HPE SimpliVity Reviews

• Scalability
• Ease of setup
• Reduced complexity
• Flexibility

We are resellers, so it allows us to sell our customers solutions that make their work easier. They can make a port more rapidly and fit a broader range of cloud data platforms.

I would like to see more storage options, such as hybrid storage options. We sell other products as well. We run across a lot of customers who are not quite ready to go to all-flash, while it's probably a better idea. Not having an all-flash option right now is probably a hindrance for us, because the customers just get turned off when they see that. Even though what HPE is selling is actually a better option, sometimes convincing customers of that, when they are only looking at the bottom line, is difficult.

So far, stability is great.

Scalability is very good.

We have not really used technical support. It is pretty self-explanatory.

We saw changes in the market and changes in the way applications are developed. The market is going away from what we think of as databases, and is moving toward cloud data applications.

The setup was very straightforward.

We have used HPE, Dell, EMC, and Cisco. Typically, it's the customers' preference. A lot of times we have customers who are very comfortable with their existing HPE equipment. Going forward, if we go to a customer who doesn't have an existing preference, then that is where we are going to start directing them because of the partnership cooperation. HPE shines right now when compared to the other options.

Compared to the protection offerings of the platforms, I think the competing native data protection just isn't there. SimpliVity really got that part nailed down. I would think that's probably an easy way to show the customer that it's the superior product.

It removes the complexities of the storage administration.

It has allowed us to reduce our rack footprint. It allowed us to simplify our administration.

I would like to see replication to a cloud solution. I would like to replicate the data so that we have a backup copy off-site. I could then be comfortable getting rid of our existing backup solution. The other feature would be a single copy of the data storage as opposed to a dual copy. In that way, when I do things that automatically have dual copies, such as with our SQL server databases, I would not then be making four copies of the data.

In regards to the HPE Simplivity current offering –

1. Replication of backup to a cloud solution would be advantageous. At present, I’d have to spin up a new site (data center, networking gear, etc.) and place Simplivity nodes there to get replication of backups to meet my offsite requirement. They’ve told me they have a hosting service option, but I’ve not received any real details.

2. Simplivity makes two copies of the VMs on different nodes for redundancy. It would be advantageous to include an option for a single copy. So when there is a product with its own redundancy (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Groups), one is not then making 4 write I/Os for each write – two at the application layer – one to each SQL server node, two at the storage layer – one to two different Simplivity nodes.

When it is properly operated and configured, it is very stable.

When you go past eight nodes, you have to get approval. That has been a concern of ours. Sometimes they say that that it has been approved, and other times, they say that they have to go through the approval process again.

I used tech support prior to the acquisition and it has been good.

We knew that we needed to invest in new solution because we were using a standard, best of breed solution, and it was time to refresh that.

The initial setup was straightforward. Unfortunately, with the deployment services, there was a delay in getting things set up. There's usually a project manager and you have to wait until the gear arrives. The project manager gets involved a week later. After a week, there's a pre-flight. By the time you are up and running, it may be a month from the time you actually had boxes land on the ground.

We didn’t bring in any alternative solutions for a PoC. However, I have done evaluations of other solutions. We chose HPE because it allowed us to get in with a smaller footprint than some of the other solutions, which might require three, four, or five nodes. When selecting vendors, I look for technical feasibility, then operability, and then cost.

I would say that with hyper-converged infrastructure, it's important to understand how the solution is going to meet your needs. It is possible that if the requirements are different, a different vendor would be more appropriate.

Valuable features include ease-of-use and being all-in-one-box. That is what I needed at the time. I wanted storage compute, speed, and performance.

The only problem I had was that when we initially purchased SimpliVity, I didn't know that the OmniCube took up 60 GB of RAM. I ordered a server with 260 GB of RAM, thinking I would have 260 GB of RAM. The OmniCube then stole 60 GB. That's the only problem I had. Now that I know that going forward, I just know I need to over provision the box when I buy it.

The stability is good. I haven't had any problems with it so far.

I haven't tried to scale it.

I needed an all in one solution. I had looked at Nutanix and SimpliVity and between the two, Nutanix would only sell me in nodes of three and SimpliVity was willing to sell me a box by itself. 

When you're a vendor, I look for support. That's the most important thing. I like that SimpliVity ran on a Dell backend. Now that it is going to HV, we'll have to see how that runs, but the support that I knew I could get from SimpliVity was very important.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was pretty simple.

Understand how the product is actually writing to the hard drives. That's the biggest thing when you're getting to the hyper-converge space where you could lose performance over a direct connect system. Understand what each product is doing differently.

Elimination of IOPS.

We are now backing up 32 TB an hour and 760 TB a day!
We are seeing a 107:1 efficiency rating.

Telling a better story. Get better at telling your story and customers will be lined up! This thing WORKS AS ADVERTISED!

We have been using this solution for three months.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability, and we already added another server to the cluster.

I haven't used customer service.

I do not say this often, but tech support is 'world class'. We've opened up maybe six tickets. Three were questions about 'best practices' and how they thought we should proceed with something. Two were bugs, and they were not under Simplivity's control. One was a firmware bug with the Cisco server, and one was a VMware bug with the NIC and slow network performance under a specific condition.

We never used hyper-convergence before SimpliVity

The setup required the assistance of professional services. We waited about a week to get on schedule.

We used SimpliVity for all pre-sales work: sizing, analysis, and deep dives.
We purchased it through a partner.

Our ROI is about two years. This is mainly because I committed to eliminating our entire NetApp (4 filers, maybe 2 dozen drawers) by the end of our lease in Q3, 2018.

There is sticker shock, with no doubt. But the product's value is there, and then some! I am turning in my NetApp in 1.6 years. I will save maybe $800K in OpEx over the next 36-40 months!

We evaluated Scale Computing, Nutanix, Cisco/IBM (their Frankenstein thing), and HPE.

We were under promised and over delivered! This thing is so much better than you can imagine. My lead engineer is actually 'giddy' playing with this stuff. NetFlix disrupted video watching, Uber disrupted how we publically commute, and SimpliVity will disrupt infrastructure.

Operational efficiency is definitely one of the biggest benefits. A lot of times, when you write a TCO and ROI, one of the biggest things is administration. So they could get rid of all those man hours worrying about babysitting their SAN and their servers, and the network, etc. Take those hours and put them back into real value for the business working on issues with the applications; not the SAN and the infrastructure.

It's ease of use and it's simplicity within the infrastructure. For a lot of our customers hyper-converge is not a one size fits all. But for a lot of workloads and for a lot of applications it does work very well and it's an extremely simple solution; very viable.

I would like to see a single PROC option for things like Robo beause we have a lot of customers that just don't need dual CPU's in some of these locations. That's what drives up the cost a lot of the time. I would also like to see smaller core counts, as well. A lot of the core counts are just unbelievable. They are way under utilized over way too many cores.

Stability is good. It's rock solid. If you size them properly, you shouldn't really ever run into issues. We have only run into one workload so far out of all of our customers that doesn't fit correctly with the solution. It was essentially a batch process job that just would require a completely separate SAN and server environment.

Scalability so far has been pretty good. We haven't really had customers that have had a scale beyond an extreme amount of nodes; eight, nine, ten nodes. It's been rock solid.

We haven’t used technical support because we still go through SimpliVity for support even though HPE bought the company. It is still a separate support structure. They could work on support a little bit, but that's just HPE going through the growing pains.

We did not have a previous solution. As far as hyper converge goes, that was the first one we started selling. We've sold vSAN, as well, and the same with Nutanix. But SimpliVity is kind of the horse for picking a ride now.

I want stability when picking a vendor. Look at a company like Simplivity. They were a great company, but poorly managed as far as money goes and luckily HPE was able to swoop them up and that’s better than a lot of the other companies that could have bought them.

Setup is pretty straightforward. Everyone tries to say how simple their solutions are to set. Everything is plug-and-play and while they are, there are still little things that you need to know and understand, especially when it comes to the network. It's very easy solution. As a sales guy, I've installed them.

As a reseller, we like to give our customers a lot of options and we're not gonna sit here and say we only sell one product cause that would never be the way to do it. But HPE is a very strong company to partner with as far as total portfolio and solutions set goes.

Do it. Try it. PLC it.

The simplicity is the most useful aspect of this product. Deployment wasn't perfectly easy, but relatively easy. After that, it's been extremely easy to manage, extremely easy to consolidate our systems and extremely easy to back up our systems; not only on site, but also to our disaster recovery (DR) site through the SimpliVity tools.

We didn't have a really good method in place to get our live data into a DR site and that was the primary driver for SimpliVity. By installing and implementing SimpliVity, it made it very simple to get all of our critical systems in a state that they could be easily brought up in a DR site.

I would like to see more features around managing the data that it uses. Specifically, if your back-up data is filling up with your nodes, what to do with that tool is to make it a platform data you don't have a full load and just for backing up the data. Another improvement would be the ability for users like myself, administrators, to be able to run patches and upgrades with fewer issues.

Stability has been great so far. I haven't had any issues with stability or even with nodes. It's been great.

Scalability is good. We have a small implementation, so I can't speak very well to scalability. We have a three-mode installation now. We're going to six modes already and I would expect that to be an improvement.

We have used technical support a couple of times and every time was a good experience with a quick response by a technician. The resolution was all standard.

We didn't have a previous solution.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know whether they look solid and stable. Now, with the acquisition by HPE, they look even more solid and more stable. Also, a vendor solution must provide functionality that we need to have in a way that is simple, particularly for our organization, because it's not IT. We needed something that didn't require a lot to manage them. A system that is very simple. It didn't increase the items on my plate that I had to do with one more thing.

We looked at Nutanix, SimpliVity and one other. We chose SimpliVity because it's by far the most stable solution. We also chose it for the simplicity of managing the solution and the price point. It was a great price.

I think they should look at it very seriously, especially if they want to keep their staff slim and still provide all the functionality they're looking for that it can provide.

This solution’s most valuable feature is its simplicity.

It allowed me to have a hyper converged system that grows with multiple training centers and data centers.

I would love the solution to be able to move notes between federations. Right now, we use a manual process, but I know SimpliVity is working on a new and improved version of the product. Hopefully, they're going to make some kind of mechanism. In large implementations, it is a very useful tool.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have Platinum support. I give them two thumbs up.

Most of our data center was running on IBM BladeCenter and they just became obsolete. So we started to look into something more advanced, more innovative and simpler to manage.

When selecting a vendor the most important aspect is technical help and their support and simplicity of the system itself.

Setup was very straightforward.

We chose this solution because the product was very innovative. The latest and greatest. I think it's the future of data center technology.

We had a couple other vendors, such as Nutanix, but they didn't really compare to SimpliVity. It's a really great solution.

Really give it a test to understand how solution works and how simple it is to manage.

Our customer has a limited IT staff, so they were looking at something that will:

• Be a little more centralized
• Be easier for them to manage
• Give them the functionality that their customers really need
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We have a lot of customers who are looking at the whole hyper-converged infrastructure. Comparing this solution to some of the other competitors that we've been going up against, they like the ease of use, the centralized management, and big cost-savings. We had one SimpliVity deal so far, but that's what everybody from the customer standpoint really liked about it. They just received the product and they were just setting it up. Hypothetically, it's going to solve a lot of business problems that they were running up against.

That's a good question and I don't really have a good answer for that right now. I'm still learning about the product as a whole and I really want to see, once it's stood up in our customer environment, how it performs. I will then probably have some better ideas once our engineers go through it and talk with the customers as to what improvements there could be.

In terms of what I would define as a perfect solution, I am looking for one that is easy to manage, has a real user-friendly interface, and something that is not too complex. I want something that is the best bang for the buck, especially when we're trying to keep HPE onboard. There are all the competitors that are always trying to come in and say, "We can bring in our product for you, and you'll spend less, ours is easier to use." We want HPE to do whatever they can do to improve, in order to make it a better customer experience.

From what I've seen, it looks like it's a really stable solution. This is our first one that we're implementing. I believe it's going to do everything we want it to do. As far as how it will be in the real world, we will have wait and see.

No customers have tried to scale yet.

Technical support will be involved in the implementation, but that's it for right now. It's in process right now, so I would rate their support as "so far, so good." We'll see when it has all been completed.

We were partnered with SimpliVity before they were bought by HPE, but we never really had any deals as far as HPE goes.

We've sold a lot of blades and 3PAP. We've had some other solutions, like ExaGrid, that tries to compete with HPE. We've done a couple of deals for them. Usually, we try to promote the HPE infrastructure whenever we can, so this product is going to help out with that.

I really can't comment on the setup right now, because I was not involved in that. I don't want to say one way or another.

My advice would be to actually listen to the whole SimpliVity story. Really compare apples to apples, when a lot of manufacturers will bring up their own selling points, which are geared towards their product

It looks like a good thing in the initial presentation. In the long run, it may not answer all of your business needs or it might be way more expensive. Really go through the story and see everything that SimpliVity has to offer.

When selecting a vendor, the first thing I look for is if they stand behind your product. I want to know that when the customer has issues or problems arise, support will be there right away.

Pricing is always good to have, but more importantly, check for a quality product that has been researched, has been proven in the market, or is following business trends.