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…
I only know what I know...which is my IT world. Having two datacenters that were physical servers attached to a SAN that "attempted" to replicate and then migrating. For a SMB small IT shop that happens to have two datacenters already in place...this has been ideal. I can have a generalist maintain the system and we have a private cloud for DR with hardly any effort...the biggest gain by far!
Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.
Deduplication and Compression - SimpliVity keeps the space consumption to a minimum. We currently have 60 servers running virtually and we still have room to grow. This really helps with the backups as we can have longer retention.
Backups - Ability to keep backups for longer and to create multiple backup policies for a VM is a breeze. You can have a backup policy for each datastore as well as a separate backup policy for the same VM.
Creating Datastores is very easy. No more messing around with LUNS and iSCSI. Just go to the SimpliVity tab and select create datastore and it's done. You can also increase the datastore on the fly as well as have a datastore bigger than 2TB.
File level recovery is included as well. The whole backup process in SimpliVity can help you do away with other software.
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!
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.
HPE SimpliVity provided us with the ability to replace our existing infrastructure with a solution that provided better backup and recovery, and an off-site DR solution, at a lower price point than other solutions.
More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime).
Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows.
All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more.
