The initial configuration was somewhat more complex than a conventional setup as the OmniStack controller requires additional configuration.

A vendor team did the complete installation from the racking-and-stacking to the SimpliVity and VMware configuration. The vendor team was very knowledgeable and made what would have been a daunting task a piece of cake.

N/A.

While SimpliVity is not inexpensive, we found it was not significantly more expensive than the cost of buying equivalent host servers and equivalent SAN storage. HPE installed and configured the equipment as part of the purchase, so that was painless.

We also evaluated VxRail, vSAN, StorMagic, Nutanix, Pivot, and others.

• To build up HCI and upgrade existing VMware farm
• To set up local HA and site DR solution for business
• Fast backup solution

From eight ESXi servers (local HA only, without site DR) to three SimpliVity solutions in prod site with HA and one SimpliVity solution in DR site.

For setting up site-to-site DR.

• It comes with backup and site-to-site DR function
• All license included
• Backup and restore are very fast

• Backup from D2D only to "D2D to tape"
• Supports hybrid HDD storage (lower cost for the second-tier workload, now all SSD storage only)
• Support

General IT workloads of core services and standard line of business applications.

Reduced storage footprint of primary and secondary copies of data and WAN replication bandwidth with good performance.

Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely. Less experienced admins can perform storage tasks.

Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes.

Currently, we are using it for our VMware workstation. We use it to host our non-production servers.

The hardware deduplication, because it is better for this use case.

We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented.

They are using backup from snapshots. Maybe they can integrate with VM or similar mechanics.

It has a proven track record of stability.

The scalability is okay.

HPE has a good track record of support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

At FDF Energy Services, IT is an important differentiator. It allows us to maintain a significant competitive advantage in the market. OmniCube is a perfect fit for our infrastructure because it allows us to simultaneously improve our levels of data protection and disaster recovery capabilities, while significantly reducing our costs. The simplification of our IT environment, coupled with the cost savings, allows us to further invest in the applications running our business.

SimpliVity allowed us to radically simplify our infrastructure. The solution provides superior value and innovation in a converged solution. We chose SimpliVity over Nutanix because OmniCube is architected with inline dedupe and compression. This includes simple backup and data protection for all our VMs, and can be managed centrally from one login and interface through VMware vCenter.

When SimpliVity announced the availability of its solution with Cisco, we jumped at the opportunity. Now, we are running all of our core applications on the SimpliVity/Cisco platform.

The technology is a game changer. It represents the future of convergence. I love the "data center-in-a-box" concept, and it is backed by solid hardware and all the functionality needed, including data deduplication, replication, and WAN optimization.

• Ease of Use
• Disaster recovery
  
• Reliability

IT is the lifeline of the company. Early on, management aligned business strategy with IT strategy, ranging from sales to product delivery. Weekly manager meetings ensured that business strategy is aligned with IT, allowing us to develop processes without bringing IT in later.

It was inconceivable that we could deploy a 2U solution and gain all the server, storage, and data protection functionality that we needed. Scalability was a huge factor, along with ease of use, and management, which was all integrated from within vCenter.

Support has been top notch, both responsive and knowledgeable.

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

We looked at a lot of other converged infrastructure solutions. To be honest, many of them are ‘one-trick ponies’ which didn’t deliver the inline deduplication, scalability, built-in data protection capabilities or superior architecture that SimpliVity’s OmniCube did.

I have a lot of confidence in the SimpliVity OmniCube product. It has enabled us to streamline our data center and improve our ability to rapidly recover from a disaster.