HPE SimpliVity Reviews

• The backup and restore capability
• The speed with which it backs up
• Restores can be done in seconds

The tool makes it more efficient for us. Instead of having to get support for multiple different solutions like storage, compute, and network, and having to contact individual vendors, it's all one solution. We can contact one person and get support over the phone. We don't have to call multiple vendors, having them point fingers at each other.

Additional features would be having more visibility into the overall infrastructure and to know what's happening with the VMs.

Stability has been rock solid. We've put it in. The transition was easy, and it stayed up the whole time. There have been no issues at all.

We have not done a whole lot with scalability. We've upgraded a little bit, but based on everything that we've seen, it's easy, simple, and can scale as much as we need it.

I've used SimpliVity and HPE. Once I get a hold of them, they are great. Sometimes, it's a little bit difficult to get a hold of them, but once we do, their technicians are great.

We were using a different solution, and it was reaching end of life. That is when we started evaluating different vendors and products. We didn't know about this tool. We saw their solution, saw the backup and restore, the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold.

We chose HPE because we ran a test between this and one other competitor. We tested some drive failures and that type of thing, and found out that the data protection was much better with SimpliVity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are functionality, performance, and support. We looked at all of those and that's why we chose SimpliVity.

The initial setup was very simple and easy. We had it up in half a day and we were up, running, and migrating our VMs.

I would have them take a look at it and do a proof of concept. They should take a look the backup and restore and the ability to restore very large VMs in seconds.

The inline dedupe and compression has allowed me to run all my servers and appliances (total 60) in an HA configuration while taking up just 8U of rack space (4x2U nodes). There is incredibly fast I/O and with the OmniCubes, my users are spoiled with the super-fast reads and writes. Did I mention that we truly enjoy our 99.999% up time?

The ease of managing this system! Recently added the All Flash CN3400F and oh my goodness are these nodes fast as lighting! I love having a private cloud for my organization. Public cloud will never care for my organizations data more than I do.

I gave it an excellent rating, thus I think it's well excellent! If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups. You have to hunt a bit if you have to restore a file. Index the backups and it would be perfect!

It's been a little dodgy this year on my CN3000s at Prod when they have lost HA Sync. This has only happened when we've lost Internet connection to our DR site. I'm still trying to understand why this happens. It's quite a pain when this occurs.

Slight inconvenience with scaling out with the All Flash nodes. We had to put them into their own datacenter because of compatibility issues with the CN3000s (seriously?). While it's not the end of the world, I unfortunately am not able to do inline vmotion of servers between the datacenters. Instead I have to do a cold storage vmotion with a powered off guest server. Not the end of the world, but is inconvenient to me because it makes for some late nights. A larger server takes many hours to move over my 1GB network. This may just be an issue with my configuration and lack of a 10GB switch.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been slightly impacted since HP purchased Simplvity. The support is still excellent, it just takes them a bit more time to get back to you when you open even a critical ticket. I'll give HP some time to adjust and update this part of the review later.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent +++. The HP purchase of Simplvity has not impacted the skill level of the engineers I have worked with. They are still great.

We had an aging Compellent SAN which was critically close to running out of disk space. Dell would not sell me an additional disk enclosure, thus forcing me to do a forklift upgrade. Moving to the Simplivity HCI allowed me considerably more resources and we came in under budget.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It's almost plug and play! Adding the All Flash node needed a little more effort.

A vendor team implemented it. Expertise was excellent. I couldn't have asked for better.

I'm not in finance, so I don't know the numbers, but I do know that I've since added 10 additional VMs and appliances, and can still add more without having to buy anything. I've saved on VM licensing because I was able to get rid of SRM. I couldn't even imagine how much it would cost to host all these servers in the public cloud!

This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN. Licensing is easily maintained. Keep in mind that you still have to license VMware per processor.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Nutanix and Dell Compellent.

Having my private cloud within my Simplivity infrastructure has given me so much more than I could have ever expected. I love the ability to fire off a full, application-aware backup of a VM and have it complete in just under four seconds. Also, I can now fail my entire data center over to my DR site and have everything up an running in well under 30 minutes, with my mission-critical servers up in under 10 minutes (the servers do have to power on!). It's awesome. You do need EZ-DR by VM20/20 to accomplish this, but it is a fraction of the cost of VMware Site Recovery Manager.

In the world of traditional backups using backup software which writes to either tape or disk, the backup software will index the files to match exactly to how they appear on the server. When performing a native Simplivity backup which allows for file level restoration , the folders, subfolders and files are not indexed but rather are listed in a somewhat, but not totally, random order. More often than not, when I am asked to restore something from backup, it will be a single file that someone has either accidentally deleted or overwritten. I have very large file servers which contain thousands of folders and subfolders. Without the benefit of indexing, it sometimes takes a bit of searching to find the correct folder/file that needs to be restored. It is occasionally easier to just restore the entire file server (renamed of course), which only takes about 10 seconds, and copy the file from the restored VM than it is to find the single file in the backup. This is just an inconvenience, definitely not a deal breaker.

The most valuable features are the backup and restore capability, the speed with which it can back-up, and restores can be done in seconds.

It makes it more efficient for us. Instead of having to get support for multiple different solutions like storage, compute, network, and having to contact individual vendors, it's all one solution. We can contact one person, get support over the phone without having to call multiple vendors, and not have them point fingers at each other.

Additional features would be more visibility into the overall infrastructure and what's happening with the VMs.

Stability has been rock solid. We've put it in. The transition was easy and it stayed up the whole time, with no issues at all.

We have not done a whole lot with scalability. We've upgraded a little bit, but from everything that we've seen, it's easy, simple, and it can scale as much as we need it to.

I've used SimpliVity technology support a lot. In terms of HPE technology support, I've only used them a little bit in the last few weeks. Once I get a hold of them, they're great. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to get a hold of them, but once we get a hold of them, their technicians are great.

We were using a different solution and we were reaching end of life. That's when we started evaluating different vendors and different products. We didn't know much about HPE. We saw their solution, saw the backup restore, and the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold. We chose HPE because we did a test between this and one other competitor. We tested some dry failures and that type of thing, and found out that the data protection was much better with SimpliVity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are functionality, performance, and support. We looked at all of those and that's why we chose SimpliVity.

The initial setup was very simple and easy. We had it up in half a day. We were up and running and migrating our VMs over.

I would have them take a look at it and do a proof of concept. Take a look at the backup and restore capability and the ability to restore very large VMs in seconds.

It is a hyperconverged system with all the benefits that can lead to.

It was an important step to add this product to our portfolio because it meets our customers needs and demands.

The graphical interface and reports need to be improved compared to other brands.

We have been using SimpliVity OmniCube for 2.5 years: 1 in internal evaluation and 1.5 in reselling and supporting it for our customers.

We have a lot of implementations and until now, we never found any issue due to the product itself. Only in one situation we encountered some sort of problem not caused by the OmniCube subsystem. It was due to Dell hardware.

We have absolutely not had any issues with scalability. A customer just has to buy another box and plug it into the system if they need more logical space. Or, if they need more memory or cores, just attach a non-SimpliVity system.

We rate technical support 4.5/5 based on their professionalism and time of resolution.

We evaluated different solutions, but SimpliVity was the best choice in performance and scalability.

It takes just 20 minutes to have an entire SimpliVity federation to be operative in a production area. There is nothing simpler.

Compared to other brands with the same functional levels and structure, SimpliVity has lower implementation and licensing costs regarding a VMware environment infrastructure, for example.

We even evaluated software solutions such as DataCore, which we support and manage as well. But, software-based solutions cannot be on the same level as a 3.0 hyperconverged system.

We advise everybody to invest in evaluating the product directly. For example, we can do a PoC where we implement SimpliVity in an existing environment without interruption of customer services as a test for a couple of weeks. Then the customer is free to decide.

VM backup and recovery.

Prior to Simplivity, we struggled to complete weekly file server backups over the weekend, and full VM restores would take hours. With Simplivity we are able to backup file servers every 4 hours and restore them in less than 20 seconds. These file servers are approximately 2TB.

I would like to see Simplivity come out with some sort of Simplivity Engineer certification, which would grant me the ability to handle the more technical issues on my own, without having to call support.

Approximately two years.

No issues with deployment.

None.

Not so far

Customer service has been great.

Technical support has been great. They have improved software upgrades dramatically, allowing me to perform my own upgrades without having to call support.

In the past we were running UCS with a NetApp SAN connected via FC. We were ready for a refresh when we saw Simplivity. It looked like a perfect fit.

Initial setup was very easy. We just input IP addresses for each network and the setup wizard took care of everything.

Pricing is a little high in my opinion. Prices have climbed consistently since our purchase and install.

We did an evaluation with Nutanix, but found their data redundancy was not sufficient for us.

In a thinly provisioned IT staffed environment, we were able to accomplish our work without having to stay after-hours anymore. Our backup RPO and RTO policies are met and done during business hours. Issues are resolved by calling one support line/number. No more headaches and hassles with finger-pointing blame between/among technology vendors. We now have a DR site with the ability to failover our production servers.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or the consolidation of the traditional server stack; i.e., compute nodes, storage, and storage networking were a perfect fit for our environment. Also, SimpliVity's compression and deduplication of data at inception yielded "more" capacity than we expected. Furthermore, the ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain. Finally, the reality of having a remote disaster recovery (DR) site without needing heavy financial investment sealed the deal for us.

Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had. DR "automation."

In the Life Sciences disciplines, we generate a lot of big data 500GB to 1TB in file size. For example, DNA and gene sequencing, image processing (sections of the heart or brain), and other data generated by a scientific instrument. I have not stored any of these data on SimpliVity. Rather, we use a traditional SAN type storage for those data.

I would like to try storing those kinds of big data on SimpiVity and see if the compression and de-dupe would make it work. Currently, I only store user generated data files on SimpliVity and have no issues. As for DR automation, I would like to purchase Rapid DR from SimpliVity, which allows me to automate the disaster recover process/procedure. Currently, disaster recovery is done manually.

We had to update a SimpliVity patch that made the networking compatible with our internal networking.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. We've added nodes into our server federation without issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used a different solution. It was not a true HCI.

The initial setup was almost painless! We had a misconfigured network setting, which the SimpliVity engineer resolved for us at no extra charge.

We have a SimpliVity sales engineer do the installation. I would rate him to be an expert. The installation was completed within four hours.

HCI has indeed reduced the complexities of our server environment. My systems architect/engineer now has more time to work on other pressing projects and investigate new technologies, which he was able to acquire and implement. No need to work overtime to resolve issues anymore.

Talk to your SimpliVity team about it. They will assist you in right-sizing your environment and getting you the correct systems and licenses so that you are able to accomplish the same production or more for less than your current infrastructure.

Before choosing, we evaluated Cisco UCS FlexPod. We also evaluated and did a proof of concept (PoC) of a direct competitor's product after our SimpliVity acquisition. In short, we validated our investment with 100% confidence.

Be open minded and consider a PoC to run some of your production load. You won't be disappointed.

• Scalability
• Ease of setup
• Reduced complexity
• Flexibility

We are resellers, so it allows us to sell our customers solutions that make their work easier. They can make a port more rapidly and fit a broader range of cloud data platforms.

I would like to see more storage options, such as hybrid storage options. We sell other products as well. We run across a lot of customers who are not quite ready to go to all-flash, while it's probably a better idea. Not having an all-flash option right now is probably a hindrance for us, because the customers just get turned off when they see that. Even though what HPE is selling is actually a better option, sometimes convincing customers of that, when they are only looking at the bottom line, is difficult.

So far, stability is great.

Scalability is very good.

We have not really used technical support. It is pretty self-explanatory.

We saw changes in the market and changes in the way applications are developed. The market is going away from what we think of as databases, and is moving toward cloud data applications.

The setup was very straightforward.

We have used HPE, Dell, EMC, and Cisco. Typically, it's the customers' preference. A lot of times we have customers who are very comfortable with their existing HPE equipment. Going forward, if we go to a customer who doesn't have an existing preference, then that is where we are going to start directing them because of the partnership cooperation. HPE shines right now when compared to the other options.

Compared to the protection offerings of the platforms, I think the competing native data protection just isn't there. SimpliVity really got that part nailed down. I would think that's probably an easy way to show the customer that it's the superior product.

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.