HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
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IBM Storage Ceph
Score 8.0 out of 10
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IBM® Storage Ceph® is a software-defined storage platform that consolidates block, file and object storage to help organizations eliminate data silos and deliver a cloud-like experience while retaining the cost benefits and data sovereignty advantages of on-premises IT.
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!
Large scale data storage: Red Hat Ceph Storage is designed to be highly scalable and can handle large amounts of data. It's well suited for organizations that need to store and manage large amounts of data, such as backups, images, videos, and other types of multimedia content.Cloud-based deployments: Red Hat Ceph Storage can provide object storage services for cloud-based applications such as SaaS and PaaS offerings. It is well suited for organizations that are looking to build their own cloud storage infrastructure or to use it as a storage backend for their cloud-based applications.High-performance computing: Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used to provide storage for high-performance computing (HPC) applications, such as scientific simulations and other types of compute-intensive workloads. It's well suited for organizations that need to store
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.
Highly resilient, almost every time we attempted to destroy the cluster it was able to recover from a failure. It struggled to when the nodes where down to about 30%(3 replicas on 10 nodes)
The cache tiering feature of Ceph is especially nice. We attached solid state disks and assigned them as the cache tier. Our sio benchmarks beat the our Netapp when we benchmarked it years ago (no traffic, clean disks) by a very wide margin.
Ceph effectively allows the admin to control the entire stack from top to bottom instead of being tied to any one storage vendor. The cluster can be decentralized and replicated across data centers if necessary although we didn't try that feature ourselves, it gave us some ideas for a disaster recovery solution. We really liked the idea that since we control the hardware and the software, we have infinite upgradability with off the shelf parts which is exactly what it was built for.
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.
MongoDB offers better search ability compared to Red Hat Ceph Storage but it’s more optimized for large number of object while Red Hat Ceph Storage is preferred if you need to store binary data or large individual objects. To get acceptable search functionality you really need to compile Red Hat Ceph Storage with another database where the search metadata related to Red Hat Ceph Storage objects are stored.
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.
