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HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
HCI (6th)
NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable
There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.
MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Although it is still early, we are optimistic that it will decrease our management costs and many resource costs due to the fact that everything is included in one box in SimpliVity."
"It's a very nice solution. It's a complete solution that we are looking for because we don't have personnel with expertise."
"HPE SimpliVity is stable enough for our business; we never have a problem."
"It is a good solution; it is a good hyper-converged solution as compared to other solutions like Cisco or Dell because they don't embed software inside the solution."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"The solution simplifies IT life, as in terms of resources such as OT and data backup one can save a lot in cost, around the clock one need not worry about having comprehensive backup, the entire system remains up and running during office hours and there is no need to wait for anything, and overall one is assured that all the data is backed up and can be restored."
"Backup and restore are very fast."
"We evaluated different solutions, but SimpliVity was the best choice in performance and scalability."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
"NetApp HCI has improved our organization by allowing us to put more time into investing in new ideas and spending less time in the administration of the solution."
"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
"NetApp HCI solves predictability challenges with industry-leading performance capabilities that allow the granular control of every application."
"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud."
"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."
 

Cons

"One thing that might be a deal killer is the additional VM Ware licenses."
"The local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HP doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here."
"Overall, the biggest issue I have is regarding the price."
"HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380."
"Pricing is a little high in my opinion. Prices have climbed consistently since our purchase and install."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"Nutanix very often beats us."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
"The reason I give it a nine instead of a ten is because of the need for pre-check work. While it is simpler than most products, there is still a lot of configuration that needs to be done."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN."
"HPE has decided to sell the solution in all-flash configurations, which may not be as cost effective for smaller mid-market enterprises."
"The solution is expensive; not every budget can fit in there."
"The pricing is very high."
"Upfront costs seems high at first look, but after analyzing all the benefits of SimpliVity, we have come out ahead."
"We spent $250,000 back in the day, and that was for two servers in my data center for that cluster. We then ran what they call an arbiter, and that took the place of a third server or the third node in the cluster. My DR site was one standalone server, and its horsepower was more than the two at my main site. It included my Cisco Switches that I needed to re-upgrade. It was comparable to what we were paying a year in VM."
"The time savings on the administration side of things is huge. We had somebody who was dedicated pretty much full-time to hardware, and now, they spend about a quarter of their time a year on hardware-related issues."
"If we compare the price of HPE SimpliVity with other vendors that are selling the hyper-converged infrastructure, all of them are not cheap and are priced similarly. However, the price we pay and what we receive makes it a good price."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise80
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...
What needs improvement with HPE SimpliVity?
I haven't noticed anything that should be better in HPE SimpliVity, as I haven't done extensive work on this platform; I have only completed a couple of projects recently. Pricing could be an area ...
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Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: July 2026.
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