HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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.

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.

Our primary use case for this solution is to offer a combination of computing storage services to remote locations. It operates in our data centers.

This solution has improved our organization because it provides ease of management and offers a single management platform for the entire staff.

The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box. The performance is also very good.

The ease of new deployments could be improved. Also, I think that the scalability of the solution may be inadequate for some people.

It would be good for this platform if we could have an independent gross-storage on the computer.

I have good a good impression of the stability of this solution.

In terms of scalability, this solution fits us. However, I think that the actual limitations are somewhat less than what people might want. For our purpose, it's ok.

We did not use a solution previous to this one. It was added to our IT portfolio because there was a need for it.

The initial setup was not extremely easy, so we needed specific skills in order to bring it into production. Once it was up and running, it was ok.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, I think that partnership is one of the most important criteria. We needed a technology that is universally deployable and has the capability of functioning in the cloud. This allows us to use the service not only in our own premise's data centers but with cloud providers as well.

At the time we were evaluating solutions but there were not many players in the market. We considered Nutanix, but it had its own hardware platform. SimpliVity had an OmniStack configuration that could run on hardware platforms that we already had within the organization. We chose SimpliVity because of this. 

There is a massive technology shift now toward software-defined storage, so we are trying to move from a functionality perspective to an abstraction layer above the equipment we buy.

I think that this is a safe investment for anyone who wants to have a straightforward solution that comes out of the box and can be deployed on an appliance. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for our data center.

Disaster recovery, backup simplification, deduplication, and compression features have helped improve my organization. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery.

The upgrades need improvement. 

One to three years.