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.
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.
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.
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.