HPE 3PAR StoreServ alternatives and competitors

We use it for all our VMs. It's our primary VM storage. 97% of our architecture is completely virtualized. We won't run a VM unless it's on Tintri. We also use it in our automation. 

Tintri has changed the way that you do NFS for VMs, which is a big deal. Usually, NFS for VMs is very chatty and causes you a lot of problems. Tintri rewrote the NFS for virtuality that allows each basic VM to get its own line at the checkout stand. What this does is that it gives much more response. I don't have problems with performance. I can virtualize pretty much anything without any slowdown or any issues. Plus, I'm easily able to replicate or clone hundreds of VMs up from one in an instance. With automation tied with our Ansible, Tintri is one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox.

It frees up my guys to innovate. They're not dealing with slow storage calls. They're not dealing with performance calls. Storage used to be a big issue where one person was maintaining it all the time. Not having to maintain that storage or groom or manicure that storage gives them the freedom to do other things. Tintri is like its own employee because it allows you to do other things besides storage. It has helped very much to reduce administrative time.

In terms of visibility, it gives me enough ammo so that when all the finger-pointing starts, I can always point to the network and say, "Hey, it's you."

We're constantly developing, iterating, and doing new VMs. So, the ability to move fast and the ability to have high-speed storage is valuable. In the case of something like Atlassian where you work with Jira and you're rolling out your own updates or something like that, you might need to iterate a 500-gig server six times to find all the issues. Even Atlassian will tell you that the first time you upgrade their stuff, it doesn't usually work, so get ready to try it again in your lab. When you are working in a lab environment or need to do things like that, the abilities that the backend of Tintri has are just amazing. They allow you to utilize and take advantage of that. I can spin up five 500-gig VMs without taking a hit to my data store, my performance, or my total overall storage. That's because of the way Tintri does the dedup and the blocks. It has already got all these blocks until the delta gets changed. Even though you've got five 500-gig VMs, which should be 2,500 gigs or 2.5 terabytes, it's not seeing it as that because it has got to compact it and basically zip, but they're all running until the delta gets far enough apart. That allows me to do things I wasn't able to do on my NetApp. It was like you can only have one other copy, and that's it because it's going to be a one-to-one clone. 

It enables replication, snapshots, and setting QoS at the virtual machine level, which is super important. We don't use quality of service because the service is so good. Once in seven years, I might have used that. It's already running and performing. So, the QoS runs on its own. It's great.

Its performance is amazing. Since I have put Tintri in, I haven't had a complaint from anybody about slowness. On top of that, there is block-level cloning and the ability to spin up VMs. We use that in our architecture. We don't deploy in a traditional manner anymore by using a kickstart server, ISO, or anything. We keep VM templates, not even VMware templates. We utilize Tintri with Ansible to provision our environments, and it's pretty awesome. It's instantaneous and very cool.

Its GUI is very good now. For a long time, it had been Flash. When Flash got deprecated, they were able to roll out everything to HTML5. The new HTML5 is in Tintri Global Center as well as on the individual VM stores, which is great. In the NetApp days, NetApps were dinosaurs. It took one person to manage the storage, carve out LUNS, carve out aggregates, etc. One person would spend all his time on storage, whereas Tintri is like a 30-minute challenge where you can order a Domino's pizza and get it. You plug it in, and it just runs. It is that intuitive and that simple. The GUI is very straightforward. It shows you a nice mapping of the hardware and everything else and how it's working. It's a true example of plug-and-play. For something which is as important as your storage, I can't emphasize how much and how important that is. It is literally one of the single most important pieces of hardware I have in my data centers.

I have a T880, T800, and T1000. The problem Tintri has is that they make their products so good that you don't ever need to replace them. You just need to buy more. They have kind of shot themselves in the foot with that. I update my software, and I've never reached the end where I couldn't update the software. I'm still running a couple of six-year-old Tintri that are killing what people bought yesterday. They had some initial issues with their first offering and their old management before they were bought by DDN, but the hardware and the platform have always been solid and spectacular. When they had all that issues, I stuck tight and held them. I was like, "No, this hardware is too good." I believed in it, and then DDN came and picked it up. They saw what I saw. Anybody who uses it will have the same opinion.

I'm waiting to see the Kubernetes package. I know they're releasing one, but I haven't seen it yet. So, I'm waiting to see that. 

As long as they stay, I don't want them to rest on their laurels. They're been great. I want them to continue innovating. The way it is VM-aware storage, it'd be nice to see cluster-aware storage as well. That'd be cool, and I know they're working on that.

I have been using this solution for about seven years.

They're pretty stable now.

It's very scalable.

They're great. We had to have a drive and a controller plate repaired. There have been three or four calls in seven years. They were great. Within four hours, they fixed it, and nothing has ever gone down. Everything that's been done persisted. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

I was previously on NetApp, and then we looked pretty thoroughly when we went to Tintri. I looked at Pure. I looked at Tegile. We got 3PAR in our data center as well for databases. We were all over the place. We looked at NetApp again.

At the time, we were very much a NetApp business. We had five racks of NetApps. The guy that got me looking at storage was the guy from Pure, and it wasn't Tintri at all. The guy from Pure said, "Well what if I could do your five racks of storage in like 4U? And I was like, "4U? You're kidding me. No way. You can't do that." So, I started looking at Pure. I liked Pure first and was looking at them, but then they had this big thing with their iSCSI. I was like, "Ah, I don't want to change all my NFS and networks." So, I got ready to shop more. 

We looked at Tegile, and then we looked at NetApp, but NetApp would have required a forklift. I just didn't like what they were doing, and then we came to Tintri. It was really impressive. The guys who had solved virtualization at VMware had left and gone to solve the issue for storage. Their storage was great, and the product was great. The product was just amazing. At the end of the day, that's what it came down to, and when you add that with the pricing, you can't lose.

I took a lot of flak internally in my company by standing by Tintri because we had bought all these Tintris, and then Tintri went bankrupt. I stood by them and said, "Hey, let's not jump ship." A lot of people I knew ripped out their Tintri and put in a Pure because they were like, "I have to have something I can build. I have to get more." And I was like, "Just wait, just wait. Trust me." I waited, and I saw Western and DDN go at it. Either one of them was going to be great. DDN won, and DDN has been a great partner. I've seen them advance, buy, and try to move the needle. That does make me very happy to know that it's in a much safer, stable place with DDN because I was getting the side eyes from C-level executives saying, "Hey, we just put all this money into Tintri, and they just went belly up." So, to see the validity of my faith in the product was good. It was very good to see that somebody else saw the same thing, bought it, and took it to that stable level. I was very happy with it.

You can order a pizza and set it up. You got two management cables, two data cables, and a replication cable. You just plug it in.

I moved one the other day because we moved our lab, and it took under 10 minutes. There are two rails that pop in. The toughest part is the rails. You got to lift the box out. You have another person there to help you, and in five to seven minutes, you're in. It takes you longer to plug in cables and power cords and run them than it does to do anything else.

In terms of maintenance, we upgrade the software once every six months.

We have a VAR, P1 Technologies, that we work through, but we do all the work ourselves. They've been our teacher, and they've been a partner. In the seven years, I've been through many different people at Tintri. A lot of the same people are still there, but I've been with my VAR the whole time. They've never changed.

We have seen an ROI. It's worth the money.

It has helped to reduce our total cost of ownership, but I don't have the metrics. We use it heavily in our automation platforms.

It's very competitive.

I would advise playing with it. Don't hesitate. Go buy it. Jump into that Tintri toolkit. There are a lot of cool features in there. Once you stop looking at storage for what storage does, you can find many other things that it does and you're like, "Wow, I didn't even know I could do that with my storage because I've been so busy focusing on these three areas. Now that I don't even think about those three areas anymore, I can use my storage for this." So, think outside the box and play with that Tintri toolkit. It's time to get on the Tintri train and stop thinking about your storage.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We are using AFF for a few clients. It's a specific type of data we use for these arrays, not like a block kind of thing or regular data. A few clients have particular requirements about where we put all the data. We are primarily using FAS, and we have around four or five AFF boxes. We don't deal with AFF regularly. 

We're not currently using NetApp Cloud Backup, but we're planning on implementing it. I'm not sure because my architect is the one who manages the end-to-end services for NetApp. He makes all the decisions on the NetApp side whether we use AFF or FAS. AFF is a unified storage box, so we route certain data to AFF. 

AFF has simplified data management across SAN and NAS environments. As admins, we're always trying to reduce the complications on the technology end. We're looking at the product from a single perspective. It's more about how the team engages with it. If one person on a 10-person team isn't comfortable with the features, then that's where we have to improve our understanding and where the vendor can help us. With AFF, we haven't had this issue. The whole team is thrilled to work on the product.

NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.

If you asked me to rate AFF's effect on the flexibility of SAP and Oracle workloads, I would give it a seven out of 10. AFF is what we are using right now, but the team isn't fully utilizing it because our architect team is managing everything. We haven't had enough time to look into that. We were interested in that. It is easier to understand and manage. There isn't a need to dig into that. However, I'm on the backend side of things, and we are still looking for some relevant documents that can help us understand this aspect better.

AFF is user-friendly. A person who has no experience with NetApp can handle it comfortably. Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens.

NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology. 

For example, my team is unaware of any product unless my architect tells us about it. Then the team starts digging. It would be helpful if they made all the documentation and training readily accessible to everyone on their portal.

We've been using NetApp since I joined the company six years back.

Stability-wise, AFF is fantastic. We haven't seen many complications, and before there is a possible outage, NetApp reaches out to us and lets us know what's going on. 

NetApp products in general are highly scalable. For scalability, I would rate AFF nine out of 10.

NetApp provides excellent support. We get valid and crucial advice from NetApp every time we interact with them weekly or monthly. I would rate their support nine out of 10 because I work with various products from multiple vendors. Compared to other vendors, I feel more comfortable reaching out to the NetApp team. 

For example, I tried to reach the NetApp support team for one of the issues over the weekend. My call got disconnected due to a network glitch, and immediately I got an email in my inbox as well as a call back from NetApp on my given number. That's how NetApp reaches its customers.

Positive

I do remote support, so I'm not working on the data center side. We have an on-site team that could better describe the installation and deployment. However, my impression is that deploying AFF is straightforward. 

The architect is the main person working with the NetApp products, and he does a deep dive before touching any product. Our team has minimal exposure to NetApp because our work involves a mix of vendors. We have people working on the NetApp side but not regularly. The architect spends a lot of time on NetApp in his day-to-day activities, and he makes the changes. He takes and gives recommendations about which product to use, whereas we provide remote support from a different region altogether. The implementation, changes, configuration, and decision-making are all done from the headquarters.

And once it is implemented, the remote team logs in and does the navigation part. We check the array and identify any problems. If we find anything, we immediately reach out to the architect. He's the one who engages with NetApp and relays information to the remote team. That's how we learn as an organization. We spend time on the products to gain knowledge and experience with vendors.

It's hard for me to speak to return on investment. We have a different team responsible for that. I support the technical side. A separate team procures new arrays. 

In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF.

We are using two other vendor products as well. One is from Dell EMC, and the other is HP. I say the best competitor would be EMC. We get the same level of support from EMC as NetApp. But it's hard to compare the two. Each vendor has its own way of providing the service. AFF doesn't work the same way the other vendor's product does. They both are unique and work based on their own design. However, the navigation makes a lot of difference for the end-users, like admins.

It depends on if you prefer working with the CLI or the GUI. I'm more comfortable on the CLI in admin roles, but I like the GUI over the CLI if I compare the same thing with the other product. Each product meets the needs of the use case in its own way, but the navigation style is different. Depending on your preference, you might feel more comfortable with NetApp or other products.

I'd rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. To customers who are considering AFF, I would say they can go for it without hesitation. If it's a choice between AFF, FAS, or something else, customers can choose NetApp AFF without a second thought. We are happy with NetApp. Out of all the solutions we've looked at, AFF is the best fit for our business requirements so far.

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

Performance-wise, it is giving us a very good result.

We are happy with the data compression and deduplication capabilities.

The interface is user-friendly and very easy to use.

Taking a snapshot and cloning data is very easy to do. We can create a script and it will clone the environment. Similarly, we can replicate the environment from one site to another site, and we can restore the environment where we choose.

The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard. For example, I can see all of the utilization and it has port monitoring capabilities. With other storage vendors, multiple tools are required for this, and there is an additional charge.

Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases.

Integration with VMware tools can be improved.

The reporting can be better.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product and we haven't had any downtime. We use this product extensively and I have seen that we have a 90% I/O load in our environment.

This is a flexible system that is easy to scale.

We initially purchased two FlashArray systems. One of them was small or midsized, and the other was high-end. Then, later, we started upgrading. As per the Everygreen contract, we get free upgrades. Every three years, we get a new controller upgrade, free of cost.

We have also upgraded our capacity and now everything is on the X series. We have four FlashArrays in total and all of our database users are connected to them. The infrastructure and database teams are directly involved with it.

The response from the technical support team is very good. We have not found any difficulties with their ability or engagement.

We have worked with solutions from HPE, IBM, and Hitachi. We don't work with any of these vendors now. We switched because Pure storage is much easier to manage. It is also more stable and it is very easy to work with.

For example, there is no shutdown procedure. If you want to power down the environment then you just unplug the power and that's it. Once you reconnect the power, it is up. With legacy storage, there is a shutdown procedure. You have to shut down the host, then the SAN switch, then the storage.

With legacy storage, there is also a procedure to bring it up. You have to power up the enclosures, then the controller, then the SAN environment, and then the server. We had to follow a long set of steps with more dependencies.

After a power outage, the storage devices from the other vendors did not always come back online. For example, we implemented a PoC with the IBM FlashSystem and a power outage occurred. The management tool crashed and did not come back up. We had to wait for IBM engineers to come and fix the issue. Whereas, with Pure, when the power came back on, the system came back online immediately.

The other storage systems were not as user-friendly. For example, I had a Hitachi G600 and I wanted to extend the block capacity. I had to spend between 30 minutes and one hour to complete it. It's quite complex. With Pure, that would be taken care of in seconds by going to the console, selecting the volume, and performing the reset.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy.

The day that we received the box, we unpacked it, racked it, and configured it. The next day, we were able to utilize it for production.

Upgrading the hardware, such as performing a controller upgrade, is a seamless process. We are planning to do a major upgrade and it will be done on the fly.

We engaged Pure to assist us with our implementation, and our experience with them was very good. The technical team came onsite for the deployment. If we have any problems then they will return to our site to help.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

We completed a PoC with most of the leading brands.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that I can recommend Pure. We were the first customer for Pure Storage in the UAE. It's stable, reliable, and you can trust it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible. You can scale out and it's easy to upgrade. The upgrade process is not complex and it can be done on the fly, without any disruption.

My main complaint is that the garbage collection mechanism draws heavily on the resources. They have integration with VMware tools, although they can improve it slightly, and I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

We have been using it heavily and all of our people are happy with it. This includes the DBA team. Whenever we have a requirement of it, it's very easy and it can be done within seconds. With our previous storage solutions, we had to spend more time looking into problems and they were not user-friendly.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado is used for system backups.

The most valuable features are the five chips architecture and the purpose-built NVMe hard disk drive. Additionally, the IOPS feature is good.

The data compression and deduplication ratio of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is not as good as other solutions, such as EMC and Pure Storage. It is important when looking at capacity effectiveness.

The solution should be properly sized because if it is not there could be flexibility issues. The system should be sized properly and once it is delivered to the customer, they should ensure everything was done correctly.

When the US and China political issues come into play they have issues in qualifying the US applications with their new storage models. Many issues can arise. For example, customers might want to use Oracle hardware with their Huawei hardware to solve some of their use cases but the companies will not coordinate with each other. The political situation makes Huawei OceanStor Dorado not integrate well.

In an upcoming release, it would be a benefit to have better algorithms on data reduction, data compression, and data deduplication.

I have been using Huawei OceanStor Dorado for approximately two years.

Huawei claims if you choose their enterprise controller, such as the 8000, when you have a cluster of eight controllers, up to seven controllers can be down, and you can still be in operation. However, with their feature Metro Cluster that can be achieved by having 70 kilometers across two-site, you can have seven, nine.

The solution is stable enough as long as you do not do mistakes during implementation.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado has amazing scalability. As long as the specifications are correct in relation to the datasheets, there are no other storages that can provide a high level of scalability for scale-up and scale-out. 

It has the capacity of adding up to 16 or even 32 controllers. Both the EMC and IBM cannot add expansion boxes with their controllers but Huawei OceanStor Dorado has it in their architecture. You can have hard drives without adding the controllers.

The technical support is good. They have has shifted the support to their Dubai region. They now have proper infrastructure. They're Egypt's support and all the support agents are good in communication. Previously Huawei was having communication issues. The engineers were in China and they were having issues, but they have become much more professionals and they are ready to do RCA without any additional cost.

IBM does root cause analysis and I have seen Huawei support do root cause analysis which is a plus point.

In our implementation there are complications. I am not a technician but I have heard it requires eight hard drives to set up. For example, if customers are looking for NAS and SAN and want to have a small cluster of hard disk drives to enable both of these features. You can't do it because you need eight hard disk drives for a separate pool. For NAS, you will again need eight hard disk drives. You will need a total of 16 hard drives to make it a NAS and SAN storage system functional.

Huawei has very good pricing. They have some promotions that can be taken advantage of at certain times of the year, such as the end of December. They are providing aggressive pricing. In the Pakistan market, they are ready to beat any vendor in Pakistan because they want to grab the market.

I have evaluated products from many vendors, such as IBM, HPE, EMC, and Pure Storage.

I'm not sure exactly what features, attract customers, but Huawei is very popular in Pakistan. Huawei is taking share away from EMC and IBM and their hard disk drive, the NVMe, is not just a hard drive, but they have engineered it for the solution.

Some customers who don't like Huawei, say they're not coming up with Intel processors but only coming out with Kunpeng. This is not a negative point but some competition tries to create negativity for Huawei products.

All these storage solutions are only commodity hardware. Everybody is focusing on the cost per terabyte. A CTO should look at the capacity, cost per terabyte, SLA offered, and type of IT equipment offered. The performance key milestones, such as IOPS, the bandwidth of the storage, and which product is providing minimal latency. If these are the milestones a CTO wants to achieve. I think Huawei is one of the best products that can achieve all of these aspects other than pricing. I would recommend organizations to consider Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

I rate Huawei OceanStor Dorado a nine out of ten.

Dell Unity XT is used for data storage at a data center.

Dell Unity XT has improved our organization's performance. We have seen reduced management times.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it.

Dell Unity XT could add a unit-to-unit replication. We haven't seen that because we don't have an additional one to test. However, it is not an improvement, but something that we would like to have visibility on how it's done or how it works.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately two years.

Dell Unity XT is a very stable and reliable solution. We can leave the solution alone for a month without needing to check on how the unit is operating, or if there are problems. We realized the benefit of using the solution in approximately one year of use.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good because during the period of one year we noticed we had the need to add more and more systems, and more components to it and we were able to do it with no hassle. We do not plan to increase our usage.

We have approximately 500 endpoints using this solution.

The support from Dell Unity XT is good. They actively monitor the units. They have called us up when they have lost connection to one of the units to then take action. We have not had any issues to have needed to contact the support directly.

I rate the support of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was previously using HP High-Performance Unit Storages. There was a need to purchase a new unit because we were struggling with the resources, performance, support, and other aspects. The best solution that was on offer that came to us was Dell Unity XT. The company decided to move to it and buy the full flash version to support all the applications that we have on-site.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT was straightforward because we had Dell representatives involved with our team. 

We had to do a migration because we wanted to ensure that there was no downtime during the migration process from the old solution to the Dell Unity XT.  To complete everything live without the business noticing that something is going on in the background. 

You cannot have two groups of equipment that are deployed at the same time. For example, the host, storage, and switches. We had to ensure that everything is deployed, updated, and then do the connections between the two solutions and start with the migrations.

We use Dell representatives for the implementation of the solution. We ended up doing the configurations ourselves without needing the support. 80 percent of the deployment we did ourselves. We had two people involved in the deployment and the solution has not required any maintenance so far.

We deployed not only the one Dell Unity XT but a bunch of them. It took us approximately one week for everything to be finished. Additionally, we deployed some hosts, switches, and other systems.

We have received a return on investment using Dell Unity XT.

We were able to solve the performance issues we were having. Our core communications and infrastructure is dependent on these units. The fact that all of the systems that we have improved significantly in terms of performance. The organization has benefited or is happy with the investment they've done at this point.

We have received a full return on investment from using the solution for three to four years.

The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price. 

If you want to scale or add additional components, this is where the price starts to spike or become very complicated and expensive. If you purchase the components separately they can cost a lot.

We did not evaluate other solutions before choosing Dell Unity XT.

My advice to others would be for them to purchase the solution urgently if they need a backup solution.

I rate Dell Unity XT a ten out of ten.