HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery [EOL] Reviews

We use the tool to manage our hybrid cloud storage with Microsoft Azure. It acts as our on-premise repository to ensure that on-premise workloads do not have to move into the cloud.

The most valuable feature of HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery for us is its ability to identify when we need additional capacity and automate onboarding. Our law firm's data needs can be unpredictable, so the tool's management of long-term data capacity strategies is crucial. They monitor when we reach around 80 percent capacity and ensure that additional capacity is provided within the required time frame, which is important for us. 

As a law firm, predicting capacity requirements is difficult because we can't anticipate which cases we'll get or how much data each case will need. The solution ensures that we have the necessary storage when we need it. 

I think HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is doing a good job overall, but there's room for improvement. It should pay more attention to different business models. As a law firm, our requirements differ greatly from those of insurance companies or banks. Our timelines and capacity recovery needs are unique. 

The solution should create specific verticals focused on contracts that suit our environment. The concept is great, but the execution could be better for the legal vertical. For example, when we need capacity, it usually takes too long to get it.

This might be okay for banks or insurance companies, but it's too slow for a law firm. The tool needs to understand how different industries work and what drives our specific requirements.

I have been working with the product for a year. 

In my experience, the tool's stability has been really good. We did have some initial problems with one of the cages not getting upgraded with firmware. However, the engineers put in a lot of time and effort to address this. They brought in a brand new cage and did everything they could quickly to ensure the platform was stable. They eventually resolved the issue without any questions.

I think the platform's stability is significantly superior to what we were used to before. But I expect that because it's not our hardware anymore. It's incumbent on HPE to ensure that whatever they've promised us stays up and works. So far, we've only had that one issue, and they were all over it. We don't have any concerns about stability at this point.

The solution sits on HPE platforms, which are very scalable platforms. We feel that our investment in the tool gives us the flexibility to grow, whether we need to scale out or up. It doesn't matter which direction we go. Regardless of how our workload grows, we feel that with the solution, we can keep up with whatever challenges our business throws.

We've been HPE customers for over 20 years, so we expect the same level of support. We have no concerns about the support.

The good thing about the tool is that we don't own the hardware—HPE does. So we expect even better support from them, and we're happy with the support we're getting.

Positive

We used Microsoft Azure before HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. We replaced Microsoft Azure because it was expensive, and we needed to save money—the main difference lies in the expense model. With HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery, we are paying 50 percent less. 

The tool's setup is very straightforward. We had no concerns there. The biggest issue we faced was the time it took to get the hardware on-premises. But the setup, maintenance, and support are great once it's on-site. We have no concerns in those areas.

HPE helped us with the implementation. 

We've seen a return on investment. It's been tremendous. We've reduced our costs by more than 50%. We're very happy with the total cost of ownership we're getting with HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery right now. It's amazing. I'd say it's the best decision we've made in the last two years. 

Pricing is straightforward. The thresholds are well documented, so you know exactly where your tiers are. The price is very clear if you decide to go for a certain capacity. The pricing is also clear if you want to move to the next threshold. So that aspect is very straightforward and not an issue.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. This high rating is primarily due to their great support. My understanding is that you have a dedicated support number. We've been an HPE customer on the enterprise side for many years and have always had great support, but I think the solution takes it to another level.

We've had one issue so far, and they were able to resolve it quickly. No resources or expenses were spared. While it's not our primary platform, backup is just as critical as production. If you don't have a backup, you have serious problems. They understood this importance and were all over the issue. We know the level of service we get from buying products from HPE, and I can see that HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery takes it up a notch.

Our primary use case is for protection if we're attacked. 

The most valuable features are simplicity and that recovery can take a few seconds. 

The speed of recovery that GreenLake provides is really good because we can go back seven to eight seconds. It helps reduce a lot of the RTOs by around 90%.

It's really easy to recover. You only need to press a button. 

Greenlake provides us with a single SaaS control console for multisite management. It really helps because we only need internet connection, and we can recover the environment even if we're not connected to the environment. It's really simple because we only need internet connection and not different on-prem consoles to access the devices and manage the recovery.

It enables us to manage all of our cloud services. This ability makes our lives easier. It makes it easier to help protect our environment. 

The ability to protect our data with no scheduling, snapshots, or agents has simplified our tasks. We only need to deploy some VMs in our environment, access the console, manage the recovery plan, and modify it. It's a huge advantage of this solution.

We didn't have a disaster recovery solution and now with HPE, it's really simple and powerful with central software that has insights. 

It allowed us to create a disaster plan with predictable RPOs and RTOs. It's really simple and intuitive because you only need to follow a wizard and then complete the fields. You don't have to have a lot of knowledge.

The predictable RPOs and RTOs are really important. 

Compared to other solutions, the RTOs are the best with Greenlake.

The unique journaling capabilities enable us to recover data from a large number of checkpoints that are seconds apart. This ability is the reason why I think that HPE Greenlake is the best solution in the market. You can recover from a few seconds ago and you cannot find this anywhere else in the market. It's really powerful.

The Hypervisor could use improvement but I think Hyper-V is on the roadmap. 

I would like to have the ability to deploy the appliances and protect some VMs on the cloud. 

There could also be more recovery reports. 

I have been using HPE Greenlake for around two years. 

We have had some problems with backup and recovery services when recovering from ransomware and deleting plans but it's improving day by day.

We worked with VMware SRM. It is quite similar to HPE but HPE Greenlake for Disaster Recovery is less complex and more powerful. 

The initial setup was very simple. It only took a few hours and could be done with one person. 

Six people in our organization use it. 

It does not require a lot of maintenance because the dashboard shows if you have any problems with the virtual machines.

Greenlake is cost-effective. 

Licensing starts with a package for 25 VMs which is too much for smaller clients. It would be helpful if they could offer fewer VMs for the basic license.

I would rate HPE Greenlake a nine out of ten. My advice would be to do a proof of concept or to try a trial license. 

I use it for disaster recovery needs. I have a main data center and then another disaster recovery site, which is technically one server to protect my mission-critical VMs.

HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery makes life a lot easier because it is a single all-in-one solution. It is easy to set up and configure, and with that testing functionality integrated, it also gives me that ease of mind because I know that it my DR procedures effectively works. Previously, the testing procedure with other tools took me several hours, even days, to be sure, and now, I can test in a matter of minutes. I know that everything is okay or not.

If there is a disruption in my environment, I just have to go into the UI from Disaster Recovery, and it tells me what my RPO is effectively at that moment, which is somewhere between five and ten seconds. That is it.

Recovery is very easy because I can see directly what is going wrong and which server or site is down under the integrated failover testing. I can do an effective failover, so I do not even have to go on-site. I can do it from anywhere. I can initiate a failover in case of a disaster to my DR server.

HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery provides a single SaaS control console for multi-site management. It works, and I use it. This single portal or the single pane of glass gives me access to all my gear. It now also gives me all the services. It gives me all the applications and software that I am running on top of the gear. I use it quite often.

I am able to manage compute and storage, as well as DR, from a single console. For me, it is very important because until now I had to use multiple consoles and multiple applications to have the big picture of all my data with all the hardware underneath it. Now, I have that single pane of glass from where I can see everything at the same time. It simplifies my life a lot.

HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery enables me to protect our data with no scheduling, snapshots, or agents to be installed. It simplifies my life a lot because it is easy to use, and we do not need to use all those integrations between different solutions.

Its unique journaling capabilities enable me to recover data from a large number of checkpoints that are seconds apart. I already tried it, and it is a part of my testing procedure. I tried to recover from multiple checkpoints, and that effectively worked. I have checkpoints for up to two days if I remember well, and until now, it all works fine.

Our Recovery Point Objectives went from days and hours to seconds. The most impressive thing about this solution is that I can now very easily specify that these mission-critical VMs are protected with Disaster Recovery, and these non-mission-critical VMs are protected with Backup and Recovery, which is a data protection tool from GreenLake, so I am using both of them.

I have now one portal where I can manage my servers, my storage, my networking, and also my data protection and disaster recovery. It is now all integrated into one portal. With the legacy Zerto, I had another UI, and they now moved that UI and management dashboard into the GreenLake portal where I am also managing my gear. That, for me, is an advantage of HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery.

It satisfies my needs because I am using VMware to VMware. It is using Zerto technology in the backend, and knowing that with Zerto, you can go from any cloud to any cloud or on-premises VMware. You can go to any cloud provider. In HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery, until now, there is only VMware to VMware mobility, and recently Azure was added as a target, but it does not have the full flexibility yet compared to Zerto. HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery has not been here for long, and I assume that it is on the roadmap from HPE, but today, it is not on par. I am using VMware to VMware, so it works perfectly for my needs.

There is less cloud integration as compared to Zerto. An area for improvement is the support for Hyper-V and KVM. In Zerto, there is Hyper-V support, but it is not yet there in HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. I might look at Hyper-V. Because of all the things going on with VMware and Broadcom, I might consider migrating to Hyper-V. It would be useful if they add Hyper-V support as well over time.

I have been using this solution for less than a year.

I have been using it for almost a year. It has been running all the time, and I did not get any alerts or things that I had to do. For me, it is a stable product. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability because it is less scalable than Zerto at this moment.

I do not have the a very large environment to protect, so at least for me, it is sufficient. I do not know about other customers, but as far as I know, it supports up to hundreds of VMs. Knowing that it is using Zerto technology in the backend, it is scalable. I assume that there would not be any issue for any size of customers.

So far, I never had to call support for GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. It has worked until now, but I had one issue with the usage of the GreenLake platform itself in the backend. It was an online experience, and I got help very quickly, so I assume that with Disaster Recovery, the support is like the GreenLake platform itself. Their support was very good.

Positive

I have used Veeam and Zerto. I am still using Veeam but not for my company's data. I am using it for my long-term data protection but not short-term data protection. HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is easier to use than Veeam. I am a big fan of Veeam, but it is another console, and now with the GreenLake offering, I have less consoles to use. It integrates with my existing hardware management tools, so it makes my life easier from the management point of view. Because it is a SaaS offering as well, it updates automatically. The update procedure now is much easier because it gets updated automatically.

With Zerto, the updates were easy, but now, with the SaaS offering, it is even easier. HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery uses the Zerto technology. I am switching from Zerto to HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery because they simplified the licensing, so it is cheaper in HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery, compared to the legacy Zerto solution. I now also have the GreenLake portal that I am using to manage my on-premises gear, and I can use that same UI to verify my disaster recovery requirements. It has made my life easier.

In terms of feature parity with Zerto, HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is definitely not there yet. There is still improvement to do. I assume it is a matter of time, but it is not there yet.

I have not yet used AI. As far as I know, AI has not yet appeared in HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. That could be an area for improvement. Also, with the Zerto legacy solution, ransomware detection has been added in the latest version. I have not used it yet, but I know that it is there. In HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery, I did not see the ransomware detection function. That can be an area for improvement, so not everything is covered from the legacy solution. I assume that it will happen.

For me, it is on-prem from VMware to VMware with local servers here.

It was very easy to install. The tool told me what to do. It involved just deploying a VM, and from that moment on, everything got done by itself, so it was very easy to install.

All I need was the subscription ID to get started. Once I logged in into the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform, which I use already to manage my servers, storage and networking hardware from HPE, I could add the subscription ID there to unlock HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. That was an advantage. 
From that moment on, I could start using the Disaster Recovery tool by downloading a file and deploying that file on my local environment to set up secure communication with the SaaS platform.
After that, I had to add my servers. Everything was discovered automatically. I had to create a protection group and put the VMs in there. That is it, so it involved adding the servers to protect and then telling them from where to where. From that moment, my data was protected, so it was a setup of a few hours, including the documentation of everything. It went fast.

In terms of maintenance, it is a SaaS solution. I am only using the platform. HPE is responsible for maintaining it.

I implemented it myself. We have a small team with just a few people. I am responsible for IT, so I am mainly using the tool.

With Greenlake, we do not need a large team anymore to manage everything. It has definitely made my life easier. I was in the US last week, but I was confident that if there was something with my IT environment, I could manage it from anywhere. That makes my life much easier, for sure.

I have not had any major downtime so far, but based on the regular testing, we can see that we are going from days to hours and even minutes. It is definitely saving a lot of time for my rather small IT team, so there is efficiency and a return on investment.

It is hard to measure the cost savings, but there is definitely efficiency. I need to put less time into managing and maintaining my environment. It has made my life much easier.

It is not cheap, but it is much more cost-efficient compared to Zerto because the entry point of the number of VMs to be protected is lower compared to Zerto. It is more interesting to get started with HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery because of the lower entry price point. I use this for my mission-critical VM's, for the other VM's I use HPE GreenLake for Backup & Recovery, which has a lower price point per protected VM.

I would definitely recommend it. I would advise taking a look at what is supported today, such as VMware and Azure. If that is what you are looking for, I would definitely advise going for HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery. If you are looking for other solutions that are not supported, such as AWS or Hyper-V, you need to take a look at the legacy Zerto solution.

I would rate HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery a nine out of ten. The product manager at HPE confirmed that they are working on functionalities. As long as they are doing this, I would give it a nine out of ten.