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.
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"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."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has the most valuable features for performance, resilience, and scalability."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is stable."
"The latency is very low."
"HPE's InfoSight software, which does the comparative analysis and artificial intelligence built-in in the box, and with Nimble they do well against the competition. Additionally, the dashboards are good."
"So far, the solution's performance is very good."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"The technical support services are good."
"Has good performance and ease of use"
"The setup is very easy."
"The feature that I like the most is the backup feature embedded inside the HPE SimpliVity. When we have any activity, within five minutes, we have a backup. It also has PDR for performing disaster recovery."
"HPE SimpliVity is scalable. Some 200 people at my organization are using this solution at present."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"Our clients are very comfortable with the single management of the complete stack. The creation of VM systems is also very fast."
"The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"They should improve just the support."
"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 solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."
"The product is expensive."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"The initial setup was complex because it was a new solution."
"If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380."
"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."
"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."
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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