HPE SimpliVity Reviews

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.

One of the most valuable features is the solution is simple. You get everything in one place, one rack for everything. So you don't have to get bits and pieces for a whole solution.

The solution works very well for banking or oil and gas sectors, and for the branch offices. 

One area of the service that could use improvement is that it is an aging solution. The market activity shelf life is over as people are moving toward a more savvy cloud box.

One con to the solution is the expense. A second thing is it has to be tailor-made properly. The presales part has to be done properly. Otherwise, you can misguide the customer.

Another issue is that it's not growing. I don't know what they want to do and apply for that particular solution or if they are looking for something else. I haven't seen many improvements in the last couple of years.

Also, nowadays everything is a very lean architecture, but SimpliVity is not a lean architecture in terms of anything. SimpliVity should be very lean in terms of the solution.

I've been working with the solution for five years.

Once you've taken the right course of action, the solution is quite stable, but it should be in the proper hands to maintain.

Scalability is very good in SimpliVity. Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable.

Compared to NewtonX, technical support for HPE is a lot better. We had a few situations where we need to get connected with them. The usual turnaround time is the next business day or whatever option the customer has. It'll be resolved accordingly in time.

The initial setup is complex. You need experts on that to kick start it, or it would be screwed up.

You need to go with a vendor, or find a niche experts, and there are only a handful of people available in the market.

The solution is expensive; not every budget can fit it. With the technical experts, for after-sales, you need to be a bit careful because it can burn your pockets if you don't expect it because there are only a few people available.

The solution is a one-time investment that the customer has to make, but the scalability is there. The performance is very good on any application you are trying to build on top of it, it performs according to that hardware layer. They offer very good presale support in the region here, if you need to get connected.

Now that AI is changing, hyper-convergence is there, but the hybrid model is applied in any scenario. Everybody doesn't want fully on-prem because SimpliVity is something where you want to convert everything on-prem. So if you are approaching a hybrid model, that solution should be in the cloud as well as on-prem. It should be not hardware agnostic, one solution. Anytime your data is your property, you can move it to any solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

One of the use cases was that a customer had around 10 servers, which stopped working. The customer wanted to replace all those servers with new ones. I proposed that they should use the SimpliVity solution in place of 10 servers with around 100TB of data in a discrete environment. SimpliVity is an on-premise solution. It's not cloud-based.

We have four customers who deal with HP SimpliVity.

What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features.

Once I am into the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node. However, there are certain other providers, like Hitachi and AirDeck, that provide solutions. You can go with any of the hardware infrastructure, and they can provide you with their solutions for HCI itself. HCI is a simple software layer, a hypervisor layer for them.

So, they can add computing, storage, and networking to it that is vendor agnostic. In HP, Dell, VxRail, or Cisco, there is a drawback. I have to go with that brand again, and I have to add a simple load of HCI in place if I want to increase computing, networking, or storage.

SimpliVity is also compatible with all HP appliances, though it is not compatible with other brands or vendors. It could be more compatible and more secure.

I've been using SimpliVity for a couple of years. My core extent is cybersecurity.

HP is renowned for scalability. They're using Nimble and three-part technology for storage and backup.

We have four engineers on our technical team.

There are plenty of hyperconverged solutions in the market like Nutanix, Dell, VxRail, etc.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10. I would recommend HP SimpliVity for people who want to start using it.

My main use case is hosting in-house applications as well as public applications over the cloud.

With HPE SimpliVity, hosting applications has become very easy and fast.

The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup, which gives a copy of my primary and secondary copies.

There are some problems with the product's stability, specifically with backup, that could be improved. The integration and automation could also be improved. In addition, when updates appear, they are often delayed and don't provide new features. In the next release, I would like to see integrations with multiple OEM vendors and better compatibility with other OEMs.

I've been using HPE SimpliVity for around three years.

The product isn't stable yet, and we are facing a lot of issues. For example, when it comes to integration with multiple applications, it becomes more complex for us to handle, and the security goes wrong.

The scalability is good, but there can be problems with integration and compatibility when patching or updating the product.

I would not rate the technical support highly - we have multiple support cases open without any solution, despite having escalated several times and being told that management is working on it.

The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients. Deployment took around fifteen minutes to half an hour.

I used a consultant from VMWare to implement the product.

Licensing is available on a yearly basis, with no mandatory additional costs.

Maintenance and monitoring requires a team of between 10-15 people. Before using this product, I would suggest that users check what kind of integrations they're looking for, as an alternative solution may work better for them. I would rate this product as five out of ten.

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.

I work with medium-sized clients who have around 200 users. SimpliVity is a general-purpose solution for all kinds of VMs. With SimpliVity, because we can own the VMware, you can have all VMs of any type of VDI. 

What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good. We just renewed and will receive new equipment in November. So even the price is really attractive compared to other solutions.

It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc. Now it's a proprietary solution for HPE, but it's difficult for them to improve because they have both solutions. But it's the same with Nutanix, I will say. 

I'm a consultant I've been I'm using SimpliVity for many years, about five. With my current client, I've been using it for two years now.

SimpliVity is definitely stable. I'm running infrastructure with six nodes, so it's always the same. It's small but all six are running very well. Maybe if you have 60 or 100, you might have a different point of view, but for me, it's absolutely stable.

SimpliVity's support is great. I was doing some experimenting last December and I had a strange problem, so got in touch with a woman from tech support and it was solved. So I only had one problem based on one experiment. Of course, if I had more than that, maybe I would experience some disappointment. But for me, I had only one problem.

Setting up SimpliVity is straightforward. In one day, you can have a complete solution up and running.

I think it's a complete package. We buy the license with support for five years. It's a subscription, I will say, but it's included when you buy the SimpliVity solution from HPE. You have a contract with the software warranty and upgrades. You can choose a license for one, three, or five years, and it's all included.

For me, SimpliVity is a 10 out of 10. I would recommend it, but also you have to follow the best practices. Like a lot of things, I can imagine that if you think you know what you're doing but you don't know, you can have some trouble. But if you follow the best practices and the rules, you will have no issues. 

We use it for financial applications. We are a small organization, so it has all of our servers, financial applications, SQL database, file servers, etc.

I believe we are up to date with the latest version for our hardware specs.

The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds.

The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf.

I have probably been using it for three years.

It is stable. We haven't had any issues.

It is not easy to scale. In our instance, we would probably have to upgrade to a whole new hardware platform.

In terms of end-users, our company is small, but we support school districts. There are probably 500 users.

I have used their support. They're good.

We didn't use any other hyper-converged technology. We just moved from a VMware system that was kind of the old school type with two servers, a disk array, and a separate disk.

It was kind of complex. There were just a lot of pieces. I wasn't so involved in the networking piece, but it seemed like it was a little bit more complicated.

We did get some quotes from Nutanix, and they were ballparks. So, it is not cheap, and there is nothing free, but those two were comparable.

I would advise others to just be sure and do their homework and compare. I'm not sure if we made the best decision, but I'm not dissatisfied with it. I'm pretty comfortable with the way it operates. I don't know enough about the other products to compare it in terms of the ease of doing updates and things like that. Usually, we get a support vendor involved when we do anything major. 

I would give HPE SimpliVity an eight out of 10.

We are using BHPE SimpliVity for hosting infrastructure.

The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V.

The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators.

In a future release, all the management features should be able to access from one location. For example, management of networking and system resources on the server should be in one place to view and manage.

I have been using HPE SimpliVity for approximately two years.

The solution is stable with many high availability features.

HPE SimpliVity is easy to scale. You can simply add resources, for instance, ram, or storage. Additionally, adding another node is possible. It is very easy and straightforward.

We have more than 5,000 people using the solution.

We needed help to integrate some of our older systems to use with HPE SimpliVity and we contacted support. We opened a ticket and they responded within five business days.

We have used Check Point.

The installation difficulty level depends on whose perspective. From a beginner's perspective, it is complex, but for advanced administrators, it is straightforward and not so complicated. 

The infrastructure is easy to deploy.

We used integrators to do the implementation of the solution.

We do not have special servers, only regular ones, the maintenance of the solution is simple.

If we compare the price of HPE SimpliVity with other vendors that are selling the hyper-converged infrastructure, all of them are not cheap and are priced similarly. However, the price we pay and what we receive makes it a good price.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE SimpliVity an eight out of ten.