HPE SimpliVity Reviews & Insights

Score7 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HPE SimpliVity are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Easy to Use: Many users have found HPE SimpliVity to be user-friendly, especially for those who are already familiar with VMware. The intuitive interface and seamless integration with existing VMware environments make it easy for users to navigate and manage their virtual infrastructure efficiently.

Impressive Data Protection: The data protection capabilities of HPE SimpliVity have received high praise from multiple reviewers. They specifically mentioned complete server backups and replication every 15 minutes, ensuring that their critical data is always protected against potential disasters or system failures. This robust backup and recovery solution gives users peace of mind knowing that their information is secure and easily recoverable.

Fast Restores and Test Instances: Users appreciate the quick and easy access to test instances or refreshes provided by HPE SimpliVity. With just a few clicks, they can restore complete server instances in just a matter of seconds, significantly reducing downtime during system maintenance or troubleshooting activities. This feature not only saves time but also increases productivity by allowing users to quickly get back up and running without any disruptions.

Reviews

8 Reviews

HPE SimpliVity - A Must for Smaller Orgs.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 9, 2024

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Small business will benefit greatly. It will combine many different pieces of hardware and quite literally simplify your footprint. The space savings and constant backups are a strong selling point and work as well as advertised. The failover between HA nodes is also seamless.

Larger enterprises would be better suited for a proper server stack / accelerator or just move to cloud.

Thomas Blackwood

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

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

HPE SimpliVity Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 27, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it across our entire organization for our infrastructure. We decided to go to SimpliVity and virtualization as we faced upgrading our old physical servers.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think cost-wise, I would recommend SimpliVity. I am hopeful that HPE will put some R&D into the software and bring it forward though.

Tom Mockus

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

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

SimpliVity. It Simply Works!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 18, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HPE SimpliVity reduces complexity in our virtualization stack. The software combines along with HPE hardware and an accelerator card (there are also flavors without the accelerator) to provide an NFS datastore for our VMs. Because of the rationalization that the software and accelerator is doing, the number of writes is reduced as it examines to see if the underlying data already exists somewhere else. This also makes it very easy to clone or backup VMs as only change data needs to be restored or cloned. This functionality can be controlled via the VMware console.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

HPE SimpliVity should work in just about every environment when sized properly, but there may be some very high performance large org database scenarios where it might be somewhat slower; but our most recent upgrade to HPE SimpliVity on DL380s was very well received by our developers. Our performance was significantly better. The features of HPE SimpliVity are especially appealing in SMB Enterprises where the administration staff is especially time/resource constrained. The features give a lot of flexibility for testing and DR with an hours worth of training. It just works.

Joshua Van Camp

Network Administration Supervisor in Information Technology at Gleaner Life Insurance Society (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Impressive restores

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 10, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am in the College of Life Sciences at BYU. HPE SimpliVity is running all of our production servers, including webservers, databases, file servers, web servers, web proxy, monitoring and log servers, etc.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Smaller organizations with a need for a solution that includes backup.

Brent Runyan

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

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 10, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HPE SimpliVity is our core sever platform for our business across two datacenters.

Both of those datacenters are production and DR for the alternate site.

Data protection is the biggest problem this solution addressed.

Also, we were in need of a refresh and this solution offered much more all with a single vendor, easy to use interface and a competitive price.

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...

Likelihood to Recommend

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!

Chad Benfield

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

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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HPE Simplivity works well for us.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 6, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We mainly use it for remote access (VMware horizon view,) but it does house a few other servers.

Pros

De-dupe
Compression
Backup
Speed

Cons

Expensive
Not scalable from a storage standpoint after implementation. Well, not easily.
Nothing else I can think of

Likelihood to Recommend

Unstructured data, exchange and remote access.

David Clark

IT Director in Information Technology at Kirton McConkie (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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After you compare the others, go ahead and buy SimpliVity!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 6, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SimpliVity throughout the organization. SimpliVity has addressed many problems with speed, bandwidth and ease of use for us. Before SimpliVity we had real issues with getting backups done after hours, now it is done org.-wide within minutes.

Pros

Speed, speed speed. Everything happens quickly and you see the results in front of you.
Time savings. I no longer need to watch VCenter all the time, I can move on to other projects

Cons

I would like to be able to move my data out of SimpliVity easier, onto another media for backup/storage. That is the only thing I can think of.

Likelihood to Recommend

I have tested several of the competition, nothing matches up.

Jim Malone

Information Technology Manager in Information Technology at Carolina Sunrock LLC (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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SimpliVity - Simplicity in the server room!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently we have 4 Simplivity OmniCubes in our environment. Two of them are hosing our Virtual Servers and the other two are hosting our VDI environment. We are using this solution to host all of our servers and VDI for the whole organization.

With the Simplivity OmniCubes we have greatly increased our backups as well as made a huge performance gain in our computing. Since everything is in one box we have been able to scale out our environment and made an easier path for upgrading and budgeting as we can add an additional two boxes each year to grow out our environment.

Pros

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.

Cons

A better dashboard to explain where the efficiencies are coming from.
More types of boxes. Possibly a smaller server just for DR purposes.
Bigger File level recovery. Currently you can only restore 4GB files at a time.

Likelihood to Recommend

SimpliVity Omnicube is well suited in any environment. Especially if you are not currently using any VMware or Hyper-V products. It is a great gateway into the virtualization of your data center. For environments where VMware is currently being used, SimpliVity will be a great addition. Less cabling is required. Better performance is guaranteed.

Two boxes are required as they work as a high availability pair. As the years go by you can simply just add a box or two to grow your environment. You can also get them configured with NVidia Grid cards to bring graphical performance to the VDI environment.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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SimpliVity - Simplicity in the server room!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

A better dashboard to explain where the efficiencies are coming from.
More types of boxes. Possibly a smaller server just for DR purposes.
Bigger File level recovery. Currently you can only restore 4GB files at a time.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience