We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and HPE SimpliVity based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both of these HPE solutions are part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise brand of excellent data management products. Users say HPE SimpliVity is the more comprehensive product. It is a very user-friendly, simple product to use, implement, and manage. The storage virtualization layers and super fast backups make it extremely valuable. Some users say HPE Nimble Storage dHCI can be a bit buggy and should provide better file-level restoration and DVX system options.
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"Nimble is easy to use, but hard to install. Once it's installed, it's user-friendly. Reporting is another advantage because we get a lot of statistical forecasting. It helps us see into the future with that."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"The latency is very low."
"The technical support services are good."
"The solution is useful for taking storage snapshots, has high performance, and the CASL architecture is good for optimizing workloads."
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"The product has cut down a lot of service tickets. Earlier, people complained about slowness."
"Artificial intelligence is built into the product. If there's a failure, HP support will proactively call the client about the issue."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"My impression is that it is a very nice solution. Very simple to use."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"Technical support is perfect. They explain to us the solution in a very clear and simple way. When we call them, they know the right answer and get the right person automatically."
"It has a proven track record of stability."
"The solution is very stable."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"It can be made cheaper."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"This year 2022, we have the possibility to include new kinds of storage with a high disk availability, such as Alletra 6000 and Alletra 9000. Those are the new storage available. If we would like to improve the quality and the capability and the high availability of these products, we can choose between different costs. This is another benefit from this HPE Nimble Storage dHCI solution of hyper-converged."
"Companies in small countries face problems with spare parts."
"Software upgrade is still more complicated than the competitors, so that's an area of improvement."
"The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds."
"The product does not support file services."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
"The price is quite high. The system could also be more scalable."
"Bandwidth throttling during offsite backups would be better than the off-peak time setting for a 24/7 shop."
"The initial setup was complex because it was a new solution."
"I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 12th in HCI with 24 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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