HPE SimpliVity Review

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.