HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We are resellers. We change virtual environments and use c7000 plus 3PAR Blades. The repository is for virtual machines.

We have VxRail and are comparing HPE SimpliVity deduplication with that of Vxrail.

Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable. The add-ons are good options.

The customer has 100 virtual machines. We need to offer high availability for their production environment.

We use HPE SimpliVity for general corporate IT applications and to support our DevOps automation software.

There are three big improvements that SimpliVity brought to our organization: 

1. The ability to quickly and reliably create and maintain a disaster recovery environment over a relatively, low bandwidth WAN connection.
2. The reduction in physical storage, due to SimpliVity's data virtualization layer, which includes inline deduplication and compression.
3. The consolidation of many technology solutions into one solution, which resulted in lower overall costs in the form of fewer software and hardware purchases, reduced backup costs, lower bandwidth charges between sites, and less administrative overhead.

The ease of setting up our DR site with SimpliVity. It was very simple. I did not have to set up a separate storage, server, and networking environments. There was no additional WAN optimization or backup hardware/software, and it did not choke my WAN link.

I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes. In order to balance this data out, a support call is required and the support technician will spend some time rebalancing the nodes. The access to do this by end users is not given. It is also somewhat difficult to monitor the actual node's physical storage with out-of-the box monitoring tools due to the virtualization of this layer. 

I previously used a traditional virtualization stack with a SAN, compute, and network layers.  I switched because, at the time, we had no DR solution in place for many of our services. We were looking for the best available options to replicate data for a DR site and bring up services at that site. 

SimpliVity provides an all-in-one solution and has been a great addition to our tech portfolio.

It was easy to install.

Upfront costs seems high at first look, but after analyzing all the benefits of SimpliVity, we have come out ahead.

We evaluated other traditional stack options with Zerto as our replication software. We looked at Nutanix and EMC VxRail.

Hyperconvergence.

More velocity in applications.

Versatile.

The price could be better and it needs to back to other storage.

We run almost all of our production environment on SimpliVity. This includes Citrix, SQL, file, and production applications.

SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution. Training time has be reduced due to SimpliVity's seamless integration with vCenter Flex and Flash clients.

• The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use. 
• The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus. 
• Managing storage doesn't require a specialized skill set. 
• Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime.

• SimpliVity needs to improve the support for native backups, like SQL and Exchange.
• File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster.  
• SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM.  

HPE has decided to sell the solution in all-flash configurations, which may not be as cost effective for smaller mid-market enterprises.

It has helped to reduce our VMware licensing costs due to host consolidation.

Powerful, unbeatable hyper-converged solution from HPE SimpliVity 380 with OmniStack. 

It allows you to take advantage of the unique platform of computing, cloud management, storage, and integrated networks, as well as software-defined data management, which is easy to use. 

The most complete hyper-convergence infrastructure solution in the industry complying with the number one server platform in the market.

Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools.

Investing less time in configuration and management means that you will have more time to focus on what is really important: Your company's innovation and rapid commercialization.

As a service integrator we have recommended and implemented SimpliVity for numerous use cases but the product is particularly suited for ROBO and VDI use cases. We are looking at SImpliVity as a solution for Tier 2 and some Tier 1 apps in DC.

Our clients have been very happy with the data efficiency features (OmniCube accelerator card) and the HPE/SimpliVity HyperGuarantee, which is unique. For one of our clients who needed backup capability but did not want to invest in a dedicated backup tool, SimpliVity's native backup with app consistency came in handy. When you do this across more than 80 sites, the savings is significant and the WAN bandwidth efficiency is impressive.

1. Simple management
2. HyperGuarantee
3. Accelerator card
4. Globally federated architecture 

The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it. The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product. The 4KB based dedupe and optimization are definitely helpful as observed by our clients. The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool.

1. For SimpliVity to become a true DC solution, the limit of 32 nodes needs to be investigated. While this may not be a significant deterrent, it brings into question the underlying architecture.
2. HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show.
3. While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it.
4. SimpliVity has little to no integrations. It may have APIs, etc., but there are very few signed on integrations in place. This is necessary to build a solutions ecosystem.

No issues. The product has been performing well. No problems.

The product initially had a limitation of 12 nodes in a federation, which has been increased to 32. Keep this in the back of your mind, particularly when looking at the number of nodes in a single stack.

SimpliVity (before HPE) was pretty darn good. While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence.

Being vendor agnostic, we are not partial to any solution or product. Where we have deployed SimpliVity we have not faced issues. In short, no switching.

The implementation is straightforward when you follow the deployment guide. Stick to the default settings as they work for most setups. If you have the option of having multiple 10Gbps NIC cards, you can explore the option of having a NIC dedicated for storage.

In house. 

• Simpler operations
• No more monolithic SANs
• No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool.

In terms of setup, there are some gotchas and caveats, particularly when discussing stretched clusters. Rapid DR also pretty much goes the same way. Otherwise the process is pretty straightforward. Upgrades were a problem but have been addressed to a large extent. The biggest concern is around support and HPE's apparent lack of knowledgeable people.

Nutanix, VxRail and HyperFlex. Nutanix comes into almost all discussions and is a leader. The only area of concern is the expense as it adds up. VxRail is definitely the number one contender when discussing ROBO use cases but SimpliVity's DVE with its accelerator card is a strong option, particularly from the point of not needing additional hardware to address add-on requirements. SimpliVity also brings capacity savings.

Have a look at multiple solutions before making up your mind. Remember to take a top down approach and start with the app layer first. Your workload decides the infrastructure, not the other way around. Also, for most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly. However ridiculous as this may seem, read the guides and manuals carefully before implementation as they do have points that need to be looked at. If you do not believe me, you will end up going back to the same document anyway, which you want to avoid.

Day-to-day use. We implemented SimpliVity a little over a year ago. I could not be more pleased with the outcome.

I have saved time and money by moving to this platform. I am happy to share my results on the amount of power, time, and space saved.

The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups. My day-to-day experiences are better now that my backups are no longer running into production.

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

Not at this time.

No issues. The system was sized right by the SimpliVity engineers

So far, the support has been great. I have not needed to call many times.

I did have another product. I found a need to upgrade due to space issues and the amount of time that it was taking to run my backups at night.

The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services. I had no issues.

The vendor team worked with my managed services team. 

I have proven to my CIO that I have saved more money than expected. I am still calculating how much. 

It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal.

I spent several months looking at different options. I looked at VxRail and Nutanix.

If you are just starting your vetting process, make sure SimpliVity is on the table, you won't be disappointed.

Production servers running on virtualization (such as web, DB, mail, and file), and the report server requires more disk performance to reduce report generation.

Improves backup time and DR solution. We can backup with more frequency and minimize RPO and RTO.

• Deduplication
• Compression

It helps us save on the cost of storage and improves the backup and DR solution.

Cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS.

It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity.