☁️ HPE SimpliVity 325 Gen11 vs Nutanix NX-3155-G9 vs Dell AX-770

The headline difference here is stack philosophy, not silicon. The SimpliVity 325 Gen11 is a VMware-centric appliance whose value sits in the OmniStack data services layer — inline dedup, compression and VM-granular backup baked into a 1U single-socket box. The Nutanix NX-3155-G9 is a turnkey AOS/AHV node aimed at customers who want to leave VMware (or never joined) and run a software-defined stack with strong multi-cluster management via Prism Central. The Dell AX-770 is a Microsoft-validated Azure Stack HCI node — if your strategic direction is Azure Arc, Azure Local and Hyper-V, it is the only one of the three that is catalog-certified for that path.

On raw hardware, the AX-770 is the heaviest platform: dual 6th-gen Xeon (up to 172 cores), 8 TB DDR5 at 6400 MT/s and 16 E3.S NVMe bays scaling to 245 TB raw per node. It will outscale the other two for dense virtualisation, SQL consolidation and on-prem AI inference with L40S or Blackwell GPUs. The SimpliVity 325 is the opposite design point — a 1U EPYC 9004 box with 128 cores in a single socket and up to 30 TB raw. Per rack unit it is competitive on compute, but storage capacity and GPU options are constrained by the chassis. The Nutanix NX-3155-G9 sits in the middle: a balanced G9-generation 2U node with up to 4 TB RAM and up to four GPUs, well-suited to mixed VDI/AI workloads but using older Ice Lake-class silicon than the Dell.

Where SimpliVity still wins is data efficiency and operational simplicity for VMware shops. OmniStack's always-on dedup/compression and integrated backup remove the need for a separate Veeam-style tier for many SMB and ROBO use cases, and the 1U footprint is genuinely useful in space-constrained UK colocation cabinets. Nutanix wins on management maturity — Prism Central, one-click upgrades and NC2 burst-to-cloud on AWS or Azure are difficult to match if you run more than a handful of clusters. Dell wins on hardware ceiling and on Microsoft alignment, including Azure subscription-based licensing and direct Arc/Defender integration relevant to UK public-sector and regulated buyers tracking NCSC and NIS2 guidance.

Recommendation framework: pick the AX-770 if Azure is the strategic destination and you need maximum cores, RAM or AI-class GPUs per node. Pick the NX-3155-G9 if you want a hypervisor-independent HCI fabric with strong multi-site management and a credible exit from VMware licensing. Pick the SimpliVity 325 Gen11 if you are committed to vSphere, value built-in dedup and backup, and need to fit dense VDI or branch clusters into 1U slots.

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Indicative estimate · subject to change · soft search, no credit-file impact · hire purchase, lease & subscription for UK businesses