HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
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HPE Synergy
Score 10.0 out of 10
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HPE Synergy is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software designed to support a composable infrastructure, which treats IT resources as a service that can be "composed" and deployed out to applications in near real-time, eliminating the need to configure hardware.
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.
Firmware repository size limitations could be larger (was increased recently but still is only room for a few SPPs)
Profile template updates flag all machines that haven't had their profile updated from the template, causing the dashboard to go red with warnings and can cause unnecessary concern
OneView, while powerful isn't as user friendly as it could be
The hardware has fulfilled all of the promises that it made when we first acquired it. The only thing that would preclude this would be if the organization decided to holistically switch hardware vendors for reasons other than performance and feature sets.
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.
While all similar offerings can achieve basically the same thing, HPE Synergy stands out against Cisco and Dell offerings with respect to manageability, ease of use and flexibility - HPE Synergy offers configurations groups of chassis to create logical enclosures that can be managed as a single entity and also blades in any slot can be plumbed and allocated as necessary to multiple uplinks. This is one level more flexible than the others which limits configurations of blades in a single chassis to similar uplink settings. Also, the HPE Synergy chassis itself supports 12 blades vs 10 in competitive offerings.
Eased concerns for go-live of a huge new deployment as we knew we could respond to any scaling concern swiftly and thoroughly
Hardware has been rock solid since implementation
Limits to initially deployed logical enclosure configurations have been addressed rapidly by the introduction of new hardware with fast speeds/additional management ring connectivity options
