HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We use it in our original data centers and large sites.

It let us create our regional data centers without a huge investment. We didn't have to have a lot of VL servers or an entire chassis to build out an ESX farm or attach storage.

• The data deduplication
• The integration with our VMware was pretty sweet.

I would like to see an option to add external storage that can be seen by all of the nodes in a stack. For example, if I need to build a file share, or something, where there is not enough data than needs to be accessed quickly, but there is a lot of data, putting a large file share or user file share on SimpliVity currently doesn't makes sense.

We had failures out-of-the-box of our new technology along with a few bugs during the initial setup. Our initial five nodes had three power failures during setup.

The OmniStack module needs improvement, because from what I have read, the newer versions use even more memory. So, as we upgrade, we lose resources available for systems.

After initial setup, it is okay. 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.

Scaling is a piece of cake. We have been able to scale up in our Asia-Pac region. We even are doing site-to-site replication of certain systems that we need to have high availability on.

I haven't any problems with the technical support. The teams are usually pretty good at what they do. Getting them in certain regions is harder than actual fixing the problems, e.g., getting somebody onsite if there are not that many technicians, like in Europe or Asia, who are trained.

We have a very dispersed environment and were looking to centralize. We were using traditional VMware farms, standalone servers, etc.

With new technology as the next thing, when we are replacing our environment, we try to go with not only what fits from a cost perspective, but we also try to stay on the edge of technology since we tend to keep our environments past their usual lives. So, it's better to start new and work out the bugs.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It is pretty much out-of-the-box. Once Pointnext got the initial connection between all the nodes set, it was pretty straightforward from there. Then, building the ESX farm was a pretty standard build.

Everything in our organization is outsourced, so we use consultants. They are embedded vendors, so our experience with them is good.

We paid for installation services from Pointnext.

The only thing that I think we are paying for is the VMware licenses, but we are enterprise, so it is not horrible.

We are primarily an HPE shop with most of our storage, networking equipment, and servers.

We did a review on Dell EMC and Lenovo. However, it would have been a bigger stretch for us to switch than to stick with HPE.

Definitely consider the product. Once it is up and running, it is pretty rock solid.

We use it in a VMware environment that supports VMs.

The most valuable feature is that it's easy to manage.

It also has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam. 

It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline.

If it's not already included, an additional feature I would like to see would be better Storage vMotion. That would be number one on my wish list.

The stability is not good. I have fewer than 20 VMs per node. I have nine nodes in my environment, and when it goes south, 20 VMs will go down, even though there's a replica on other nodes. There's a third copy which is a backup and I can't bring any of those online.

The scalability is very good. It's excellent for a branch office/remote office, instead of a data center.

Most of technical support has been excellent. I can escalate my support case to a developer very quickly, in less than a day. That's unbelievable.

We switched because we have a most-excellent salesperson. He promised something more than what the SimpliVity environment can support.

The short version regarding ROI is that it's not good. It takes two engineers all day to solve an ESXi node-down issue, and it takes between two days and two weeks to bring it back.

We signed a three-year contract.

On our shortlist there were only Vblock, which we didn't need, and Nutanix, which was more expensive. So we chose the least expensive, at least at the time.

Do a proof of concept on everything, instead of just relying upon the salesperson's pie-in-the-sky promise.

I'll rate this solution as a five out of ten. It may not be terribly mature yet. I see disk, for example, becoming all-flash. That may have overcome my painful learning experience.

We use SimpliVity in our retail stores as a backup solution.

We had an incident once where one of our primary servers in a retail store went down. It took us less than a second to do a restore. It came back up and we were up and running. It used to take us days to restore those servers.

The most valuable feature is the quick restore.

There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site.

It seems pretty stable in regard to the way it's working with the Federation and in the local copies.

The scalability is good. It's scalable to what we need it for.

The technical support is amazing. It's really good. We've gotten the white-glove treatment from HPE and CDW.

We were running on antiquated equipment and older solutions that required a lot more hands-on work. We used a piecemeal solution. We had two Dell servers and a VNXe storage unit and we backed it up through Commvault. So we had a bunch of different providers, different supports that we'd have to call for the three different things. With SimpliVity it is all just one.

Initially, it was pretty complex for us because we didn't know anything about it. But once we got the hang of everything, it actually became pretty simple.

We used a reseller, CDW. Our experience with them has been great. They've been an awesome reseller for us. We do almost all of our stuff through CDW.

We haven't really seen ROI yet because we're still fairly new to the product.

Our shortlist included Dell and Commvault. We chose Simplivity for the simplicity of the way it works and the true hybrid converged appliance which was there. We didn't have to buy a bunch of equipment. We bought two nodes and were able to do everything with those two nodes.

If you're a retail company that has a bunch of stores, I would actually highly recommend this for your stores - for the simplicity of it, the ease of the restores, and keeping your environment up and running.

We use it as a backup solution and so that the nodes don't fail. When the nodes fail, it's all governed through SimpliVity. It's been working really great. We haven't had too many issues with it.

We use it for hosting stuff for clients.

It easily backs up our systems, allowing us to recover them.

It makes my job simple.

• It comes all in one box.
• It is simple and easy to use.
• Everything works as advertised.

HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380.

The stability is self-managed.

The scalability may be a little limited. It depends on what we select with it.

We haven't had any issues or problems with the technical support. They help us by setting up a demo and making sure everything functions correctly with the product before we ship it to the client.

Our previous solution was hardware, not a one box solution. It had multiple servers.

It was time to upgrade the client's solution. We chose to go with this solution because it was a small market client.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was simple to set up. After setting it up, it was easy to manage.

We used HPE for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We are an HPE shop. Most of the stuff that we have is HPE, so there was only one choice for us.

I would recommend buying this product. It is a simple, self-managed product.

Our primary use case for SimpliVIty was around backup and disaster recovery. We were trying to replace our existing DR service platform, then consolidate our backups from the different solutions, whether that was Veeam on the VMware side, Robocopy for file shares, or Windows Backup or SQL backup for certain applications.

Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to. That has freed up those resources to do more application delivery type functionalities.

• The ease of management in these deployments were some of the most valuable things. 
• The date storage infrastructure that it provides is pretty fantastic.
• 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.

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.

It is very stable. We have had very limited problems. When we do have problems, it is typically not on the SimpliVIty side of the house, but on the hardware side or VMware side. However, the support is phenomenal at getting all of the right resources on the line together, whether they have to call up VMware or your networking provider, whomever it happens to be, to get to the bottom of the problem.

Scalability is fine. We are a fairly small organization, so it hasn't really come up. We fit well into their small end of deployments. From what I hear, it can scale quite high. However, that is not a functionality or feature that we've come across yet.

The technical support is good. We purchased SimpliVIty prior to HPE owning them, so there was a different support when the buyout occurred. However, it is at a level now where it is second to none.

We didn't initially think we needed to invest in a new hardware solution. We really were focused on DR backup. As we went through the use case and worked out the financials on it, we determined that SimpliVIty was the right move for us, as it financially made sense to the point that we had an HPE 3PAR that was two years old and we put that on the shelf. So, it was not hardware refresh related at all.

There were definitely some complexities to the initial setup, as we had to migrate off of our older infrastructure, which was the more complex part. Generally, the SimpliVIty install and migration was pretty straightforward.

We used a reseller, IMP Solutions, to purchase the deployment, but we did the actual install and deployment ourselves with SimpliVIty support. IMP Solutions was fantastic.

When we did our financials, it became a wash based on what we were doing previous with regular hardware refreshes. However, 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.

For the VMware licensing, it is approximately $10,000 a year.

SimpliVIty, HPE's previous hyper-converged solution, Nutanix, and Scale Computing were on our shortlist. 

What made us chose SimpliVity was the tight integration on the backup and DR aspects of the product. Everybody else had that type of capability, but it felt like it was added on after the fact, whereas with SimpliVIty, it was built from the ground up to do these things, which was our primary use case. So, it made sense for us to move forward with that product.

Try to understand your rate of change on your data: When you take a backup, how quickly is your information changing or being updated, and whether it is a database, file server, or whatever it happens to be. This will affect the way that you size the solution and get into those archives. It will affect how much space it starts to take up and how you calculate that. Know your data.

It does everything that we need it to do. The only spot that it falls out is the archival backups. Otherwise, it is a rock-solid platform. It has freed up a bunch of resources to do different types of work, instead of dealing with storage allocations, backups, and recoveries.

The primary use case is its an offsite virtualization. It runs all our servers at an offsite office in Brazil. Our main sites are in New York and London. We bought a company in Brazil that had aging hardware, so we replaced that with three nodes of the SimpliVity solution. Since it is small office and it does everything, you don't need to have a SAN nor a fancy network. It is a one stop shop, which was really good for this particular thing.

The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done.

SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one. It's sort of silly. I feel like it would be like half a day of programming for somebody to write something that would just auto-balance it.

The vCenter integration could probably improve a little. It is just a plugin that you are interacting with, and it feels like it has been largely the same for a while. It could probably get better.

It used to be kind of touchy. Now, it is great. I have not touched it in about six months since it doesn't break.

It is not very scalable. However, I think it is supposed to be like that. It is not supposed to be like a massive solution with about 30 clusters, and that is by design. I don't think that is a flaw. It is designed for small clusters, so it is not very scalable. 

The technical support is not the worst ever. It has changed, because it used to be bad. It used to be where they had amazing techs, but you could never get them on the phone. Now, you can get somebody on the phone but they never know what they are talking about. 

There is pretty good support for upgrades. I got a pretty senior tech the last time that we did an upgrade, so it is workable.

We had an aging infrastructure that we didn't want to replace with a ton of physical servers. We went from a whole mess of old, difficult servers to support to three servers that we never have to touch. Therefore, it has greatly reduced the amount of administration for our site, and we basically don't touch it.

I believe that we bought the solution through some reseller in Brazil.

I feel like all the other companies gave up.

For smaller node clusters, I wouldn't go with anybody else. For small node hyper-converged three-node clusters, it is the best game in town. It was great before HPE bought them. Now, it has a large organization standing behind it. I would definitely recommend SimpliVity. If people are using it for the right purposes, like we are, it is a really good solution.

We are in a stretched cluster environment. So far, it has been really good.

We can get backups faster. We have a smaller footprint for hardware, which takes up less space. So, we use less electricity and floor space.

The storage deduplication, as far as the storage space, is the most valuable feature, then the backups.

It has a smaller footprint. We can restore faster. Things run faster and smoother.

We have only been using it for a little less than a year. So far, it has been good. We haven't had any issues.

Scalability sounds easy, just add nodes. We haven't had to do that yet, since we just started.

The technical support is good. We are in contact with HPE. It seems like anytime that we have problems people are there to help us. 

We went from our old technology to the new technology. So far, it has helped us with backups to save us money from the old technologies.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had help with them doing it.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and our experience with them was good. We have had them for a long time.

I have not seen ROI.

We also looked at Nutanix.

We chose HPE because of the cost savings. With the backup and restore, we didn't have to have a third-party backup solution for it, instead we could use SimpliVity.

Do your research. We talked with many people about it. Do what is right for your environment.

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.