HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
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HPE Synergy
Score 9.0 out of 10
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HPE Synergy is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software designed to support a composable infrastructure, which treats IT resources as a service that can be "composed" and deployed out to applications in near real-time, eliminating the need to configure hardware.
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!
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.
Firmware repository size limitations could be larger (was increased recently but still is only room for a few SPPs)
Profile template updates flag all machines that haven't had their profile updated from the template, causing the dashboard to go red with warnings and can cause unnecessary concern
OneView, while powerful isn't as user friendly as it could be
The hardware has fulfilled all of the promises that it made when we first acquired it. The only thing that would preclude this would be if the organization decided to holistically switch hardware vendors for reasons other than performance and feature sets.
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!
The GUI of Synergy is very user friendly and simple. Compared to previous generation products it has many great built in features. HPE Synergy shines in the management features of the OneView software making it a very good update from last gen. The ease of cabling and hardware replacement only add more to this.
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.
While all similar offerings can achieve basically the same thing, HPE Synergy stands out against Cisco and Dell offerings with respect to manageability, ease of use and flexibility - HPE Synergy offers configurations groups of chassis to create logical enclosures that can be managed as a single entity and also blades in any slot can be plumbed and allocated as necessary to multiple uplinks. This is one level more flexible than the others which limits configurations of blades in a single chassis to similar uplink settings. Also, the HPE Synergy chassis itself supports 12 blades vs 10 in competitive offerings.
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.
