HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage include high-performance computing clusters (HPC) and as a storage solution for data storage. 

It is being used in educational institutions. We are acting as a system integrator and reselling the solution. For our customers, the main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are focused on research. They store their research data in HPE Alletra Storage.

We have provided Alletra 6000 on-premise. The usage depends on the customer's specific needs. Currently, they have deployed it as an in-house operation and are using it purely for internal storage on their premises. There are various features available, but these customers—mainly from the educational and government sectors—are unlikely to utilize even 50% of the storage’s capabilities. Their basic needs are being met, which is sufficient for them.

HPE Alletra's capacity and efficiency are good, and the upgradability option is excellent. Its console makes the management easy.

HPE Alletra Storage has definitely helped our customers reduce the time they spend on capacity planning. As for whether the tool also reduces the data management operations expenses for our customers, they have fixed jobs and data requiring regular backups on the storage. Wherever we have provided HPE Alletra Storage, it is still not completely filled up. Once the storage gets filled up, we will examine data management further.

I find the replication, snapshots, and deduplication features of HPE Alletra Storage most useful. Since the deduplication and replication parts are there, the data is compressed and stored, which is why users are happy with the storage performance. The input-output operations per second (IOPS) of the storage are very good, and the performance of the storage is impressive. The read-write operations are fast. 

HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations such as provisioning and day-to-day management, and I find it good.

Its performance is good, but we do have some concerns with Alletra. The challenge I face is that the recent models launched are not available now. When we pitch a solution to a customer and sell HPE Alletra 6000, the customer sees that the product has been discontinued by HPE. The transition of the storage is happening too fast, making it difficult for us, as we normally declare to customers that the product will not reach end-of-life for the next five years. These challenges arise as HPE transitions for the betterment of the product, but we are left answerable to the customer when they ask why we are offering something that the OEM has discontinued. This transition is occurring too fast, and historically, HPE had 3PAR storage that lasted a long time. We need a stable product, and with HPE Alletra, we are unsure about the stability of the product for the next one or two years. Customers now inquire about what happened to Primera storage, which is no longer available, and we lack answers.

I feel that HPE Alletra Storage could be improved, as all our competitors offer storage with options for both file and block and object within a single model, while HP still considers HPE Alletra as block storage only. In many government bids, when the government specifies a need for storage that supports both file and block, we lack a solution for that. A customer will not purchase two storages—one for file and another for block—so we need HPE Alletra to come with a solution that accommodates all data types: file, block, and object. This is critical since government purchases often rely on tenders.

I have been working with HPE Alletra Storage since the launch itself for the last two to three years.

The backend support from HPE is good.

I did not talk to their technical support. My engineers deployed it. They had a chance to talk to them.

The initial setup of HPE Alletra Storage is straightforward. The deployment is not very difficult. 

Our customers mainly utilize HPE Alletra Storage on-premises. Nobody is using the cloud version, as government rules in our country mandate that storage must be on-premise or on a MeitY-approved cloud that must be located in India. Due to these guidelines, customers are currently favoring on-premise solutions, although they may transition to cloud in the future.

Our engineers were able to handle the deployment without needing assistance from the HPE team.

My customers' return on investment (ROI) with HPE Alletra Storage depends on different factors. We can ascertain the ROI once warranties and everything else conclude for one or two storages. As for performance, I can say that the ROI is satisfactory since the IOPS are high and failures are low, indicating good ROI.

Generally, I find the price competitive for HPE Alletra 5000. However, for the higher version of HPE Alletra, the price does not seem competitive when compared to competitors EMC or NetApp, which have higher prices.

I don't believe HPE Alletra has helped reduce the cost per terabyte, as it is competitive with other products, maintaining a similar price point.

To summarize, the biggest benefit of HPE Alletra Storage for our customers is the higher IOPS and read/write performance. However, there remain numerous concerns regarding the product being too format-specific as it only serves as a block storage solution, presenting challenges.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten.

We are using HPE Alletra Storage as our storage for our VM environment, a storage area network for us. All of our VMs that we put on are on it, approximately 20 or 30 VMs. We provide storage for that. We also use it for our backups with Veeam.

It keeps it simple. It makes it easy for my team. It doesn't necessarily make it easy for us to figure out stuff; however, it makes it easy for us to get to what we need to get to after we figure out stuff. It makes it easier for my team than to have conversations around terminology, around what we're doing, how we're doing it. And that for us is worth its weight in gold for us. We're a small team, so I need that when person a is doing something and person b is doing something, if they're doing the same things that they can speak to each other and see what the other is doing and understand what they're doing.

My experience with the deployment of HPE Alletra Storage has been good. 

I like the single pane of glass approach. I like the fact that when I log in, I can get access to all of my different infrastructure components, and I can manage them through the web portal, and that makes things very easy as opposed to having to jump through different management interfaces or administration consoles.

These systems are intelligent enough that when an issue is detected, before we're even aware of it, tickets are automatically opened and closed. I receive copies of these tickets, and instead of things breaking and impacting the business, issues are handled proactively, which is fantastic.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. We have a pretty small dev environment and it hasn't impacted our dem environment as well. The team is freed up; we can be anywhere and log in and do something. We like that we have a stable platform that is more mature and allows us to do some amazing things.

Reducing the price for HPE Alletra Storage would be fantastic. However, we need better education that is specifically geared toward our sector and industry.

In our specific case, we are very labor sensitive. As we examine AI opportunities with our vendors, we are very conscious about which AI opportunities we pursue due to the sensitivity of our team and staff, as the adoption of AI could impact their jobs. During a recent session, there was discussion about level one and level two engineering roles being replaced by generative AI, which was concerning for a labor union where staff are worried about job security.

We would appreciate more education that's geared toward our sector and is sensitive to these concerns. The conversations should focus on how AI can augment what people are already doing, allowing them to move to higher-value tasks rather than replacing their positions entirely.

I've been using the solution for a year. 

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as top-class.

We're still old school and over-provision. We purchase more than we need. We expect not to have to scale for a little while. However, we have a good partner that can bring forward new capabilities for scaling and right-sizing. 

I evaluate the support I received from HPE as excellent. The engineers who helped us during pre-sales have continued their support after implementation. They've followed up on features we weren't initially ready for and have maintained open communication. Now that we have a better understanding of HPE, we're able to advance to the next level. It has been a very good experience.

Positive

We were with Cisco, and prior to that, we were running with IBM. It's been better than expected thanks to the breadth and depth of HP.

The deployment has been good. We didn't just do Alletra. We're doing Aruba as well, and OpsRamp. So far, our experience has been good. 

We have not noted an ROI beyond the stability we get day to day, which is quite valuable. 

The pricing is high. It's a fairly significant investment in us. 

We're implementing more than just HPE Alletra Storage; we're also implementing Aruba. The experience has been positive, and I would recommend it to others.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use the HPE Alletra Storage for Kafka at my store.

The ease of use of the HPE Alletra Storage benefits my organization since it's simple.

The features of the HPE Alletra Storage I appreciate the most are one SKU and the speed of the resources. 

The solution has reduced my data management operation costs and time. The solution helps reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by one-third. 

The HPE Alletra Storage has improved IT efficiency by one-third. 

Alletra provides me with a cloud-like operational model for managing data infrastructure.

We can get support from Senior engineers fairly easily.

We've reduced time spent.

I would not like to see any additional features included in the new release of the HPE Alletra Storage. We're still new to the solution. So far, it's fine. 

I've been using the solution for six months.

We are still new with the cloud-like operational model of the HPE Alletra Storage as we just got it up and running two weeks ago.

I would assess the stability and the reliability of the HPE Alletra Storage as good. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues yet.

The HPE Alletra Storage scales effectively with my growing organizational needs.

The HPE GreenLake AI Ops enables me to get assistance from a senior support engineer without having to go through support tiers and escalations. 

My evaluation of customer service for the B2B is based on the number of instances we have. The service has been good. 

I would rate my customer service technical support a nine out of ten. When I made a call, they came to our site and helped us configure it.

Positive

The deployment was a little rocky.

I have seen a return on investment from the HPE Alletra Storage.

The licensing has been fine.

Before selecting the HPE Alletra Storage, I considered Dell as another solution. What stood out during my evaluation process when comparing these options was that I wanted an on-premise solution that we could get up and running.

The main challenge I faced was that it basically supports one of our solutions, which is our travel solution. My advice to another organization considering the HPE Alletra Storage is that I would still want to get some case studies. 

I rate this solution nine out of ten.

We predominantly use HPE Alletra Storage for ERP, specifically for SAP S/4HANA.

I appreciate that HPE Alletra Storage is an all-flash NVMe storage with a disintegrated architecture, allowing me to enhance performance without needing to add capacity. If I'm buying the Alletra MP 10000 right now with two controllers and 24 NVMe drives, I can simply add a single controller to boost my performance without being stuck with the limit of two controllers at a time for upgrades.

Seamless integration with existing infrastructure is absolutely important to our organization's strategy because otherwise, I would need to redo everything repeatedly, which consumes significant time.

We do use the AI-driven insights in HPE Alletra Storage. The AI-driven insights for Alletra MP 10000 greatly assist our data operations by providing immediate access to insights without going into the storage or asking the storage administrator for data. This enables any storage manager to easily obtain insights regarding performance, IOPS requirements, disk usage, and compression ratios from anywhere in the world.

In terms of predictive analytics features, HPE Alletra Storage automatically opens and enriches support cases with diagnostics during any storage issues, which drastically reduces the mean time to repair and eliminates manual log collection, resulting in much higher efficiency in support automation.

I would like to see improved in HPE Alletra Storage in the future the introduction of more performance-centric controllers rather than entry-level controllers when pitching into the Indian market, as the Indian market is now mature enough to handle more performance-based controllers.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for six months.

I have not experienced any performance issues or limitations with HPE Alletra Storage as of now.

We have not escalated any questions to tech support because we have not encountered any issues whatsoever up to this date.

Negative

The initial setup process with HPE Alletra Storage is very easy, and I find it straightforward.

I cannot comment on the ROI from the HPE product, but the capacity enhancement we attained through no-question-asked compression offers a lower cost compared to traditional architecture while maintaining similar SLA levels.

When comparing HPE Alletra with competitors like Hitachi and IBM, it is crucial to note that Alletra MP 10000 guarantees 100% data availability SLA, which is unique among HPE's offerings, while Hitachi offers this guarantee across almost all their storage products. Though Hitachi excels in performance with other storage subsystems, when focused on Alletra MP 10000, I find it competitive as it provides a specific performance structure.

We use HPE, we use Hitachi, and we use IBM for our storage solutions. From HPE, we work with Alletra MP 10000.

Regarding the pricing aspect of HPE Alletra Storage, it is a bit on the higher side compared to Hitachi, but I think they need to work on that since Hitachi offers strong competition with their B26 and B28 models.

I would assess the value of HPE Alletra's as-a-service delivery model for my organization as a high score out of ten.

I recommend that organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage look into its disintegrated architecture, as it offers significant commercial and technical benefits. The flexibility to upgrade only one controller for performance increases costs effectively without needing to upgrade both controllers.

I rate this review 9 out of 10.

My main use case for HPE Alletra Storage is production server storage.

The speed and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage have benefited my organization by allowing us to avoid worrying about the high cost of moving to the cloud quite yet.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most are speed and reliability. 

HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operation expenses. Since we're such a small shop, we replaced two other storage devices with it, so the cost of support, maintenance, time, and labor has helped reduce our overall expenses.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning. We don't spend a lot of time on that since we're so small. I assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as awesome because we've reduced from two storage arrays down to just one Alletra while still having so much more room.

HPE Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-like operational model of HPE Alletra Storage has affected our operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by increasing our development to production time.

There are so many features of HPE Alletra Storage that I probably don't even know about, and as a small shop, we probably don't take advantage of half of them.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about a year.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization great. That said, typically, our expansion storage isn't very fast.

I would evaluate customer service or technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as excellent since I haven't had to call them at all.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using an old HP storage solution.

My experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage was easy.

I haven't seen an exact ROI with HPE Alletra Storage. I have experienced a reduction of labor, as managing one device instead of two has helped.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage was good, however, licensing is always a challenge since nobody enjoys those costs, though having support going forward gives me peace of mind.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I looked at Synology and remember that there was another option. I don't recall what it was. What stood out to me in my evaluation process was that Synology fits in between the straight consumer and enterprise level, as they didn't seem to have a full-on enterprise product HPE Alletra does.

We haven't had to do any support calls on HPE Alletra Storage yet, and it's been a year.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten out of ten and definitely recommend it to other organizations looking to upgrade from older equipment that doesn't have the same feature set.

My main use case for HPE Alletra Storage is storage.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers. The cloud-like operational model has affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day tasks—all of the above. 

Direct access to senior support engineers is very important. Spinning up a new VM and provisioning storage for it is significantly easier than doing it manually. HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure.

I don't know how HPE Alletra Storage can be improved; I will have to ask my team what they want next.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about six to seven years now.

I have experienced some issues, not necessarily downtime. That said, we had some controller issues at one point; however, since I have redundancy, we really didn't experience any downtime.

HPE Alletra Storage scales very well with the growing needs of my organization.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as very good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service a nine. 

I have a very good rapport with the support personnel at HP; they are familiar with my environment, and when I call, they call me back. I simply tell them, 'This system is doing this,' and they already know what to do next.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using NetApp to address similar needs.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as seamless.

I have not seen an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was fair. Compared to what we had before with NetApp, HPE Alletra Storage is much cheaper, and the maintenance renewal is much cheaper as well, which is why we went with Nimble or HPE Alletra Storage.

Before choosing HPE Alletra Storage, I considered EMC, Dell, and IBM.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to buy it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as a nine.

HPE Alletra Storage provides predictable performance and capacity for applications without data integrity trade-offs. This predictable performance and capacity helps operations by providing exact numbers for upfront storage usage and predictable capacity performance.

It's user-friendly, easy to configure, manage, and very flexible for both VMware and physical servers. The synchronous replication between data centers is also very good.

It has very good compression and deduplication, which makes it one of the best in the market. 

It helps when it comes to simplifying storage operations, such as provisioning and day-to-day management. It is very user-friendly and provides a single pane of glass to work with. 

It provides a cloud-operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure through the GreenLake solution, allowing users to manage and monitor storage on-prem from a single pane of glass, both on-premises and in the cloud.

In HPE Alletra Storage, areas that have room for improvement include the network-attached storage, specifically the NFS performance.

I've worked with HPE Storage for about ten to fifteen years. In the past, the storage had a different name. I’m recognized as an HPE Master Storage professional, which means I hold a high-level certification. I have been working with HPE Alletra Storage for a long time.

HPE Alletra Storage is very stable, and security patches are announced and easy to install, warranting a rating of excellent stability.

It's very scalable.

Our clients are medium sized organizations.

My thoughts on HPE's technical support are very positive, rating at nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Dell and NetApp storage. HPE Alletra Storage is reliable, stable, and very effective on fiber channels with excellent support, making it a high-end storage solution at the top level compared to other storage solutions.

I find it relatively straightforward, but there may be some issues with getting it registered properly in the HPE system and portals.

It does not require much maintenance and is easy to maintain.

The solution has helped reduce data management operations expenses by 20% to 40%.

It's a little bit over prized. The pricing of HPE Alletra Storage depends on available rebates. Other storage solutions such as Dell are slightly cheaper, while alternatives such as Pure are more expensive. The price point is good but somewhat high.

I would recommend HPE Alletra Storage to other users because it is reliable, stable, flexible, and suitable for enterprise and production environments. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are for databases.

The benefits for my organization include reduced operational workload and complexity.

The feature I appreciate most about HPE Alletra Storage is its simplicity.  

HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operation expenses. The cloud-like operational model has drastically affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management, improving our management timeframe.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without going through support escalations. The direct access to senior support engineers is crucial for us.

The solution has helped reduce the time spent on capacity planning by approximately two to four hours. The uptime was notably improved compared to our previous system, being two to four times faster. I have not expanded usage yet.

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved in the observability GUI by consolidating information in one place instead of having it separated. It's currently too compartmentalized.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for at least two years now.

I haven't experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

HPE Alletra Storage is scaling effectively with the growing needs of my organization. We don't have problems.

As an engineer, the internal service we provide for running databases receives positive feedback from database administrators. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as a nine. This rating is based on their fast response time and readily available assistance when needed. The escalation process is very efficient.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using HP 3PAR to address similar needs.

I would describe my experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage as very good and straightforward.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been very good without any problems.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we were considering Dell's solution, though I don't recall the specific name.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as an eight.

We currently use HPE Alletra Storage internally at Vantage Point as transactional VM storage and at a couple of our colocation sites as straight block storage. By and large, it serves as transactional virtual machine storage for our clusters.

The most valuable feature of HPE Alletra Storage for me is the Data Services Cloud Console and the cloud provisioning, even though it's all private. 

The integrations it has don't limit our options from a storage perspective. If we want to do anything cloud-related, we can. The integration of the InfoSight metrics is exceptionally impressive. These features of HPE Alletra Storage provide more insight into what's actually happening within the environment. 

The storage platform has worked effectively, so there aren't many problems that need solving anymore. What it does allow us to do is get more key metrics on what we're actually doing, and it helps us right-size some of our deployments. The features don't help us from a storage perspective because we simply don't have issues that need to be fixed with the storage anymore.

It has reduced our data management operations expenses in some ways. Previously, we were fighting operational problems with the Dell Unity platform and our older fifth-gen Nimbles, which we no longer experience. However, we don't have current problems to compare it to.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent on capacity planning significantly, saving probably a couple of days' worth of labor. The capacity efficiency has improved since the 6K series, showing approximately 20% better performance in every metric compared to fifth-gen Nimbles, Dell Unity, Dell PowerVaults, and other storage solutions I've used.

Improving HPE Alletra Storage is challenging to answer because there are several different metrics to consider. From a performance perspective, the improvements and large jumps are fantastic as is. From a deployment perspective, I was a big fan of the on-premise deployment model and then connecting it afterward to GreenLake. Now that's being sunsetted. From a sensor and metric standpoint, there is just enough data without getting useless metrics, where you become blind to what it provides. The HPE Storage Technical Assistance Center is still probably the best out of all the storage vendors. 

It's difficult to improve upon being able to call in and get assistance almost instantly.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for five years.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as a nine out of a 10 or a 10 out of 10. While we're not a shop that has thousands of arrays, we do have a significant number of them. We've had a controller that needed to be replaced before, but we've never experienced any data loss.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with our growing needs and has been able to keep up with our requirements. Recently, we over-provisioned one of our data stores. We were able to do this because the data reduction was better than we originally anticipated.

The customer support for HPE Alletra Storage is second to none. There are many different areas to get support within HPE, but the storage support, specifically Nimble support, has been excellent.

Regarding the support process, you dial the storage support phone number for your region. In our case, North America. They use a follow-the-sun model, so there's always somebody available during local hours who is alert and ready to assist. For a critical situation, you'll get assistance almost immediately. Otherwise, you leave a message and receive a call back within 10 to 15 minutes maximum. All that's needed to get started is a description of the issue and an array serial number. There are no complicated procedures or permissions required.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using Dell Unity, which wasn't addressing our needs.

I have seen a return on investment on our 6010 and 6050s because they solved our storage problems, which directly translated to fewer man-hours being spent mitigating issues and better efficiency of the end-users using the applications that run on the storage.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage are in line with the market from both CapEx and OpEx perspectives. Speaking specifically of the 6K Alletra series, the renewal process can be complex due to the sheer volume of SKUs. It requires careful tracking, but that's primarily the responsibility of the partner rather than the end-user. We haven't had any renewals on any of the Alletra MPs or the Synergy chassis or anything larger than that.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we evaluated Pure Storage, the Dell product portfolio, and briefly looked at iXsystems.

We do not use HPE's GreenLake AIOps. We are evaluating different AI platforms and what they can do for our business and clients regarding HPE's GreenLake AIOps, but we don't know what we need. I don't have enough knowledge to determine if we should be using it.

Regarding additional features, the Nimble Connection Manager and plugin integration within the vSphere environment is being discontinued. As a VMware-heavy shop, we find HPE VM Essentials and Morpheus interesting, but they're relatively new. Until they have full integration with major backup vendors and include features like immutable storage, immutable backups, hypervisor level native backups, and integrations for other tools, the existing plugins shouldn't be discontinued.

What stood out about HPE Alletra Storage is its ease of use, which many of our clients are familiar with. The biggest selling point, besides the performance metrics, is the exceptional storage support experience. While HPE compute support is a separate entity that isn't as good, the storage support is outstanding.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage as a nine out of 10.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are that all of our data is on there, including SQL, Windows, file servers, ZenApp servers, and everything.

The encryption feature benefits our organization significantly, as we had to buy separate products that used to involve more hardware and licensing costs to store the keys. With HPE Alletra Storage, this is inbuilt, so it obviously saved a lot of money.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I prefer the most are the ease of provisioning and encryption, where the ability to provision a volume used to be difficult. It's easier to do now. 

Feature-wise, it's pretty simple; just a one-click button to enable it, so implementing it was pretty easy too.

As for provisioning, in the old days, we had to be really specific about what type of volume we wanted, the parity size, and the cage protection model. We used to be a 3PAR shop, and transitioning to HPE Alletra Storage made provisioning very simple and easy. 

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning as InfoSight plays a big part; it tells you what to expect to a degree, and the tools it provides give you good insight on when to expect to expand, alongside the support, which also gives you good insight. It has reduced the time I spend on capacity planning by about 80%.

When assessing HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency, if you're talking about data dedupe, it dedupes fairly efficiently; coming from older storage model systems that did one-to-one, we see at least a two-to-one dedupe, so that's definitely a 50% reduction. 

Performance-wise, you're looking at different models; a 6030 gives you more than a 6010, and a 6050 gives you more than a 6030. When we transitioned from a 3PAR F400 or an 8200, the performance definitely increased by 100%.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing our data infrastructures; we are a private cloud/managed service provider, so we don't prefer the level of cloud management of the infrastructure or the storage. We prefer to keep it in-house, however, it obviously gives us more options, where you can be just on-prem or have management from the cloud, providing a lot of flexibility.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, it needs to have a true active-active controller; it claims to have an active-active controller from the back end, however, the second node is pretty much sitting there doing nothing. The MV 10000 series, which is the next series, is an improvement to HPE Alletra, and HPE is already doing that. In the next release, I would prefer to see better dedupe features; I know other companies do excellent dedupe, and they have protection group policies, meaning you have immutable data in case of a ransomware attack. If you're on the SAN, it should give you a way to protect that data without being erased. Other vendors have that capability built-in, ensuring that you can't erase the data, so features similar to that would be great.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about three years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as being quite robust, as we haven't had an outage.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of our organization; we size it based on customer needs and plan for immediate growth in the first and second years. The expansion process is pretty straightforward; we estimate growth after two to three years, building in enough space and power to expand easily. The process is very simple; it just involves connecting another shelf and adding the storage.

When evaluating customer service and technical support, I want to highlight that, similar to my experience with 3PAR and Nimble, Nimble support was outstanding, and I never had an issue. 

The support for HPE Alletra is about the same; however, there are occasions, especially after hours or on weekends, where we might get the B team, resulting in a bit of a runaround as you have to gather logs and go through troubleshooting steps. If it's the A team during the day, the solutions are usually quite good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as a nine. 

To make it a ten, I would prefer avoiding the runaround and the delays I sometimes experience with weekend support; in previous years, I would get immediate responses and solutions, and now the process can take several days, which can be frustrating. Streamlining that process to get quicker answers would significantly improve my rating.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I wasn't using another solution to address similar needs, as we're an HPE shop, and we were on 3PAR, which effectively transformed into Primera and then into HPE Alletra. So, all our products have been HPE.

During the evaluation process, I did not notice anything that particularly stood out, both positive and negative; it was a better product than what we had and fulfilled our needs from our previous solutions. It was just a learning curve to adapt to the new product and the new UI.

The deployment model for HPE Alletra Storage is on-prem.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. The return on investment is a bit of complicated math; the way we sell storage to our customers is by the terabyte, with locked-in prices for three or five years. It's not possible to go back and compare it and factor money in, but we try to achieve a return of interest within around 18 months for a three-year contract and 36 months for a five-year contract, just as examples to get the money back.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I am not directly involved; we go through our third-party vendor, and we pretty much just stick with what he gives us in terms of good pricing.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we considered various other solutions, but we're an HPE shop, so we stick with whatever our vendor gives us. Our vendor said that after Primera, HPE Alletra is the next big thing, so we just set it up.

The solution's impact on data management operations expenses depends on what model you had, what model you went to, the size of the data, and the type of data, so it depends on many factors. 

While I'm not sure if it reduced or increased costs, it definitely did not go down. HPE GreenLake AI Ops enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations, and the basic support has been pretty good. 

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as an eight out of ten; while it has dedupe numbers and encryption at rest, the IOPS depend on the model, and similar models from different vendors tend to have better IOPS.