HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
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SANsymphony
Score 9.1 out of 10
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DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and accessed. The vendor states users can ensure business continuity with just 2 nodes, easily scaling out to 64 nodes, and achieve productivity for performance-demanding workloads by improving I/O processing and reducing…
My organization was a relatively early adapter back in 2014. Nutanix was really the only other competitor we were aware of at the time. We felt the data management and integration features of SimpliVity were superior to Nutanix. Pricing was also very competitive from …
SimpliVity OmniCube supported NVidia Grid cards when we did our POC where Nutanix didn't.
SimpliVity also had a better business case for us as it gave us the DR planning that we wanted as well as a way to be innovating and reduce our space usage in the server room.
DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.
We reviewed DotHill, EMC, HP, Dell-Compliant, Left-Hand, NetApp and VMware's vSAN offerings and after reviewing costs, performance, and features, DataCore came out on top. We discovered that DataCore's solution allowed us to save about 50%, as compared to other SAN vendors but …
Very proprietary and not sure if it's still around. Pricing was not an issue, just the vendor lock-in was an issue. Simple software layout and not too many hiccups for HP. SANsymphony was just as easy to use and you could grab any vendor, not just HP, to upgrade the system.
SimpliVity Omnicube is well suited in any environment. Especially if you are not currently using any VMware or Hyper-V products. It is a great gateway into the virtualization of your data center. For environments where VMware is currently being used, SimpliVity will be a great addition. Less cabling is required. Better performance is guaranteed. Two boxes are required as they work as a high availability pair. As the years go by you can simply just add a box or two to grow your environment. You can also get them configured with NVidia Grid cards to bring graphical performance to the VDI environment.
This product is very well suited to companies that use SANs and wish to secure their data in another room on another physical medium, regardless of whether the SANs or servers come from different suppliers. It will work with all types of data storage and transport layers (FC or iSCSI). This solution is very economical for small infrastructures with all the functionalities of the leading manufacturers on the market.
There's very little that I can find in their software that I would say needs to be improved. Sometimes the updates are too frequent and just as we finish updating all our sites another update comes out. Due to the many, many various options for what hardware to use, sometimes it is difficult trying to figure out what hardware options are the best for the money. DataCore can help a bit with this but because they only are the software side of the solution they tend to not prefer one hardware vendor over another (they get along with everyone). They do have good documentation that covers known issues with various hardware items.
While they support de-dup, it is recommended that you not de-dup the storage used for operating systems, or high change rated type data. The requires some planning to ensure the storage that is targeted for de-dup only have data that end users would be using (such as MS Office files etc.). Also, their de-dup console is not yet integrated inside their main SANsymphony console. They are working on it but it's not there yet.
While their console allows you to connect to each of the nodes without closing the interface you have to log out and in when you switch between a different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter to where you see all server group in a list and can just click on each group. It would be nice to be able to see multiple groups at the same time. So having more of an Enterprise approach (v/s a local storage cluster) view would provide better management of the environment. For example, their current reports can only run for each storage server group. There is currently not a way to run the same reports or look at performance across the enterprise (only the local site).
Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that could show capacity, usage, performance and any issues would also be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this.
It sits nicely ontop of VMWare and is easy enough to use. Some improvements to the UI could be done, such as placing buttons where it is expected to have them not in unusual places, so you have to hunt for them. The backup and restore is intuitive and makes things super easy if you need to do a quick rollback. Space savings on multiple VMs and backups means we are backing up more than we need which gives us confidence in what we do. Updating the system is also fairly easy and their support has always been fantastic. They will contact us if they detect any issues, usually before we notice them!
Support is very good. With proactive support, you are supported by an engineer in North America who answers the phone and immediately begins assisting with your issue. The folks I have dealt with in the last several years have been very skilled and it is rare to have a ticket open for more than a day or two. Issues affecting production are dealt with appropriately and are escalated within the support organization.
In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
We reviewed DotHill, EMC, HP, Dell-Compliant, Left-Hand, NetApp and VMware's vSAN offerings and after reviewing costs, performance, and features, DataCore came out on top. We discovered that DataCore's solution allowed us to save about 50%, as compared to other SAN vendors but maintained a rich set of features that we needed for current and future growth.
