HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Scale Computing HC3 comparison

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.

HPE SimpliVity Features

HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Flexible, compact architecture
• Centralized management
• AI-driven intelligence
• Built-in data protection and disaster recovery
• VM-centric management and mobility
• Simple to deploy, manage, and scale

HPE SimpliVity Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Efficient: HPE SimpliVity helps reduce the number of devices in your data center while also decreasing the total cost of ownership.

• Cloud benefits with enterprise capabilities: When your enterprise deploys HPE SimpliVity, you gain the agility, elasticity, and affordability offered by cloud computing.

• Affordable and flexible: The solution provides IT teams with the performance, reliability, and resiliency of on-premises infrastructure. HPE SimpliVity allows them to start virtualizing their enterprise while also keeping sensitive data safe.

• Reduced risk of data loss: Because HPE SimpliVity is a powerful solution with built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery, it is able to provide advanced data protection that reduces your organization’s risk of data loss and also lowers the risk of ransomware attacks.

• Speed: HPE SimpliVity gives you the ability to deploy blocks and manage VM environments quickly and easily by using the VMware interface. In addition, the solution allows you to quickly view all data centers and remote offices within a single interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.

Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.

A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”

PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”

German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

• AOS storage
• Flexible and open compute
• Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

• Integrated disaster recovery
• Full-stack lifecycle management
• VMware with Nutanix
• Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

• High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.
  
  
• Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.
  
  
• Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.
  
  
• Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.
  
  
• Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
  
  
• Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.
  
  
• Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
  
  
• Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
  
  
• Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

• NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.
  
  
• The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.
  
  
• The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.
  
  
• Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

HC3 is an appliance-based hyperconverged infrastructure solution. HC3 combines servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/disaster recovery into a single appliance. This hyperconvergence of technologies radically simplifies IT infrastructure making it easier to implement and manage and significantly reduces the total cost of ownership of infrastructure. The HC3 hyperconverged appliance approach allows seamless, non-disruptive infrastructure scale out and automated, non-disruptive software and firmware updates. Our customers choose HC3 to reduce complexity and cost from IT infrastructure so they can focus their IT administration on improving applications and process rather than managing and maintaining complex infrastructure.