HPE SimpliVity Reviews

Inline deduplication, instant recovery of data across datacenters, low latency, easiness of management. The solution is fully integrated in the Virtual center client, which makes for a very lean learning curve. Simplivity adds as a plugin into virtual center and delivers a fully featured dashboard. Backup Policies are VM-centric, but can be applied at a datastore level as well. The dashboard displays live and historic latency values, overall and for each VM, and is used as a GUI for backup and restore. Backup and restore are performed automatically but can be also performedmanually at any time. This is done with a couple of klicks and takes a few seconds.

We consolidated five servers and one SAN with three arrays into two OmniCubes. Our SAN was full with 20 TB at the time of migration, and we accomodate the whole amount of data into less as the half of the disk space. Since then the infrastructure grew constantly, but the data foot print on the Omnicubes barely increases. Dedup is currently around 3.3. Additionally, we implemented DR with a third OmniCube residing in a second datacenter, where we replicate our data. Recovery of VMs is done in a couple of seconds. We now almost never use our backup software to restore data anymore.

Some proactive / predictive monitoring of VMs health would be a plus. Speed in cathing up with Vmware Esxi releases could also be slightly improved.

Proactive monitoring of VMS: this is one item on my wish list. I would like an easy way to receive an alert when a VM is performing badly (due to latency, cpu or memory issues for example). I know there are ways to create alarms or alerts in vSphere or third party tools. But what I am talking about here is some easier way to achieve that, maybe with a few clicks in the GUI. It is not specifically a task which Simplivity must accomplish, but since it has a plugin in VC could be a good place to introduce it.

Regarding Esxi releases. Omnicubes run on Esxi and Simplivity has to officially support each Esxi release for you to go and install it on your Omnicube. This takes obviously a few weeks after each Vmware release. Sometimes it can take longer, so in those cases would be good to speed up the process.

1.5 years

No.

No.

No.

Excellent support.

Perfect, the technical team is great, one of the greatest I know so far.

No, this is our first hyperconverged solution.

Not really, OmniCubes were deployed in a couple of hours.

Through a vendor, their expertise was good.

We looked at Nutanix and vSAN.

We have found no other solution in the market which has the same full set of features. Specifically inline deduplication is unique in its implementation here.

DR, Dedupe, Efficiency Rating.

Simplified our DR Solution.

Lowered the Backup Increment from 1 hour to under 15 minutes.

I would like to ability to install a client on a remote server and download images from the federation service.

3 Years.

No, Very easy to implement.

No, Very pleased with the stability of the solution.

No, We have increase capacity 2X.

Outstanding Customer Service.

Outstanding Technical Support.

I migrated from IBM Blade Servers and traditional SAN infrastructure.

Very Straightforward. It was a much easier rollout than expected.

In House.

Very Economical.

Yes, Nutanix.

As an early adopter of SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure, we’ve seen significant benefits of the solution. SimpliVity reduced our data center footprint from 20U to 4U, increased our application delivery performance by 75%, and lowered operational costs in a major way.

In-line data-deduplication and data virtualization. DR Replication. Fast cloning, fast restores, and fast backups.

Our deploy times are greatly reduced, but what I love most is our ability to sync de-duped data across to our DR site quickly and efficiently. I hope I never need it, but I feel much better about our situation now that we have SimpliVity if we ever need to fail over to our DR site.

Ability to add storage incrementally would be nice.

3 months

Minor issues that were quickly resolved with support.

No.

Not yet.

Very good

Very good.

The initial setup was a bit complex. This was made easier with their deployment guide, and Professional Services group, who handled the deployment.

EMC VxRail

Data protection that is inherent with the system. Speed of deployment and extremely easy to manage. Backup and replications take just seconds! I have a junior level tech maintaining the system!

We update our main pharmacy system monthly at three locations. Standing up a test environment for validation takes just minutes. Also, during the upgrade process after hours our maintenance window has decreased over 50% with blazing fast entire server backups.

Upgrades/Patches to ESXi have to be approved by SimpliVity and their support installs them...along with upgrades to their virtual controller. That's the one downside to having such an easy to manage integrated console...it needs to be validated against ESXi.

2 years

No

No

No

Great.

Technical Support is very knowledgeable and responsive. First Class.

Legacy Dell Equallogic SAN. Needed a datacenter refresh and loved the feature rich all in one SimpliVity solution.

It was very straightforward. Your part is to provide LAN connectivity, Ipmc and rack them. Implementation team pretty much handled the rest including knowledge transfer.

Given we needed a datacenter refresh, we were able to implement SimpliVity at a cheaper cost than replacing our legacy compute and SAN. We inherited true business continuity (priceless)...and were able to prune our preexisting server backup solution. Just the backup solution software costs saved us >$15,000 annually. ROI was instant.

Cisco Flexpod/NetApp, Dell Compellant SAN

This solution protects your data with minimal effort. Due to the deduplication, optimization, compression and small block size; our replication happens every 15 minutes without feeling it. We have a very elaborate backup schedule that allows us to keep various levels of backups for extended periods times without hardly using any physical storage. A savings rate of over 130 to 1!

Backup and restore.

As a small IT shop we spend less time managing our VMware infrastructure which gives us more time to focus on the front end of our business.

Single file restore capabilities and ease.

18 months

NO -- went up fast and migrated quickly.

Very stable so far...

We added a fourth server with relative ease.

Technical support has been among the best we have dealt with.

• Integrated backup and DR features
• De-duplication and compression
• Management using the vSphere client
• Total ease of management

Backups - policies are built in and managed using the SimpliVity extension in vSphere. It makes working with backups and recovery extremely simple and removes all the complicated tasks of backup storage management. The ability to place backups at any datacenter within the vSphere environment is nice too. These are full backups too, not just snapshots.

Reporting - improvements have been made, but I would like to see some enhancements for recalling historical information: automated reports on storage efficiency over time and backup growth over time.

I have used it since January 2015.

I have not encountered any stability issues. We were able to migrate all of our legacy environment of physical servers and data over to SimpliVity with no issues. Performance was improved and storage efficiency with the deduplication really works. When we had an Accelerator card fail in one host (the card manages the deduplication tasks for the host), we got an alert the card had failed but never had a service interruption. The card on the other host takes over for the failed card until it is replaced. Very resilient.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We initially started out with a 2+1 configuration and then scaled up to a 3+2 with no issues.

Technical support is the best. Their first-line guys know the product and can solve issues. I have always had any issue or support request resolved in a timely manner and by the same guy who was assigned the ticket.

Initial setup was very easy. I actually set up the “Federation” myself one Saturday morning with no help from support. I just followed the instructions for the rack and stack, powered up assigned IP addresses to the networks it required and the embedded wizard did the rest.

The nice thing about SimpliVity is that ALL the features are included in the base price. You don’t have to try to pick and choose and fight the pricing game.

We looked at other solutions before purchasing SimpliVity (Nutanix), but SimpliVity was a better fit for our requirements and had what I judged as features Nutanix could not compete with.

Do your homework and compare them to the competition apples for apples so that you see the value the product has from features, ease of use and pricing.

I have spoken to other customers at SimpliVity road show events and serve as a customer reference for them when asked. I really believe in the product that much.

It’s difficult to find a single valuable feature, because all of the features are good. The key point is the Data Virtualization Platform that allows you to achieve great efficiency in storage use, data management, backup and disaster recovery. I appreciated the simple and quickly deployment, the vCenter integrated management features, the backup and DR integrated and finally, but important, performance that is very good.

With the OmniStack system, we can deploy a system in a Stretched cluster configuration with a sync replication and a disaster recovery site with a few clicks of a mouse; all are managed from the vCenter and we don’t need to upgrade the internet connectivity, because the efficiency data management works fine. Management of the system is simplified and the complexity of the system is reduced.

Backup application integration: The backup actually allows creating some independent recovery points of the VM. It’s possible to duplicate and restore the entire VM or restore some guest files. The backup is consistent because the VMware integration and the VSS integration allows having an “application-consistent” restore point, but the restore doesn’t have an application integration function. So if the VM has, for example, installed an Exchange Server, I’m not able to restore a single mailbox or a single item from a specific mailbox. Doing this requires deploying a third-party backup solution. There aren’t specific issues about this, but I think it could be a good improvement.

Support for other hypervisors: Some our customers have installed Hyper-V or KVM; the Simplivity roadmap includes Hyper-V support with the Windows 2016 release. VMware-only support can actually restrict our business opportunity; it’s a business issue, not a technical issue.

I have been using it for one year.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues, but it’s too soon, because I don’t need to expand the systems currently in production.

Support is good and efficient.

The initial setup is very simple; the deployment of the entire system is a one-hour, wizard-guided procedure.

The pricing is not cheap but it lines up with converged solutions. If compared with a traditional system, it is important to evaluate all the features. If all of the features are compared, Simplivity is less expensive than a traditional solution. If you compare it to Nutanix, it is important to compare it to a RF3 solution (five-node minimum), because Simplivity can achieve the same protection level with a two-node configuration; OmniStack is less expensive.

The license depends on the size of the appliance and is affected by the CPU power (number of CPU cores). However, it’s possible to use an x86 external server connected to the Simplivity storage using a 10Gb network and exported by NFS, using the power of the Data Virtualization Platform with the external x86 computational power. This supported configuration improves the computational power without affecting the license.

I choose Simplivity after evaluating Nutanix and Data Domain. I chose Simplivity for its data virtualization platform.

Because the crucial point is the Data Virtualization Platform, the key point is the data type evaluation: it’s important to evaluate what type of data will be stored in the appliance. For example, if the data is video streaming, the platform isn’t good because the deduplication won’t will work well. The other key point is an evaluation of the workload to consolidate. I suggest always monitoring the system performance with some tools for defining the CPU, memory, network and disk workload of the system and an audit of the data type that will be managed. With the generic VM data types in our system, we have achieved data efficiency from 20:1 to 40:1.