We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and HPE SimpliVity based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both of these HPE solutions are part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise brand of excellent data management products. Users say HPE SimpliVity is the more comprehensive product. It is a very user-friendly, simple product to use, implement, and manage. The storage virtualization layers and super fast backups make it extremely valuable. Some users say HPE Nimble Storage dHCI can be a bit buggy and should provide better file-level restoration and DVX system options.
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"The product provides zero downtime."
"The technical support services are good."
"The solution is useful for taking storage snapshots, has high performance, and the CASL architecture is good for optimizing workloads."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's user interface is very easy to work with."
"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it."
"HPE SimpliVity is scalable. Some 200 people at my organization are using this solution at present."
"I have saved time and money by moving to the platform."
"Best for companies just starting out."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the backup rate and the backup transfer."
"The solution is scalable."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"The documentation could be better."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"It can be made cheaper."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"The product does not support file services."
"I rate Nimble one out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nimble Storage was a nightmare. It took us three months to deal with all the kinks and bugs. We had two people from HPE assisting us and two from our team."
"The product is expensive."
"Their documentation needs to be simpler to read yet more detailed so it's easy to compare models and easier for clients to pick."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI only works with a hypervisor like VMware. There are plenty of other hypervisors that HP doesn't support. This is an area for improvement."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"They should optimize the administration stack because it is consuming too much memory. It ends up consuming 20% of memory. They have another product for this feature, but I would like to have this feature within HPE SimpliVity."
"It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 12th in HCI with 23 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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