HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We sell HP products. Hyperconvergence with SimpliVity is one of the main products that we are pushing. The virtual application is the main product. It is based on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but it is only an application. We sell this infrastructure to our customers and put the virtual application in this infrastructure.

A solution that provide a simple way to HA , is absolutely efficient and improve the work for the IT team

The access, high availability, and interface are the most valuable and important for us. There is one interface for the whole product, which is very important because you have a single pane to view all the infrastructure of a customer. You can improve your data recovery plan or DRP, or you can make a special emergency plan if a disk has any problem.

It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America.

VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity.

I have been selling HPE SimpliVity for less than one year.

It is stable.

You can easily scale without any problem by adding new nodes, which is a very good part of the product. Currently, my customers don't have a requirement for scalability, but they will have a requirement in the future. They will have to scale the platform, storage, and virtual machines in the near future. A customer is planning to add one or two nodes at the beginning of the next year. My customers are medium-sized and big-sized companies.

They can maybe improve the response time. When a customer has an emergency and is pushing us, we need to respond in the best way. This is not a complaint. Customers always want the solution immediately. We help our customers in getting the most uptime for this service.

No, previously we didn't use a differente solutio , just HP DL nodes separately

It is a new technology, and the setup is a little complicated. The learning curve is not so high, and you can learn to deploy the product easily in a couple of weeks. You have to get people certified in different technologies of HP before the deployment.

Deployment can take from a couple of weeks to a month and a half. There could also be problems with a customer's infrastructure. In some cases, putting the devices is a whole new project because the customer is not prepared.

In Latam is very different a ROI. Depends of the industry and all the return has more time to return

It is expensive for this market. Everyone says that it is a very good product, but the only complaint is about the price. The enterprises must evalute carefully what they want to do and how many people has tod do te job. A simple interface improve operational time

Nutanix, Dell nodes

I would recommend this solution. It is very good for me. 

I would rate HPE SimpliVity a nine out of ten.

As a service integrator we have recommended and implemented SimpliVity for numerous use cases but the product is particularly suited for ROBO and VDI use cases. We are looking at SImpliVity as a solution for Tier 2 and some Tier 1 apps in DC.

Our clients have been very happy with the data efficiency features (OmniCube accelerator card) and the HPE/SimpliVity HyperGuarantee, which is unique. For one of our clients who needed backup capability but did not want to invest in a dedicated backup tool, SimpliVity's native backup with app consistency came in handy. When you do this across more than 80 sites, the savings is significant and the WAN bandwidth efficiency is impressive.

1. Simple management
2. HyperGuarantee
3. Accelerator card
4. Globally federated architecture 

The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it. The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product. The 4KB based dedupe and optimization are definitely helpful as observed by our clients. The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool.

1. For SimpliVity to become a true DC solution, the limit of 32 nodes needs to be investigated. While this may not be a significant deterrent, it brings into question the underlying architecture.
2. HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show.
3. While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it.
4. SimpliVity has little to no integrations. It may have APIs, etc., but there are very few signed on integrations in place. This is necessary to build a solutions ecosystem.

No issues. The product has been performing well. No problems.

The product initially had a limitation of 12 nodes in a federation, which has been increased to 32. Keep this in the back of your mind, particularly when looking at the number of nodes in a single stack.

SimpliVity (before HPE) was pretty darn good. While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence.

Being vendor agnostic, we are not partial to any solution or product. Where we have deployed SimpliVity we have not faced issues. In short, no switching.

The implementation is straightforward when you follow the deployment guide. Stick to the default settings as they work for most setups. If you have the option of having multiple 10Gbps NIC cards, you can explore the option of having a NIC dedicated for storage.

In house. 

• Simpler operations
• No more monolithic SANs
• No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool.

In terms of setup, there are some gotchas and caveats, particularly when discussing stretched clusters. Rapid DR also pretty much goes the same way. Otherwise the process is pretty straightforward. Upgrades were a problem but have been addressed to a large extent. The biggest concern is around support and HPE's apparent lack of knowledgeable people.

Nutanix, VxRail and HyperFlex. Nutanix comes into almost all discussions and is a leader. The only area of concern is the expense as it adds up. VxRail is definitely the number one contender when discussing ROBO use cases but SimpliVity's DVE with its accelerator card is a strong option, particularly from the point of not needing additional hardware to address add-on requirements. SimpliVity also brings capacity savings.

Have a look at multiple solutions before making up your mind. Remember to take a top down approach and start with the app layer first. Your workload decides the infrastructure, not the other way around. Also, for most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly. However ridiculous as this may seem, read the guides and manuals carefully before implementation as they do have points that need to be looked at. If you do not believe me, you will end up going back to the same document anyway, which you want to avoid.

• The backup and restore capability
• The speed with which it backs up
• Restores can be done in seconds

The tool makes it more efficient for us. Instead of having to get support for multiple different solutions like storage, compute, and network, and having to contact individual vendors, it's all one solution. We can contact one person and get support over the phone. We don't have to call multiple vendors, having them point fingers at each other.

Additional features would be having more visibility into the overall infrastructure and to know what's happening with the VMs.

Stability has been rock solid. We've put it in. The transition was easy, and it stayed up the whole time. There have been no issues at all.

We have not done a whole lot with scalability. We've upgraded a little bit, but based on everything that we've seen, it's easy, simple, and can scale as much as we need it.

I've used SimpliVity and HPE. Once I get a hold of them, they are great. Sometimes, it's a little bit difficult to get a hold of them, but once we do, their technicians are great.

We were using a different solution, and it was reaching end of life. That is when we started evaluating different vendors and products. We didn't know about this tool. We saw their solution, saw the backup and restore, the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold.

We chose HPE because we ran a test between this and one other competitor. We tested some drive failures and that type of thing, and found out that the data protection was much better with SimpliVity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are functionality, performance, and support. We looked at all of those and that's why we chose SimpliVity.

The initial setup was very simple and easy. We had it up in half a day and we were up, running, and migrating our VMs.

I would have them take a look at it and do a proof of concept. They should take a look the backup and restore and the ability to restore very large VMs in seconds.

The simplicity is the most useful aspect of this product. Deployment wasn't perfectly easy, but relatively easy. After that, it's been extremely easy to manage, extremely easy to consolidate our systems and extremely easy to back up our systems; not only on site, but also to our disaster recovery (DR) site through the SimpliVity tools.

We didn't have a really good method in place to get our live data into a DR site and that was the primary driver for SimpliVity. By installing and implementing SimpliVity, it made it very simple to get all of our critical systems in a state that they could be easily brought up in a DR site.

I would like to see more features around managing the data that it uses. Specifically, if your back-up data is filling up with your nodes, what to do with that tool is to make it a platform data you don't have a full load and just for backing up the data. Another improvement would be the ability for users like myself, administrators, to be able to run patches and upgrades with fewer issues.

Stability has been great so far. I haven't had any issues with stability or even with nodes. It's been great.

Scalability is good. We have a small implementation, so I can't speak very well to scalability. We have a three-mode installation now. We're going to six modes already and I would expect that to be an improvement.

We have used technical support a couple of times and every time was a good experience with a quick response by a technician. The resolution was all standard.

We didn't have a previous solution.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know whether they look solid and stable. Now, with the acquisition by HPE, they look even more solid and more stable. Also, a vendor solution must provide functionality that we need to have in a way that is simple, particularly for our organization, because it's not IT. We needed something that didn't require a lot to manage them. A system that is very simple. It didn't increase the items on my plate that I had to do with one more thing.

We looked at Nutanix, SimpliVity and one other. We chose SimpliVity because it's by far the most stable solution. We also chose it for the simplicity of managing the solution and the price point. It was a great price.

I think they should look at it very seriously, especially if they want to keep their staff slim and still provide all the functionality they're looking for that it can provide.

This solution’s most valuable feature is its simplicity.

It allowed me to have a hyper converged system that grows with multiple training centers and data centers.

I would love the solution to be able to move notes between federations. Right now, we use a manual process, but I know SimpliVity is working on a new and improved version of the product. Hopefully, they're going to make some kind of mechanism. In large implementations, it is a very useful tool.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have Platinum support. I give them two thumbs up.

Most of our data center was running on IBM BladeCenter and they just became obsolete. So we started to look into something more advanced, more innovative and simpler to manage.

When selecting a vendor the most important aspect is technical help and their support and simplicity of the system itself.

Setup was very straightforward.

We chose this solution because the product was very innovative. The latest and greatest. I think it's the future of data center technology.

We had a couple other vendors, such as Nutanix, but they didn't really compare to SimpliVity. It's a really great solution.

Really give it a test to understand how solution works and how simple it is to manage.

Backup and DR applications are very good and easy to use.

Due to inline deduplication, optimization and compression of data, very high IO throughput is possible.

No additional training is necessary for support personnel and engineers, as the SimpliVity federation is managed via a plugin in the VMware vSphere client or webclient.

Our company acts as a SimpliVity implementation partner. We also do platform maintenance/management for customers who do not want to do it themselves. We only get positive feedback from customers as to performance, RTO/RPO times, and day-to-day management.

We would like to see more possibilities to monitor the SimpliVity platform. Also, storage balancing between nodes within clusters with more than two nodes could be better. I believe this is solved in the new release of the software, but we still have to test it.

We have used SimpliVity for about three years now and have done several small and midsize implementations on OmniCube and OmniStack server systems.

Overall stability is great, except for some incidental hardware failures with DIMMs and remote access cards. The SimpliVity software and hardware acceleration card has never let us down. As long you use the BOM (bill of material), you are good to go.

The product is very scalable, if you can work with the building blocks. If you need more computing power, you can add computing nodes, which can be any x86 server. If you need more storage, you need to add a SimpliVity OmniCube or OmniStack node.

The technical support is very good, probably the best we have encountered until now.

In the past, we deployed the more traditional systems, such as a hypervisor with shared storage. We see the advantages of hyperconverged solutions and were impressed by the SimpliVity product, so we have shifted our main focus to hyperconverged solutions; in particular, SimpliVity.

The initial setup demands you to think through the IP addressing plan. Once you have that in place, initial deployment and configuration is very simple.

I don't have any pricing and licensing at hand, so no advice here. Please consult a SimpliVity Partner for that.

We did look into Nutanix and also did a few implementations. We found that if you want the same level of performance and protection for your data, you will need to invest in many more Nutanix nodes. Nutanix has much more overhead, is less efficient in the use of storage capacity, and requires much more platform to get VMs running.

ROBO implementations are much easier and efficient to do with SimpliVity.

Carefully look into your workload and discuss this with a SimpliVity Partner or Solution Architect.

We know that a small set of workloads are not suitable to run OK on the SimpliVity platform. Large database servers could be a problem running on the platform.

It’s a great product for most workloads. It may be less useful with very large database server VMs.

I use HPE SimpliVity for my private cloud, and all my production servers are running on this private cloud. My ERP software and the most important system, SAP, is running on HPE SimpliVity. Their metal server is physical, but all the other digital ecosystems or digital platforms are running on my private cloud in SimpliVity HPE.

I like HPE SimpliVity's hard disk compression capabilities. The data is compressed into very little space or volume. I think that the principal value of HP SimpliVity is its capacity to compress the data, and I'm saving a lot of disk space using SimpliVity.

HPE SimpliVity could be more flexible and scalable. I don't feel SimpliVity is flexible or easily scalable because I still need to buy another server to add to my clusters. I can't just run or harvest and add to my solution. I need to buy another server.

There are a lot of components that are not giving a lot of value to me right now. I also had a few problems with the built-in hard disk drives. I've had many issues with the harvest stripes that the servers use. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's unusual to have a physical failure on the HPE platform. I don't see any value at the software level, especially in the software that manages that solution. 

I was waiting for something, especially in the application layer that I would use, but that is all over VMware, and it doesn't have an integrated module that I can use to manage the server and all the instances. 

HPE SimpliVity could be more scalable.

I think the initial setup was easy. It was really fast. 

The technicians assigned by HPE implemented this solution in a very short time. At most, it took about two or three days. It was really amazing. It was very simple, and they helped us migrate the materials and the digital machine.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE SimpliVity an eight.

I trust HPE a lot because it's an excellent product. I think SimpliVity is a better solution than other basic HPE solutions. Maybe not the best, but it's a good solution.

My primary use case is virtualization and data storage.

SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well.

An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration.

I've been using this solution for around five months.

SimpliVity works well, we have no problems with its stability.

This product is easy to scale, but it's not cheap to do so.

The technical support team responds very quickly.

The initial setup was simple - we had two nodes connected to each other with direct connection to the ports, and that was all.

I implemented this solution myself.

Full bundle licenses are available on a three-yearly basis with no additional costs.

Plan your deployment, and then implementation will be easy. I would give this solution a score of nine out of ten.