Anyone demo'd Simplivity yet?

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Nate7311

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My company was approached about being a partner and I'm curious what other forum members may have experienced. It seems like datacenter-in-a-box similar to the Nutanix conncept. Anyone demo them yet? Thoughts?
 
Good product with some powerful technology inside it like their accelerator card. A coworker jumped ship to work for them about 9 months ago and loves it.
 
It's solid gear. They have a good backup/replication story and I think the integration in to vCenter is better than Nutanix. I prefer the Nutanix form factor though.

If you're looking at it I'd get in Nutanix and Symplivity and compare...unless you plan to carry both. And let's not forget the rumored "Project Marvin" coming out of VMware at some point.
 
NetJunkie said:
And let's not forget the rumored "Project Marvin" coming out of VMware at some point.
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That's really the biggest issue with all of those 'other' companies out there. It doesn't matter which other company it is, but the reality of it is that as customer one would need to make the decision to depart traditional vendors and sign on with the start-up stack.

That just seems unreasonable to me. Yes, no doubt that those startups have better technology right now because they are more agile than the 1st tier vendors, but they are also the big unknown. Just because it's easier to administer their stack today doesn't mean that they will still be in business tomorrow.

So the question becomes whether one would want to abandon traditional offerings today and hope that the startups will still be around and a good value before the end of their hardware refresh cycle (which, let's be honest here, is now 5-7 years and no longer the 3-4 it used to be).

So you want to be married to Nutanix or Simplivity for the next 7 years? Especially when you know that VMware is set to release it's own offering soon and you can keep everything in the same stack, with the same support, and with the guarantee that they will still be here for years to come?

Here's what VMware's Marvin trademark says:

"Computer hardware for virtualization; computer hardware enabling users to manage virtual computing resources that include networking and data storage."

If that's not the same concept as those startups then I don't know what is.
 
We tried it.

Have to admit I really liked it but in the end it wasn't for us.

The dedupe didn't so well with our particular type of workload, though I could see how it would produce some amazing results with certain types of data.

The backup and restore/cloning blew my mind.

In the end my biggest concern was the same as it was with all the converged folks we looked at, in our case storage and compute don't scale linearly and I didn't fancy potentially having to stand there in six months time asking for $60K or whatever because we had to buy another node when all I actually needed was another 1TB of disk space.
 
hutchingsp said:
In the end my biggest concern was the same as it was with all the converged folks we looked at, in our case storage and compute don't scale linearly and I didn't fancy potentially having to stand there in six months time asking for $60K or whatever because we had to buy another node when all I actually needed was another 1TB of disk space.
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This was also customer's concerns on these types of solutions. If you look at these hyper converged systems as a whole they are very well priced for what you get. The problem is if later you just need more disk space (which is the most common constraint). Well, you have to buy another server/blade/whatever plus more VMware licensing. If you scale linearly across all elements it's fine..but that's very rare. And that's the problem.

The other push back we get a lot is on the perceived fragility of the system. What happens if an admin deletes a control VM? My answer was always "So don't. You don't just accidentally delete vCenter, do you?" but people get worried. IMHO it's more of a perceived risk than it really is...but perception is often reality.
 
During my hands-on training with SimpliVity, I tried it and found Omnicubes easy to scale and manage. The inline dedupe/compression card makes cloning, backups, and moving of VMs so easy and fast.
 
vspro said:
During my hands-on training with SimpliVity, I tried it and found Omnicubes easy to scale and manage. The inline dedupe/compression card makes cloning, backups, and moving of VMs so easy and fast.
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Name two things you didn't like about them.
 
Hi all,,

just quick question,,
is it possible if I already using simplivity and I wanna backup my VMware into tape ?

just curious thought...
 
There's nothing preventing that. You'll just need to use a Backup product that's compatible with VMWare and supports Tape drives/libraries.
 
We looked in to them for VDI. It always came down to storage expansion as a reason to not go with a hyper converged solution. Though it's not hard to throw a NAS in to the mix for client storage. It just seemed cost prohibitive for our needs. I wound up building a scalable solution for similar costs. No complaints yet.

Veeam has decent tape drive support.
 
just did a large Simplivity deal with one of my customers. they are using it for VDI and love it. Nutanix would have worked just as good, only problem is it use supermicro, lenovo and dell boxes and Simplivity uses Cisco. the name Cisco carries a bigger stick when going up against the other guys. we have about 12 customers using both solutions and they are very happy. range from healthcare, pharmaceutical companies and even a few law firms.
 
Jeriko2 said:
just did a large Simplivity deal with one of my customers. they are using it for VDI and love it. Nutanix would have worked just as good, only problem is it use supermicro, lenovo and dell boxes and Simplivity uses Cisco. the name Cisco carries a bigger stick when going up against the other guys. we have about 12 customers using both solutions and they are very happy. range from healthcare, pharmaceutical companies and even a few law firms.
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That would be a neat solution given their FPGA-powered dedupe. Can you share some details about the deployment? How many seats? How many on one appliance?
 
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