HPE SimpliVity Reviews

Hyperconvergence.

More velocity in applications.

Versatile.

The price could be better and it needs to back to other storage.

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.

Powerful, unbeatable hyper-converged solution from HPE SimpliVity 380 with OmniStack. 

It allows you to take advantage of the unique platform of computing, cloud management, storage, and integrated networks, as well as software-defined data management, which is easy to use. 

The most complete hyper-convergence infrastructure solution in the industry complying with the number one server platform in the market.

Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools.

Investing less time in configuration and management means that you will have more time to focus on what is really important: Your company's innovation and rapid commercialization.

As a service integrator we have recommended and implemented SimpliVity for numerous use cases but the product is particularly suited for ROBO and VDI use cases. We are looking at SImpliVity as a solution for Tier 2 and some Tier 1 apps in DC.

Our clients have been very happy with the data efficiency features (OmniCube accelerator card) and the HPE/SimpliVity HyperGuarantee, which is unique. For one of our clients who needed backup capability but did not want to invest in a dedicated backup tool, SimpliVity's native backup with app consistency came in handy. When you do this across more than 80 sites, the savings is significant and the WAN bandwidth efficiency is impressive.

1. Simple management
2. HyperGuarantee
3. Accelerator card
4. Globally federated architecture 

The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it. The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product. The 4KB based dedupe and optimization are definitely helpful as observed by our clients. The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool.

1. For SimpliVity to become a true DC solution, the limit of 32 nodes needs to be investigated. While this may not be a significant deterrent, it brings into question the underlying architecture.
2. HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show.
3. While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it.
4. SimpliVity has little to no integrations. It may have APIs, etc., but there are very few signed on integrations in place. This is necessary to build a solutions ecosystem.

No issues. The product has been performing well. No problems.

The product initially had a limitation of 12 nodes in a federation, which has been increased to 32. Keep this in the back of your mind, particularly when looking at the number of nodes in a single stack.

SimpliVity (before HPE) was pretty darn good. While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence.

Being vendor agnostic, we are not partial to any solution or product. Where we have deployed SimpliVity we have not faced issues. In short, no switching.

The implementation is straightforward when you follow the deployment guide. Stick to the default settings as they work for most setups. If you have the option of having multiple 10Gbps NIC cards, you can explore the option of having a NIC dedicated for storage.

In house. 

• Simpler operations
• No more monolithic SANs
• No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool.

In terms of setup, there are some gotchas and caveats, particularly when discussing stretched clusters. Rapid DR also pretty much goes the same way. Otherwise the process is pretty straightforward. Upgrades were a problem but have been addressed to a large extent. The biggest concern is around support and HPE's apparent lack of knowledgeable people.

Nutanix, VxRail and HyperFlex. Nutanix comes into almost all discussions and is a leader. The only area of concern is the expense as it adds up. VxRail is definitely the number one contender when discussing ROBO use cases but SimpliVity's DVE with its accelerator card is a strong option, particularly from the point of not needing additional hardware to address add-on requirements. SimpliVity also brings capacity savings.

Have a look at multiple solutions before making up your mind. Remember to take a top down approach and start with the app layer first. Your workload decides the infrastructure, not the other way around. Also, for most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly. However ridiculous as this may seem, read the guides and manuals carefully before implementation as they do have points that need to be looked at. If you do not believe me, you will end up going back to the same document anyway, which you want to avoid.

Day-to-day use. We implemented SimpliVity a little over a year ago. I could not be more pleased with the outcome.

I have saved time and money by moving to this platform. I am happy to share my results on the amount of power, time, and space saved.

The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups. My day-to-day experiences are better now that my backups are no longer running into production.

I would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives.

Not at this time.

No issues. The system was sized right by the SimpliVity engineers

So far, the support has been great. I have not needed to call many times.

I did have another product. I found a need to upgrade due to space issues and the amount of time that it was taking to run my backups at night.

The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services. I had no issues.

The vendor team worked with my managed services team. 

I have proven to my CIO that I have saved more money than expected. I am still calculating how much. 

It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal.

I spent several months looking at different options. I looked at VxRail and Nutanix.

If you are just starting your vetting process, make sure SimpliVity is on the table, you won't be disappointed.

Production servers running on virtualization (such as web, DB, mail, and file), and the report server requires more disk performance to reduce report generation.

Improves backup time and DR solution. We can backup with more frequency and minimize RPO and RTO.

• Deduplication
• Compression

It helps us save on the cost of storage and improves the backup and DR solution.

Cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS.

It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity.

We are hosting virtual machines on it, and it is performing quite well.

We used to have a lot more units reserved in the rack for virtual machine hosting. Now it is only two units per site.

Another improvement of course is the backup, the disaster recovery functionality, how it behaves, how fast the backups are done. And the reduction of data.

It's very simple to manage. It has reduced the footprint in the datacenters quite a lot.

The stability is also okay.

It scales quite nicely. We are not very big so I don't know if it really scales up that big. But for a small to medium company, I would say it is much better, for example, than the competition. For us, it is the right size. I think it was the right choice.

I can say that the support was better when it was a separate company, when it was SimpliVity. But, now with HPE it has not been quite as good. But that is normal. HPE is a big company. Things are a little bit, I would say, more "official" than the person-to-person communication that startups have. But that is natural.

The support might take a little bit more time, but we are a non-standard support case because we are actually using the HPE software on a non-HPE hardware. 

We have this pre-HPE hardware. We use it on Dell, and Cisco, and that probably can create more confusion for HPE support. So, I'm really hoping that HPE will come up with some on-premise replacement so that we can actually switch to HPE units, so that HPE can have full support on the system.

We were using traditional server and storage based. We switched to SimpliVity because it was looking promising. It was simple. It reduced hardware presence in the datacenter. It increased backup speeds. The simplicity of the SimpliVity.

It was quite straightforward. We didn't see big problems. It was quite easy. It's easy to manage. It was easy to install also.

The other hyper-converged products, they were not that complete.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, that really depends on the vendor. But of course trustworthiness. And it usually comes down to product rather than partner. But, of course partners, and vendors themselves, are also important.

I think it's really complex to focus on a few things. If you bring in something new we usually like to to see what the end product can actually do. But of course the support on top of that is also important. If you have a good product but nobody can install it or maintain it or give support, then it would also be bad.

I've always said to everybody that SimpliVity is one of the best hyper-converged solutions. But, again, it really depends on the business case. Everybody has to evaluate it for themselves, because businesses are different. I've known that hybrid is the thing for years because that's why we bet on that, we had to have datacenters onsite, and then we can put something in the cloud. But, there are companies that could be only in the cloud, that need to be on-premise only. It really depends on the company.

We use it for a Tentacle system, which we provide to our customers. At the moment, it is not in full release, we have just been testing the following:

• Virtualization
• VMs.

It has been performing well. It was more than what we expected. We have been testing it for three months now.

We are still on a PoC. We have not pushed it out that far.

We are expecting the speed that we have seen so far.

From a generic point of view:

• The sheer speed
• The sheer power.

No issues.

No issues.

We had a standard HPE blade server. Our reseller put forward SimpliVity to us. We tried it out and tested it. I was like, "Wow." It blew us away. 

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was told that it was very straightforward.

Cost is a factor. It is quite expensive.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: price and service. HPE emcompasses these values.