HPE SimpliVity Reviews

• Backups
• Recovery
• VMware VirtualCenter integration
• DR
• Being able to present the solution as NFS SAN to existing compute

Backups are all automatic and admins do not have to worry if the production VMs are being backed up. Easy backup policy with no LUN administration is also one less task to worry about. DR and DR replication are no longer an issue; no longer have to seed a SAN locally and ship it out to the DR site.

I like how VMware vSAN has their ready node pre-configured for certain workload and application types.

The many models and EOL on certain areas on their site are a bit confusing. Allow customers to try and deploy the units themselves and have support follow up later to validate the deployments.

Invest more on sales and marketing as they have a great product.

Using the cheap 7200 RPM disks on certain models just drags the product down when first impression counts the most.

Make sure the customer fully understands the CPU and memory overhead of each hosts.

I have used it for six months in production with tier 1 servers.

We encountered deployment issues, as it is was not as smooth as I planned, but things was corrected.

We encountered stability issues, we had the wrong model for our environment. Once we got the correct model, everything was very stable.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is 9/10.

Technical support is 9/10.

I previously used DataCore SANSymphony, Nimble and from my last company, it was vSAN 6.0 and 3PAR SAN. Our Datacore SAN that we migrated off of lacks a lot of features and was built on very cheap hardware.

SimpliVity meets all of our requirements and also address other future requirements that were not in the scope of the primary storage project.

Initial setup was complex, as they would not let the customer try to deploy the configurations of the units.

Implementation was mostly in-house, but leverage SimpliVity support for remote deployment and configurations.

• Overall hardware cost savings compared to traditional fiber SAN.
• Reduce SME of SAN admins.
• Reduce SME of backup admins.
• Reduce third-party backup.
• Reduce datacenter footprint and complexity.
• DR software was an added bonus.

Look at the bigger picture on your requirements as this solution can address the complete stack for most company's needs. Licensing is simple but be aware that the OmniView feature and RapidDR software is not free. You should use VMware enterprise plus licenses but can get away with standard edition licenses.

• Pivot3
• Nutanix
• VMware vSAN 6.0
• Nimble
• Tegile
• Pure Storage
• Compellent
• EMC VCE and vxRail
• Tintri

See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse....

The rapid backup and restore functionality improved our efficiency in the development area.

We no have the ability to restore a production environment to multiple development environments with a few clicks in a very short time. With 6 development teams working on different modules on the same system, this helps a lot in their agile approach.

One thing that might be a deal killer is the additional VM Ware licenses. It is important to keep this in mind, especially when moving over from free hypervisor like Hyper-V.

This would be applicable if users migrate from a free Hypervisor like Hyper-V. With Simplivity not yet supporting these, one has to procure the VMWare licenses. As this cost is in US$, it can become very pricey, especially for clients in South Africa!

So again, it is just something people need to be aware of if they are not already using VMWare.

18 months.

None.

The only issue we once had (it took us and then engineers a while to figure out) was a heating/airflow problem. This was self inflicted after upgrading the cooling system.

None. We started with two, got another one, and then another three. Deployment and expansion was a breeze.

Excellent. Local sales team always available and involved.

Also excellent. Always helpful and available during upgrades or maintenance windows.

Had a traditional Server/SAN setup. Upgrading that turned out to be more expensive than moving over to the new solution.

Lots of work, but straightforward. We basically rebuild all our VM's (from Hyper-V to VMWare).

We made use of the local team. Very skilled!

One must make sure that you understand all the functionality that comes with the solution, and then try to establish the cost of not having these in place!

Yes. Looked at expanding the old solution, and also looked at Nutanix.

Apart from being a great product supported by a very skilled and friendly team, it is very sexy, and will give you lots of bragging rights!

The built-in ability to do backups to DR, do internal backups, and have on-the-fly deduplication is by far the most valuable to me.

Our organization went from not having DR to having a fully implemented and tested DR and DR plan in 6 months with SimpliVity. Migration off our legacy solution to SimpliVity was seamless.

Being able to balance replicas across nodes on your own (without calling support) would be awesome.

SimpliVity has 2 copies of a guest virtual server on their nodes, a primary “live” copy and a secondary “replica” copy.

SimpliVity has some pretty good algorithms to initially balance those two copies across the physical nodes.

However, if the server size changes dramatically and you have too many large replicas or primaries on one of their physical servers, it will start to fill up.

Right now, you cannot move a replica (to balance storage across cubes) on your own, you have to call support. Support is very good and can do it very quickly, but it would be nice to be able to do it on our own.

We have been creating a lot of new servers lately, so I usually have to call them about once a month to take a look at our balance across cubes.

I have used SimpliVity for about 1 year.

We had no issues with deployment.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

They have the highest level of customer service I have experienced in a vendor. They have great people on at any time of day.

SimpliVity's technical support is great. I've never had an issue that had to be 'escalated'. The first person I talk to is able to quickly fix any problems I have had.

We had an aging infrastructure that was due to be replaced. We wanted our new product to have built-in DR capability.

I already had a good understanding of VMWare, moving to this solution was probably the most straightforward implementation I have ever done.

We implemented with the help of SimpliVity directly. Their expertise was great. Implementation went very smoothly.

I believe in the long run we found the reduced footprint, electricity, and other overhead costs, along with other reduced costs we had a 3 year ROI.

We looked at Dell Compellent and Pivot3.

Seamless backup, quick deployment.

SimpliVity requires an arbiter to be installed on a non-virtualized (or at least on non-SimpliVity virtualized) storage. This means you can not totally virtualize your environment on SimpliVity. I would like to see the arbiter on a system that is virtualized and eliminate that external portion.

About a year.

The VAR that helped with deployment did not know that the arbiter could not be virtualized and this lead to problems down the road when installing updates.

No.

I have not scaled it yet.

Good.

Excellent.

I switched from a non-hyperconverged solution. This was less hardware and VMware licensing to manage.

Initial setup took a day.

The VAR was still learning the product. I would rate their level of expertise as low.

I also evaluated Nutanix and Scale.

Inline deduplication, instant recovery of data across datacenters, low latency, easiness of management. The solution is fully integrated in the Virtual center client, which makes for a very lean learning curve. Simplivity adds as a plugin into virtual center and delivers a fully featured dashboard. Backup Policies are VM-centric, but can be applied at a datastore level as well. The dashboard displays live and historic latency values, overall and for each VM, and is used as a GUI for backup and restore. Backup and restore are performed automatically but can be also performedmanually at any time. This is done with a couple of klicks and takes a few seconds.

We consolidated five servers and one SAN with three arrays into two OmniCubes. Our SAN was full with 20 TB at the time of migration, and we accomodate the whole amount of data into less as the half of the disk space. Since then the infrastructure grew constantly, but the data foot print on the Omnicubes barely increases. Dedup is currently around 3.3. Additionally, we implemented DR with a third OmniCube residing in a second datacenter, where we replicate our data. Recovery of VMs is done in a couple of seconds. We now almost never use our backup software to restore data anymore.

Some proactive / predictive monitoring of VMs health would be a plus. Speed in cathing up with Vmware Esxi releases could also be slightly improved.

Proactive monitoring of VMS: this is one item on my wish list. I would like an easy way to receive an alert when a VM is performing badly (due to latency, cpu or memory issues for example). I know there are ways to create alarms or alerts in vSphere or third party tools. But what I am talking about here is some easier way to achieve that, maybe with a few clicks in the GUI. It is not specifically a task which Simplivity must accomplish, but since it has a plugin in VC could be a good place to introduce it.

Regarding Esxi releases. Omnicubes run on Esxi and Simplivity has to officially support each Esxi release for you to go and install it on your Omnicube. This takes obviously a few weeks after each Vmware release. Sometimes it can take longer, so in those cases would be good to speed up the process.

1.5 years

No.

No.

No.

Excellent support.

Perfect, the technical team is great, one of the greatest I know so far.

No, this is our first hyperconverged solution.

Not really, OmniCubes were deployed in a couple of hours.

Through a vendor, their expertise was good.

We looked at Nutanix and vSAN.

We have found no other solution in the market which has the same full set of features. Specifically inline deduplication is unique in its implementation here.

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.

In-line data-deduplication and data virtualization. DR Replication. Fast cloning, fast restores, and fast backups.

Our deploy times are greatly reduced, but what I love most is our ability to sync de-duped data across to our DR site quickly and efficiently. I hope I never need it, but I feel much better about our situation now that we have SimpliVity if we ever need to fail over to our DR site.

Ability to add storage incrementally would be nice.

3 months

Minor issues that were quickly resolved with support.

No.

Not yet.

Very good

Very good.

The initial setup was a bit complex. This was made easier with their deployment guide, and Professional Services group, who handled the deployment.

EMC VxRail

Data protection that is inherent with the system. Speed of deployment and extremely easy to manage. Backup and replications take just seconds! I have a junior level tech maintaining the system!

We update our main pharmacy system monthly at three locations. Standing up a test environment for validation takes just minutes. Also, during the upgrade process after hours our maintenance window has decreased over 50% with blazing fast entire server backups.

Upgrades/Patches to ESXi have to be approved by SimpliVity and their support installs them...along with upgrades to their virtual controller. That's the one downside to having such an easy to manage integrated console...it needs to be validated against ESXi.

2 years

No

No

No

Great.

Technical Support is very knowledgeable and responsive. First Class.

Legacy Dell Equallogic SAN. Needed a datacenter refresh and loved the feature rich all in one SimpliVity solution.

It was very straightforward. Your part is to provide LAN connectivity, Ipmc and rack them. Implementation team pretty much handled the rest including knowledge transfer.

Given we needed a datacenter refresh, we were able to implement SimpliVity at a cheaper cost than replacing our legacy compute and SAN. We inherited true business continuity (priceless)...and were able to prune our preexisting server backup solution. Just the backup solution software costs saved us >$15,000 annually. ROI was instant.

Cisco Flexpod/NetApp, Dell Compellant SAN

This solution protects your data with minimal effort. Due to the deduplication, optimization, compression and small block size; our replication happens every 15 minutes without feeling it. We have a very elaborate backup schedule that allows us to keep various levels of backups for extended periods times without hardly using any physical storage. A savings rate of over 130 to 1!