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.
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"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."
"I love InfoSite. That gets you a lot of good detailed information."
"Nimble Storage is a capable platform with high availability."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"The latency is very low."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us."
"The HPE SimpliVity disc compression is very valuable."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"It has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."
"They should improve just the support."
"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 initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"Software upgrade is still more complicated than the competitors, so that's an area of improvement."
"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."
"The solution must be hypervisor-agnostic."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
"Needs to improve the cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
"Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
"It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 13th in HCI with 23 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 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 and VxRail, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Rubrik. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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