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 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.
