HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL] comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

HPE SimpliVity

Read 155 HPE SimpliVity reviews

12,842 Views
12,328 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

HPE SimpliVity

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and NetApp HCI [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, StarWind and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

October 2026

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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 (5th)

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen

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.

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Massimiliano Bartolozzi

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We had a standard HPE blade server, our reseller put forward SimpliVity to us, we tried it out and tested it, and I was like, "Wow," it blew us away."

"All of these awesome features make Simplivity a real game changer in the market."

"Backup and restore are very fast."

"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."

"More velocity in applications."

"HCI has indeed reduced the complexities of our server environment, and my systems architect/engineer now has more time to work on other pressing projects and investigate new technologies, which he was able to acquire and implement."

"We went from having our core data spread across tapes that would have come down to days of downtime to working with SimpliVity, where we can lose an entire datacenter and still be fully operational within minutes."

"SimpliVity's console is useful."

More HPE SimpliVity pros

"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."

"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."

"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."

"The initial setup was straightforward; it was easy and fast to deploy, and NetApp Cloud Manager made getting up and running with Cloud ONTAP amazing, easy to use, simple, and it basically did everything."

"It's simple, flexible, powerful; we've been able to move most of our workload to it and we've seen increased performance across the board."

"The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."

"It offers the ability to scale on demand which is important to the burst capability of scaling up and scaling down."

"Since implementing this solution, we have to do less work."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

Cons

"They should optimize the administration stack because it is consuming too much memory. It ends up consuming 20% of memory. They have another product for this feature, but I would like to have this feature within HPE SimpliVity."

"SimpliVity updates are a painful and complex process that takes about two hours per node."

"The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal."

"The life-cycle management can be improved."

"There are some small changes that can be made to the interface to improve it but it typically works well."

"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."

"I would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives."

"Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless (or at least be assigned a technician who could walk us through the process for both the SimpliVity software as well as the VMware software)."

More HPE SimpliVity cons

"It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."

"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."

"It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."

"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."

"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."

"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."

"Its stability is 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 crash."

"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think it's a complete package. We buy the license with support for five years. It's a subscription, I will say, but it's included when you buy the SimpliVity solution from HPE. You have a contract with the software warranty and upgrades."

"This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis. The licensing cost also includes vCenter at a cost in the cloud solution."

"There is a one-time purchase needed for the license for HPE SimpliVity. The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money."

"The solution can be expensive if you are using a lot of nodes."

"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."

"We did get some quotes from Nutanix, and they were ballparks. So, it is not cheap, and there is nothing free, but those two were comparable."

"We're paying $3,000-$4,000 a month."

More HPE SimpliVity pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"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."

"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."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

19%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	67
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	80

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

See all answers

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Comparisons

VxRail vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 22% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 15% of the time

VMware vSAN vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs HPE SimpliVity

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE SimpliVity Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 21% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 6% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE SimpliVity

October 2026

Download HPE SimpliVity product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

October 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI

No data available

Overview

HPE SimpliVity provides businesses with advanced features such as inline deduplication, compression, and instant recovery, enabling efficient backup and scalability. Its integration with VMware and centralized management fosters ease of use, establishing a streamlined IT infrastructure.

HPE SimpliVity stands as a comprehensive solution for organizations seeking a robust infrastructure capable of handling diverse workloads. Its features like integrated backup and disaster recovery ensure quick restores and high availability. Known for its efficient use of storage and data processing capabilities, it helps reduce operational costs. This system offers a reliable framework for virtualized environments, enhancing disaster recovery processes, IT operations, and application hosting while supporting workloads such as Oracle, SAP, and SQL.

What are HPE SimpliVity's key features?

Inline Deduplication: Minimizes data redundancy, enhancing storage efficiency.
Compression: Optimizes storage, reducing space requirements.
Instant Recovery: Facilitates rapid restoration of data and applications.
Centralized Management: Simplifies IT operations with unified management.
Scalable Architecture: Adapts to business growth seamlessly.

What benefits should users seek in HPE SimpliVity reviews?

Cost Reduction: Achieves savings through efficient data processing and storage utilization.
High Availability: Ensures consistent service and data accessibility.
VMware Integration: Provides compatibility and smooth operations in VMware environments.
Quick Disaster Recovery: Enables swift restoration processes for continued business operations.

Organizations deploy HPE SimpliVity mainly for virtualized environments, focusing on disaster recovery, IT operations, and application hosting. Extensively used in sectors for VDI, backups, and data center tasks, it supports major workloads like Oracle and SAP, simplifying infrastructure management while ensuring high availability.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

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, Broadcom, StarWind and others in HCI. Updated: October 2026.

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