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.
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"Simply being able to move objects and the duplication feature have been quite effective."
"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."
"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 latency is very low."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's user interface is very easy to work with."
"The product has cut down a lot of service tickets. Earlier, people complained about slowness."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"I love InfoSite. That gets you a lot of good detailed information."
"SimpliVity works well in a UAT environment.."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"It has reduced my data center activities."
"The most valuable feature is the quick restore."
"Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to."
"The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"One point for improvement is to increase the performance capabilities of the Windows-based executable as compared to its Linux Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) equivalent."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"I rate Nimble one out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nimble Storage was a nightmare. It took us three months to deal with all the kinks and bugs. We had two people from HPE assisting us and two from our team."
"Companies in small countries face problems with spare parts."
"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."
"It can be made cheaper."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"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."
"They should improve just the support."
"The solution must be hypervisor-agnostic."
"One thing that I would like to see improved is the flexibility of the node expansion."
"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."
"SimpliVity has little to no integrations."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"It would be better if it could integrate more easily with other vendors."
"A lot of our customers are using VMware and also are using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is not very stable on the HP SimpliVity."
"I think that they should have their own hyper-converged system."
"Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 11th 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 Scale Computing HC3. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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