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 ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"The technical support services are good."
"Nimble is easy to use, but hard to install. Once it's installed, it's user-friendly. Reporting is another advantage because we get a lot of statistical forecasting. It helps us see into the future with that."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Nimble Storage is a capable platform with high availability."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"The solution has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. It is designed to take advantage of deduplication strategies, which means we don't have to have as much disk in the system to do the job that we used to have to do."
"The solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature for us is its integration, as it provides an entire solution in a single box."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"The product's active controller feature needs improvement."
"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."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"Companies in small countries face problems with spare parts."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us."
"The price is quite high. The system could also be more scalable."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"Its deployment should be easier."
"The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal."
"HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 12th in HCI with 24 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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