The built-in ability to do backups to DR, do internal backups, and have on-the-fly deduplication is by far the most valuable to me.
Our organization went from not having DR to having a fully implemented and tested DR and DR plan in 6 months with SimpliVity. Migration off our legacy solution to SimpliVity was seamless.
Being able to balance replicas across nodes on your own (without calling support) would be awesome.
SimpliVity has 2 copies of a guest virtual server on their nodes, a primary “live” copy and a secondary “replica” copy.
SimpliVity has some pretty good algorithms to initially balance those two copies across the physical nodes.
However, if the server size changes dramatically and you have too many large replicas or primaries on one of their physical servers, it will start to fill up.
Right now, you cannot move a replica (to balance storage across cubes) on your own, you have to call support. Support is very good and can do it very quickly, but it would be nice to be able to do it on our own.
We have been creating a lot of new servers lately, so I usually have to call them about once a month to take a look at our balance across cubes.
I have used SimpliVity for about 1 year.
We had no issues with deployment.
We have not had any stability issues.
We have not had scalability issues.
Customer Service:
They have the highest level of customer service I have experienced in a vendor. They have great people on at any time of day.
Technical Support:
SimpliVity's technical support is great. I've never had an issue that had to be 'escalated'. The first person I talk to is able to quickly fix any problems I have had.
We had an aging infrastructure that was due to be replaced. We wanted our new product to have built-in DR capability.
I already had a good understanding of VMWare, moving to this solution was probably the most straightforward implementation I have ever done.
We implemented with the help of SimpliVity directly. Their expertise was great. Implementation went very smoothly.
I believe in the long run we found the reduced footprint, electricity, and other overhead costs, along with other reduced costs we had a 3 year ROI.