HPE SimpliVity Reviews

It is for the production virtual environment. I have virtualized almost 99 percent of my servers, and I'm using SimpliVity as a host for those virtual machines.

It does what needs to be done for us. The main thing for us is to make sure that we can recover a failed VM on a different site if the primary site fails. We need to be able to recover on the DR site. The performance was the main focus.

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.

We aren't using a lot of space because it does everything that we need it to do on the back-end, which is a good thing.

• The performance
• The backups
• The DR strategy
• The deduplication is great.

My main problem with the solution is that it is taking too much memory for something that we don't build. We are not creating the VM; it is created by the deployment. It is the SimpliVity solution which is using the memory that I was counting on for my production part. This is the biggest problem that I have. I know that the VM has to built there, but I would hope that they have a different area in the system to use this different type of memory. The production memory should stay with the customer when the machine is built, and during deployment, it should use different memory.

We just implemented the lightest cluster a month ago.

So far, the stability is good. We don't have any issues. Everything is running 24/7.

Scaling isn't so hard.

We have not had many technical support calls. However, we had one call which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. Are they capable of answering that question or not? Based on that particular call, we didn't receive the right answer.

I used a three-tier solution, meaning SAN, hosts, and the network fabric. I wanted to move away from the three point failure environment into the single mirror environment, especially for performance.

I didn't know what exactly what I was looking for in the beginning. I knew we needed to move away from our legacy environment into the hyper-converged world. Therefore, I was looking at different solutions. I knew that Nutanix was the big one out there, and is still the big one out there. Somehow, I landed on the SimpliVity site.

Initially, the setup was complex for us. Once you know the product, we are planning to do the deployments ourselves now because we understand everything (most of it). We recorded what we needed and can redeploy the systems to a different clusters going forward.

We used an integrator through HPE. Our experience with them was great. Everything worked well. We didn't have any hiccups.

For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey.

Nutanix was the closest to the HPE SimpliVity product. I had better conversations with the salespeople from HPE. They were able to explain how the solution worked and how it does everything I needed, so that naturally helped me with my decision.

The solution is great. Make sure you are aware of everything before you commit to deploying or purchasing it.

General purpose fertilization is our primary use case. 

This IT solution covers our hardware. We are using it in our VMware virtualization aesthetic to cover all the workloads within our region.

If something goes wrong with a patch, or whatever, and we need to make a recovery, it takes about six seconds to recover and get it back to normal. Previously, it could take hours.

We are a bit more productive with this solution because we don't have to spend as much time managing backups and recoveries.

It is easier to manage than what we are doing before.

Speed and recovery are its most valuable features.

The solution has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. It is designed to take advantage of deduplication strategies, which means we don't have to have as much disk in the system to do the job that we used to have to do.

The upgrade path needs to be better defined on the spec sheets. I would like hard numbers to be revealed to me, instead of being hidden by, "We have to go to HPE to get you a special request, then fill a part number for me."

Right now, the stability is good. There has been no degradation of the product.

What has really been affected is our ability to keep our workloads running and playing safely.

I haven't had to try and scale it yet.

It is pretty good for a small to medium-sized business.

The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us.

Our previous solution failed, which is why we switched. We were using the HPE HC380. We had already started examining the SimpliVity solution as a replacement for that stack, but then it failed. So, we had to put SimpliVity in as an emergency.

The initial setup is straightforward. It just runs according to a script.

We went from having our core data spread across tapes that would have come down to days of downtime to working with SimpliVity, where we can lose an entire datacenter and still be fully operational within minutes.

I can also now have my IT generalist do daily tasks easily as it is very easy to use.

• Inherent data protection
• Backup
• Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort.

The upgrade path used to be a challenge, but it has gotten much much easier.

Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue.

No, not at all.

No, but we sized correctly in the beginning and have not needed to since.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

First hyper-converged solution that I have ever used.

It is very straightforward to migrate existing VMs into the SimpliVity environment. Just VMotion the servers across and realize the benefits immediately.

It was implemented in-house.

Not sure.

But in comparison to other solutions, SimpliVity gave us all we need bundled into one at a much cheaper price point.

Try to do a true comparison.

SimpliVity includes backup, deduplication, and WAN optimization, so it is only fair to compare that with solutions having the same (or added in) features.

ESXi licensing is a big part of initial investment if you do not already have that covered.

Nutanix and traditional SAN solutions (NetApp and Compellent).

It truly is as good as it seems, which three and a half years ago was a bit of a leap of faith. We are very happy that we made the leap.

One of the most valuable features is the solution is simple. You get everything in one place, one rack for everything. So you don't have to get bits and pieces for a whole solution.

The solution works very well for banking or oil and gas sectors, and for the branch offices. 

One area of the service that could use improvement is that it is an aging solution. The market activity shelf life is over as people are moving toward a more savvy cloud box.

One con to the solution is the expense. A second thing is it has to be tailor-made properly. The presales part has to be done properly. Otherwise, you can misguide the customer.

Another issue is that it's not growing. I don't know what they want to do and apply for that particular solution or if they are looking for something else. I haven't seen many improvements in the last couple of years.

Also, nowadays everything is a very lean architecture, but SimpliVity is not a lean architecture in terms of anything. SimpliVity should be very lean in terms of the solution.

I've been working with the solution for five years.

Once you've taken the right course of action, the solution is quite stable, but it should be in the proper hands to maintain.

Scalability is very good in SimpliVity. Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable.

Compared to NewtonX, technical support for HPE is a lot better. We had a few situations where we need to get connected with them. The usual turnaround time is the next business day or whatever option the customer has. It'll be resolved accordingly in time.

The initial setup is complex. You need experts on that to kick start it, or it would be screwed up.

You need to go with a vendor, or find a niche experts, and there are only a handful of people available in the market.

The solution is expensive; not every budget can fit it. With the technical experts, for after-sales, you need to be a bit careful because it can burn your pockets if you don't expect it because there are only a few people available.

The solution is a one-time investment that the customer has to make, but the scalability is there. The performance is very good on any application you are trying to build on top of it, it performs according to that hardware layer. They offer very good presale support in the region here, if you need to get connected.

Now that AI is changing, hyper-convergence is there, but the hybrid model is applied in any scenario. Everybody doesn't want fully on-prem because SimpliVity is something where you want to convert everything on-prem. So if you are approaching a hybrid model, that solution should be in the cloud as well as on-prem. It should be not hardware agnostic, one solution. Anytime your data is your property, you can move it to any solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it for optimization of the platform for the virtualization.

The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us.

SimpliVity is simple to integrate with our backups.

We have used it for testing.

• Compression
• Deduplication
• As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us.
• The solution is very innovative.

We would like to have more security with the solution.

It is very stable. We have not had any outages.

The scalability is great.

We have 13 nodes in our data center.

The technical support is very good. We have Tier 2 and 3 support.

We moved to SimpliVity from our previous solution because SimpliVity met our requirements. Our previous solution was four years old.

The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform.

We used a partner, Datavision, for our deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

HPE proposed Synergy and Simplicity. We chose Simplicity, which has been a great platform for us.

We are not looking to change our solution, at least not in the next three years.

You have to manage so much hardware if you have IT systems, and each system has a different web interface, log, and reporting service. When you check all of them in a day, you don't have enough time for other work, but I can manage all the services from a single interface with SimpliVity. It saves me time.

The backup and restore features are the most valuable. Because before SimpliVity, I was backing up the data to an external hard disk. It worked slowly sometimes, and I had to wait for hours. But now, I am backing up all my data in seconds.

I think first we should make a hardware upgrade.

No, it's stable.

No, it works well.

I haven't needed technical support yet.

I was using classical storage, server technology, because it's not easy to manage all hardware capacity.

It was straightforward.

The price should be cheaper.

I only looked at Nutanix and VMware vSAN, but SimpliVity is convenient for our systems.

Anyone looking to implement it should do so without losing any time.

The most valuable features are the backup and restore capability, the speed with which it can back-up, and restores can be done in seconds.

It makes it more efficient for us. Instead of having to get support for multiple different solutions like storage, compute, network, and having to contact individual vendors, it's all one solution. We can contact one person, get support over the phone without having to call multiple vendors, and not have them point fingers at each other.

Additional features would be more visibility into the overall infrastructure and 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, with no issues at all.

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

I've used SimpliVity technology support a lot. In terms of HPE technology support, I've only used them a little bit in the last few weeks. Once I get a hold of them, they're great. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to get a hold of them, but once we get a hold of them, their technicians are great.

We were using a different solution and we were reaching end of life. That's when we started evaluating different vendors and different products. We didn't know much about HPE. We saw their solution, saw the backup restore, and the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold. We chose HPE because we did a test between this and one other competitor. We tested some dry 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. We were up and running and migrating our VMs over.

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

VM backup and recovery.

Prior to Simplivity, we struggled to complete weekly file server backups over the weekend, and full VM restores would take hours. With Simplivity we are able to backup file servers every 4 hours and restore them in less than 20 seconds. These file servers are approximately 2TB.

I would like to see Simplivity come out with some sort of Simplivity Engineer certification, which would grant me the ability to handle the more technical issues on my own, without having to call support.

Approximately two years.

No issues with deployment.

None.

Not so far

Customer service has been great.

Technical support has been great. They have improved software upgrades dramatically, allowing me to perform my own upgrades without having to call support.

In the past we were running UCS with a NetApp SAN connected via FC. We were ready for a refresh when we saw Simplivity. It looked like a perfect fit.

Initial setup was very easy. We just input IP addresses for each network and the setup wizard took care of everything.

Pricing is a little high in my opinion. Prices have climbed consistently since our purchase and install.

We did an evaluation with Nutanix, but found their data redundancy was not sufficient for us.