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HPE SimpliVity

Score9 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

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What is HPE SimpliVity?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about HPE SimpliVity.
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HPE SimpliVity - A Must for Smaller Orgs.

Incentivized
Thomas Blackwood
Head of ICT in Information Technology at Fahan School (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use HPE SimpliVity to run all our virtual machines and perform backups. It does exactly what it claims and saves space through deduplication and can take backups down to the minute level. This has meant we have been able to get rid of additional hardware as the HPE SimpliVity combines many tech stacks into one.

The failover capability has been essential with being able to successfully conduct DR testing and failover as well.

Pros

  • Minute Level Backups
  • Failover if running multiple nodes
  • Space optimisation
  • Management of VM's through VMWare
  • Restoration of VM's in seconds
  • Integration with Greenlake Backup and Recovery for Cloud backups

Cons

  • UI can be less than intuitive at times
  • reporting on the actual amount of space utilised can be misleading
  • Upgrading to additional storage if not specc'd correctly can be very expensive.

Return on Investment

  • We have been able to go from spending 53L per annum on backups to 23K with the HPE SimpliVity Solution
  • When not needing Servers, Storage, and networking and combining it all into the one we have saved a considerable amount of space and money.
  • The DR and backup confidence we have has meant we have been able to reduce risk and meet our cyber objectives and RPO / RTO times.

Usability

Other Software Used

Veeam ONE, VMware vSphere, Windows Server, HPE Aruba Ethernet Switches, Synology DiskStation, Fortinet FortiGate

SimpliVity. It Simply Works!

Incentivized
Joshua Van CampView profile
Network Administration Supervisor in Information Technology at Gleaner Life Insurance Society (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Backup/Clone VMs.
  • Reduce stack complexity.

Cons

  • Upgrades are better than they used to be, but still complex.
  • Make existing RapidDR product integral, versus a separate licensed component.

Return on Investment

  • Make restores much quicker.
  • Saved administrators time.

Other Software Used

Cohesity, KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA), KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA)

HPE SimpliVity Review

Incentivized
Tom Mockus
Director of IT in Information Technology at MDI Hospital (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Ease of use
  • Replication is very easy
  • Works well with VEEAM

Cons

  • Training is poor, as we did most of our own.
  • R&D is suboptimal
  • I think it was great product 4 years ago but I have not seen much improvement since.

Return on Investment

  • It had a fantastic ROI compared to replacing all the physical servers.
  • SimpliVity takes less knowledge to understand, cutting down on staff leaning curve.
  • It did bring us forward in technology at the time.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AOS

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business, Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity

HPE SimpliVity delivers a SMB Enterprise level capabilities at an affordable price point.

Incentivized
Chad BenfieldView profile
Director of IT in Information Technology at Neil Medical Group (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • If you know how to use VMware then you essentially already know how to manage HPE SimpliVity. Ease of use is key for us since we are a small shop.
  • The data protection inherent is impressive. We have complete server backups for our Tier 1 servers locally and replicated every 15 minutes.
  • We have application upgrades frequently that require end use testing. We also have a in house developer for certain focuses. Test instances or refreshes are just minutes away. The actual complete server instance restore takes just a few seconds.

Cons

  • I haven't contacted support lately...however in the past I wasn't able to remediate VMware without support given the integration. A trade off.
  • 4 years being a customer, the initial sizing is now close to being an issue. I wish I could just add more memory without licensing costs. Another trade off but I've been more than pleased with our servers' performance.
  • Again...I haven't asked lately so this may be handled differently now. I'll investigate soon or upgrade altogether given the age of equipment.
  • I can't think of anything else...

Return on Investment

  • ROI has been recognized in several areas...TCO is certainly one of the main points.
  • Data protection has allowed us to realize minimal downtime and recovery in a disaster situation. That's priceless...
  • Being able to easily spin up test environments and having our support people able to do so are both huge for us.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio IDE, SAP Crystal

Impressive restores

Incentivized
Brent RunyanView profile
Systems Engineer/Architect in Information Technology at Brigham Young University (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • HPE SimpliVity has built in incremental backups, and the restores are incredibly fast. I have seen 2TB VMs restored in 20 seconds.
  • HPE SimpliVity has also made DR/BC a possibility. We have purchased and off-site DR box at a fraction of what tradition DR would cost.

Cons

  • As mentioned, HPE SimpliVity has built in backups. The one issue is that those backups are stored on primary storage, so depending on retention schedules, you may find yourself running out of space.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi, Exablox, Veeam Backup & Replication