We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"Offsite backup, replication, and duplication of data are important for our plant environment since we are hard on our equipment."
"Our customers get a lot more horsepower for a lot less management."
"As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us."
"SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the backup rate and the backup transfer."
"The solution is very stable."
"The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering."
"The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training."
"One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes)."
"Technical support is okay."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
"The best feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the central management of all of our resources. Additionally, it is easy to use"
"It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion."
"One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect."
"It allows us to have a cloud-based ecosystem."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"To install or to update it is more complicated than other solutions."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install."
"The initial setup was a little complex because we were in the first version, fresh releases."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform."
"While the customer support is truly incredible, for Spanish speakers it would be appropriate to have support in their native language to further improve problem-solving conditions."
"I would like to see them utilize the spare storage that they use as a redundant space. I feel that now a lot of resources are wasted just for standby purposes because we are using data protection. Instead of utilizing those resources only when something happens, they can have an alternative so that we can utilize these resources all the time."
"Could have better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators."
"There is a lot of functionality in Prism Central, but sometimes you want to see those features in Prism Element."
"I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface."
"I would enjoy an advanced mode where experienced users can leverage their knowledge to do advanced things currently only allowed using the command line tools on the CVM."
"We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved."
"We could always use a performance upgrade, or simplified management."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 6 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 29 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and HPE StoreVirtual, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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You should also consider a few basic details:
- What is the hypervisor that you are going to use? If it's VMware then both of them are good. AHV has limitations and I have seen my customers suffering as they grow. Do not use AHV, let them refine it more.
- Do you want a hardware independent solution? If so, then HPE SimpliVity is out. If you are paying for 3-5 years of support, services, warranty, and licenses then it is irrelevant.
- Accelerator card - one more point of failure apart from OVC with Nutanix is that it is only Acropolis.
- High Availability - Nutanix is faster doing fail-overs
- Backup - more or less the same on esxi platform.
- Replication - Nutanix is better doing replication between the sites and is easy too.
- Storage Cost: Sales team of both the products lie when it comes to tell you how much they are going to consume. But with SimpliVity, at least in their config, they keep around 100-200GB of RAM for buffer.
- Performance - Both the platforms with identical hardware offer more or less the same performance. With SimpliVity, the OAC really gives you a good performance.
- Support - Nutanix is better, no doubts. When SimpliVity used to be SimpliVity, they had good support services.
- Containers - Better to work on Nutanix, however, if you are going to use vRealize Automation then both are OK.
If you like doing stuff by yourself and are well versed with VMware products, then try VMware vSAN with vSAN ready nodes and you will be amazed. Check each and everything that Nutanix salespeople say on the internet.
Similar to Mikes comments above, we evaluated both these products and Cisco Hyperflex and ended up selecting Nutanix. Our legacy platform was all HPE so they had the foot in the door from the start, however, it soon became clear that the roadmap for HPE is vague with SimpliVity and whilst it had some advantages over the others, they were few and relatively minor in our selection criteria. We needed a platform to support HyperV and whilst all three could do this, HPE could only support this with SimpliVity on a very expensive configuration that commercially blew them out the process quite early. Cisco had a good offering and could potentially deliver a good solution although whilst they challenged regularly, we still felt they were playing catch-up in this space. There is a good reason why Nutanix is selling HCI platforms in large numbers and why Gartner ranks them top in the Magic Quadrants, the key differentiator for us was the overall approach to whole lifecycle and support offering that came with the product. Something I think that Cisco and HPE need to take a step back and look at more with customers as well as their technology offerings.
HPE, in my personal research opinion, is struggling to gain momentum within the HCI space. The move from a dedicated hardware card to software enablement was a good move. Yet it does bring the question of do I want to move to an HCI partner that now runs on V1 release software? Do I want to work through the bug list to help HPE improve a product? Financially the product brings no benefit over the other HCI players.
Nutanix for me would be the preferred HCI product between these two. Reasons would be because of multiple stable releases and continued growth. I can choose which Hypervisor I want to run be it AHV, HyperV or VMware. I can also change at any stage should I wish to do so. I could transform applications in AHV using containers and spin up my dev workloads there. In the interim business, I can continue running on the hypervisor trusted for workloads while the teams build confidence using AHV. Nutanix is now focusing on feature richness and transformational approaches while allowing you to choose your hardware vendor of choice with full support.
The negativity of Nutanix is that you pay double hypervisor costs to do the same thing. When acquiring Nutanix, make use of AHV and the strength of the base integration. Thus drop VMware which scares most enterprises, unfortunately. HyperV is not largely adopted in many enterprises thus the double bill on hypervisor is not so bad. Yet when moving to Azure or AWS the hypervisor is not a consideration for technical staff.
You'll notice that HPE doesn't really talk that much about SimpliVity anymore. They also signed a global agreement in April to run AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) on HPE hardware for their hybrid cloud offering. Makes you wonder why they wouldn't use SimpliVity as the platform for that.
Truth is, SimpliVity had some good features (scalable compute, erasure coding and insane data reduction). However, it's limited to VMware for a hypervisor and the impressive data reduction algorithms absolutely kill performance.
On the other hand, Nutanix runs on multiple hypervisors and hardware platforms. Plus AHV has a multitude of features that improve efficiency and performance. And it's going to be around awhile.
The advantage that Nutanix has over SimpliVity is that it is a distributed storage fabric that runs in the application space and is not dependent on any single brand of hypervisor. Nutanix can run on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM or Nutanix’s own Acropolis hypervisor. Nutanix is a scalable software solution whereas SimpliVity is a hardware solution dependent on a specialized ASIC. You can run Nutanix on IBM, HPE, Dell or just about any commodity hardware and the user interface is very simple. Also, with the hyper convergence controller (CVM) decoupled from the hypervisor and hardware, updating Nutanix is non-disruptive.
You should consider a few basic details:
- Hypervisor – AHV vs VMWARE. Although VMWARE is a master in virtualization, for start-ups, AHV can server the purpose (commercial impact).
- Hardware independent solution- If so, then Nutanix is a good option.
- High Availability - Nutanix is faster doing fail-overs.
- Replication - Nutanix is better doing replication between the sites.
- Storage Cost: SimpliVity keep aprox. 100-200GB of RAM for buffer.
- Support - Nutanix is better, no doubt. When SimpliVity used to be SimpliVity, they had good support services.
- Containers - Better to work on Nutanix, however, if you are going to use vRealize Automation then both are OK.
I agree with Shu and Mike. There is a lot more support and more features that Nutanix provides than any other HCI. There are not hardware complexities like in SimpliVity. You can use any vendor of your choice and go with Nutanix HCI, also use one hypervisor for production and another for DR. A way to save costs on a DR hypervisor is to use AHV in production and use VMware or Hyper-V based on your choice. Nutanix also provides native file services for connecting to physical servers, data protection services including DR, which I prefer most. Lately, Nutanix supports even SAP HANA-like workloads.
You should make a final decision based on your requirement, present pain points, specific features on HCI that can help to address any or all of your pain points.
Agree to everything Shu has said. HPE has announced a partnership with Nutanix, that has to be a sign of what's to come for SimpliVity. Nutanix has done a good job of acquiring companies that add value to their portfolio. They have also come a long way with their built-in hypervisor AHV. It has a lot of the same basic functionalities of VMware.