HPE SimpliVity Reviews

We run our 50+ virtual servers on SimpliVity and also use it for backups.

The all-flash storage in SimpliVity provides much better performance that the spinning-disk of our previous virtualization system. The extremely fast backups and restores (typically less than 1 minute) enable us to easily backup all our VMs every 2 hours. Lastly, the incredibly high data reduction ratio through compression and deduplication enables us to store 38 Days of full backups done every 2 hours in a remarkably small space. We're currently seeing a data reduction ratio of almost 300:1.

Backups and restores occur very quickly.

HPE Technical Support has been very responsive to any problems we've had.

All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions.

The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.

The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes.

SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.

Although HPE has made significant improvements, the upgrade procedure is still overly complex. It's gotten much easier but it's still far from double clicking on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. Therefore, installing SimpliVity upgrades is an area that HPE could improve upon further.

Performing file-level restores, which is the most common backup recovery operation that we do, also seems more complex than it needs to be. The recovered files/folders are restored to an ISO file, mounted as a DVD, and then they need to be copied from that. Afterwards, the ISO needs to be removed from the VM and then deleted from the SimpliVity storage. It gets the job done but it's kind of clunky.

We've used the solution for three years. 

The stability is, for the most part, pretty good. I won't say we haven't had problems.

Our biggest problem has been SSD failures. Over the three years we've had it, we've replaced over half of our SSDs due to drive failures. Of course, it's all been under warranty and therefore it hasn't cost us anything other than a lot of time and headaches. I suspect HPE received a bad batch of SSDs from their SSD vendor and many of them ended up in our system.

Technical support has been good. They have been very responsive to our SSD failure issues and we usually have a replacement drive in hand within 2 hours of calling HPE SimpliVity support. We have had a few software issues and, again, the HPE support has been very responsive and usually quickly resolves our problems.

Positive

Our previous solution used three VMware servers and two mirrored SANs. The servers were end-of-life and the SANs were almost out of available storage space.

The initial setup and configuration was reasonably complex and we used our local HPE reseller to assist us.

We have two nodes and it probably took a couple of hours per node to get everything configured and working. Then it was just a matter of migrating our VMs from our old system to the new SimpliVity system.

We used our reseller for the implementation. We have a local HPE shop here that we buy most of our network and computer equipment from and they came in and did most of the initial configuration. They were extremely knowledgeable and I doubt we would have been able to get everything properly configured and operational without them.

Since we were faced with having to replace our entire VMware system (three host servers and two SANs), we found that the cost of a two-node SimpliVity hyper-converged system was very close to what it would have cost to build a comparable conventional discrete system. 

We evaluated Dell VxRail, VMware vSAN, and Nutanix.

We're customers and end-users. 

I'd rate the solution as an eight out of ten. 

We really like it. As stated earlier, most backups take a minute or less. Within our first year, one of our SQL servers got corrupted somehow and wouldn't boot. We restored the VM from the previous backup, which was at that time about an hour old, and in under a minute we had that 950 GB VM up and running. Restoring this VM with our old backup system would have taken six or seven hours. For us, this was a real eye opener.

I'd advise potential new users to definitely do some kind of a trial, if at all possible, and go into it with their eyes open. We had a pretty good idea of its capabilities beforehand. Although we didn't do a trial, we had witnessed several demos of it. Overall, we've been pretty happy with it. However, like any product, there are always a few things that could be improved.

We have about 45 virtual servers running for the company. These include file servers, SQL servers, public safety, GIS, Exchange, and all other applications used by a local government.

The whole backup and recovery capability. We are able to create full backups and restore full backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds. This has been a great feature.

The deduplication is resulting in a data reduction ratio of 290:1 at the moment.

The interface is fairly user-friendly.

Prior to the latest release, it was a real pain to upgrade SimpliVity. First, the host server had to be upgraded with the latest drivers, followed by an upgrade of the OmniStack controller software, and lastly, an upgrade of the VMware ESXi software. Each of the three steps were done independently and the process took 2 to 3 hours per node. Starting with the 4.0 Release, an Upgrade Manager orchestrates the whole process and greatly simplifies it. It still takes 2+ hours per node, however.

We have been using SimpliVity for about two years.

SimpliVity has been very stable. We've had no downtime.

Scalability is something that needs to be improved because if you need more storage then you have to add more nodes. You can't just add more disks to it.

We have about 250 users.

We've had a few instances where we've had to work with HPE support and they've resolved everything very quickly. We've had zero downtime.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We had HPE implement and deploy the product for us. We purchased it from a local HPE partner and they set the whole thing up.

We bought this solution as a package that included all of the hardware and all of the software.

We evaluated options from Dell, IBM, Nutanix, Scale, and others before choosing SimpliVity.

In summary, this is a good solution aside from the issues with scalability and improving the ease of upgrading. The upgradability has improved but it's still far from simply clicking a link and it automatically upgrades. It's not quite that simple yet, but it's getting there.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

I use the solution for general virtualization, different workloads, and VDI.

The product can be managed easily. The storage efficiency is valuable. The tool has an integrated backup. The data protection capabilities are very good. I did not face any issues with it. We do the standard virtualization. We use VMware. Everything we do on VMware, we can do also on SimpliVity.

The solution must provide other hypervisors. VMware is changing its licensing model.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The tool has been working fine for a very long time. The stability is very good.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten. It's a system based on appliances. If we want to scale, we must get a new appliance. Every hyperconverged infrastructure has a similar model. If I want more storage, it's not flexible because I need to add more appliances. The tool is suitable for medium and small companies.

HPE provides good support.

The setup is easy. We have two on-premise clusters deployed in our organization.

Nutanix and VxRail are competitors of the solution. HPE SimpliVity is better than its competitors because of its storage optimization and backup features.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The inline dedupe and compression has allowed me to run all my servers and appliances (total 60) in an HA configuration while taking up just 8U of rack space (4x2U nodes). There is incredibly fast I/O and with the OmniCubes, my users are spoiled with the super-fast reads and writes. Did I mention that we truly enjoy our 99.999% up time?

The ease of managing this system! Recently added the All Flash CN3400F and oh my goodness are these nodes fast as lighting! I love having a private cloud for my organization. Public cloud will never care for my organizations data more than I do.

I gave it an excellent rating, thus I think it's well excellent! If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups. You have to hunt a bit if you have to restore a file. Index the backups and it would be perfect!

It's been a little dodgy this year on my CN3000s at Prod when they have lost HA Sync. This has only happened when we've lost Internet connection to our DR site. I'm still trying to understand why this happens. It's quite a pain when this occurs.

Slight inconvenience with scaling out with the All Flash nodes. We had to put them into their own datacenter because of compatibility issues with the CN3000s (seriously?). While it's not the end of the world, I unfortunately am not able to do inline vmotion of servers between the datacenters. Instead I have to do a cold storage vmotion with a powered off guest server. Not the end of the world, but is inconvenient to me because it makes for some late nights. A larger server takes many hours to move over my 1GB network. This may just be an issue with my configuration and lack of a 10GB switch.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been slightly impacted since HP purchased Simplvity. The support is still excellent, it just takes them a bit more time to get back to you when you open even a critical ticket. I'll give HP some time to adjust and update this part of the review later.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent +++. The HP purchase of Simplvity has not impacted the skill level of the engineers I have worked with. They are still great.

We had an aging Compellent SAN which was critically close to running out of disk space. Dell would not sell me an additional disk enclosure, thus forcing me to do a forklift upgrade. Moving to the Simplivity HCI allowed me considerably more resources and we came in under budget.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It's almost plug and play! Adding the All Flash node needed a little more effort.

A vendor team implemented it. Expertise was excellent. I couldn't have asked for better.

I'm not in finance, so I don't know the numbers, but I do know that I've since added 10 additional VMs and appliances, and can still add more without having to buy anything. I've saved on VM licensing because I was able to get rid of SRM. I couldn't even imagine how much it would cost to host all these servers in the public cloud!

This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN. Licensing is easily maintained. Keep in mind that you still have to license VMware per processor.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Nutanix and Dell Compellent.

Having my private cloud within my Simplivity infrastructure has given me so much more than I could have ever expected. I love the ability to fire off a full, application-aware backup of a VM and have it complete in just under four seconds. Also, I can now fail my entire data center over to my DR site and have everything up an running in well under 30 minutes, with my mission-critical servers up in under 10 minutes (the servers do have to power on!). It's awesome. You do need EZ-DR by VM20/20 to accomplish this, but it is a fraction of the cost of VMware Site Recovery Manager.

In the world of traditional backups using backup software which writes to either tape or disk, the backup software will index the files to match exactly to how they appear on the server. When performing a native Simplivity backup which allows for file level restoration , the folders, subfolders and files are not indexed but rather are listed in a somewhat, but not totally, random order. More often than not, when I am asked to restore something from backup, it will be a single file that someone has either accidentally deleted or overwritten. I have very large file servers which contain thousands of folders and subfolders. Without the benefit of indexing, it sometimes takes a bit of searching to find the correct folder/file that needs to be restored. It is occasionally easier to just restore the entire file server (renamed of course), which only takes about 10 seconds, and copy the file from the restored VM than it is to find the single file in the backup. This is just an inconvenience, definitely not a deal breaker.

The main reason for the selection was that SimpliVity ensures high availability, and, with the static cluster configuration, we are reasonably protected as we have two nodes with synchronous replication. That's why we feel comfortable enough to use this technology.

The simplicity of the solution is its most valuable aspect. It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view. It's easy to use.

The pricing is reasonable.

I've found the solution to be stable. 

We haven't had any issues. Recently, we purchased new SimpliVity nodes. We are pretty confident with the platform. We are using it more than in the beginning.

The installation was a bit complicated. 

There may be issues around scaling. 

Technical support could be better.

SimpliVity has to evolve into a solution that is more integrated with the public cloud. At the moment, this is not the case. It's not our case, however, if we wanted to make some kind of hybrid integration between private cloud and public cloud, SimpliVity is not well prepared for this. 

I started using the solution nearly three years ago. The first installation was before the pandemic, that's for sure. It was likely in the spring of 2019.

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Scaling is problematic. It's not as scalable as other solutions, such as Nutanix. In our scenario, it's not a big point for us as we have a medium enterprise. Therefore, we don't need to scale straight to tens of nodes. We only have four nodes at this time. For us it's not a problem, however, maybe for larger organizations, it can become a problem.

We've had some issues, such as typical disc faults, however, on the same day, we open a ticket in the super-portal and we receive the new piece. It's very, very useful and affordable. However, for more technical issues, it's a little bit difficult to find the right person. Eventually, finally, you will find him.

The product is a little bit more complicated. That said, SimpliVity always is installed with certified personnel from the HPE, so it's a question of time. You always have to give them space in the racks for the servers. That's all.

We have certified HPE personnel install the solution on our behalf. 

The cost of the solution is pretty good. It's not too expensive. 

Before choosing this solution, we looked into Nutanix which was the competitor at that moment.

The main reason for our decision in 2019 was the price. Nutanix was a higher cost - much higher than SimpliVity. Nowadays, I think the price has reduced. Maybe, nowadays, we would decide on something else. However, at that moment, it was very, very clear for us.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others, however, it depends on the environment. For a company of our size, it's a very good solution.

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.