HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

We use it in our customer environment that has more than two or three hosts. We don't have to worry about meeting any of the network vendor requirements for storage.

It's made everything faster.  On the array that we use internally, it has eliminated all of our storage bottlenecks, which has really quieted down all of our alarm systems, so it just made our days quieter.

It's easy to deploy and maintain, and it's made everything faster. 

It does offer a cloud-like infrastructure. However, it depends on what you are trying to do. The cloud-like perception is mostly seen during the deployment of HP GreenLake. While it is multi-tenant, that's not how we use it day to day.

While it's good for predicting problems, we don't have many. I don't know how many tens of thousands of sensors are on the Alletra arrays. Whenever there has ever been a problem, there has been a sensor, an email, et cetera. If it's a problem with the hardware or a failure that's even pending, something gets shipped out, and a case is auto-created and auto-closed for us. So it pretty much just does all of it.

The data availability guarantee is crucial. While it doesn't reduce the time spend on storage provisioning, it's fixed and has made the management easier. That's where its time savings comes into play.

It's improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs. I don't know what our figure was before, but it's at least double, and we upgraded from a Dell EMC Unity.

It's reduced the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. It's not that we have so many storage-related support tickets. It's that when we have storage issues, latency issues, or alarms, someone has to look into them. I'm not sure if it's the product itself that's made this better or if it's been the upgrade and support that we get from HPE. 

Our main array that we upgraded from was a Dell EMC Unity. We also had Nimble and MSA storage in the network. The reason we switched is we just needed the performance and the networking.

I'm not sure if I've gone through all the features. There's always room for improvement. 

I'd like an easier way to tune the alerts that email us. If we have a remote site that has issues, we have alerts that queue up and then once that gets resolved everyone gets flooded with alerts. 

I've used the solution for the last three years. 

The stability is very good. I've never had an issue with one dying. 

While it may be possible that the solution is infinitely scalable, I don't have the network need to continuously scale up. I don't know where the ceiling is.

HPE Nimble support is world-class. I'd rate it ten out of ten. Non-Nimble storage support is horrific. I'd rate it two out of ten since it takes so much longer to get to the correct team. Once you get to someone, the support is pretty good. It's just getting there that is hard. 

We previously used a Dell EMC Unity. We also had Nimble and ASA storage in the network.

Deploying the Alletra iSCSI platform was easy peasy. I could do it in my sleep. The Alletra dHCI platform was more of a headache. It requires a lot more planning and is more unforgiving during the initial setup. Once it's up and running, it's excellent.

We used a consultant to assist with the implementation. 

We've witnessed ROI in terms of smoothing out the bottlenecks and discovering the root problems. I don't have specific KPIs or metrics for ROI.

The pricing is very good. That said, every vendor is a spiderweb to navigate. It's a pain, everywhere.

We evaluated five different vendor solutions and this one, based on its performance and cost, was a win-win. We had hands-on experience and were more comfortable with HPE products. That said, the main driving factor was the cost.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's my personal favorite piece of storage. That said, there's always a new product and feature coming up in tech. 

We use it for our backend Tier 0 storage.

It is the core foundation for our disaster recovery plan and high availability plan. We use Peer Persistence in conjunction with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster to fail over critical workloads between data centers on a quarterly basis.

HPE Alletra Storage tries to provide a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-like operational model has not affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management. It is not enterprise-ready.

We have not seen much evidence of the fact that HPE Alletra Storage can predict problems and prevent them before they occur.

It is important that they guarantee data availability. They have had to pay up multiple times because they were not able to provide the availability, and so far, they have kept their word.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. It has saved about 20% of the time. With each iteration, they are getting better at their user interface.

HPE Alletra Storage has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPS. There is about 50% improvement.

Multi-node or the four controllers and the port persistence are valuable. The overall redundancy and performance of the system is valuable.

They can continue developing their V vaults and peer persistence. They can implement active-active peer persistence so that our organization can use it.

In the next release, we would like more V vault support with metro clustering or peer persistence.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for two and a half years.

We were early adopters, so we got to see some of the worst of Alletra. Since then, it has become much more stable. It is definitely a much more stable product now.

It is very scalable.

Their support is pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

HPE has dedicated a lot of resources to our organization to ensure that we are successful. There is definitely a lot of collaboration between our organizations to support Alletra.

Positive

We were using 3PAR and Primera. We switched because it was a refresh into the newer technologies.

We are mostly on-prem, but we do use Azure as we have started to do a hybrid model. 

Its deployment was very smooth and simple.

We did it ourselves. It was very straightforward.

We have seen an ROI. As data continues to grow in our environment, driving down the price per terabyte is essential for us to be able to continue to afford the performance they give us.

HPE was a clear winner on price per terabyte. It was very smooth.

We evaluated Pure, and we evaluated EMC. The main difference was the price per terabyte.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten. If they can improve some of the things, that would take it to ten.

We use the solution for infrastructure for one of our global financial customers to allow them to scale up and out.

The distributed hyper-converged infrastructure is great. Just having the ability to scale independently storage compute is useful. 

The extended capacity offers a small footprint that's still meeting a large customer demand. 

The cloud-like model will be helpful. I can see it will make things much more efficient once we get to that point.

For predicting and preventing problems, it looks like it will be a very useful feature. It will simplify operations and Day Zero and Day One operations.

Its guarantee of data availability is important. It will be one of the key aspects for the customer. 

It will help save time around storage provisioning once implemented fully.

The simplified provisioning of storage compared to other solutions in and of itself will make it more efficient.

Customers have an existing solution they can compare the performance of IOPs to. This product looks to be as good or even better. However, that's yet to be determined. 

Alletra should effectively reduce the time dealing with support tickets once it is fully implemented. It likely will improve by a factor of two to three, although we aren't at that point yet.

From what I've seen so far it's definitely checking the boxes of what the customer's looking for.

I'd like to see larger cluster sizes beyond four nodes. 

I've been using the solution for four months. 

It seems to be robust, and since it's based on the Nimbe product line, it will be mature. that stability will be fine. 

Going up to four nodes is not as scalable as I'd like for horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is huge. That said, the ability to go beyond four nodes would be of interest to customers in the future.

I haven't dealt with technical support yet. However, I'm sure it will be fine. I've seen a lot of focus on support. HPE will definitely bring its A-game. 

Positive

We use Dell. They are looking at the smaller footprint and simplicity as far as managing the product which is why Allertra is so attractive. 

We haven't deployed the solution yet. That said, just talking to the HPE deployment team and watching the demo, the process seems like it will be very simple. We'll be able to do it in hours instead of days or weeks. 

I'm an integrator. I'll help my clients handle the implementation. 

With a smaller footprint, there will be less power consumption. There will be more effective capacity as well, and less rack space used. 

I've heard the licensing is going to be much, much more streamlined than what they're used to currently. 

The customer is also looking at Hitachi, although it's more complex. Plus, the customer already has a significant HPE footprint. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. From an effective capacity, power, and footprint standpoint, it edges out the incumbent.

On-premises

It runs our corporate and restaurant data center.

It reduces the need for a specialized storage engineer. Uptime has been high, so it has reduced outages or downtime.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. It reduces the need for advanced engineers to do configurations and customization.

It routinely opens tickets on its behalf for support and hardware replacements without our intervention and downtime.

The guarantee of data availability is very important to our organization.

HPE Alletra Storage has significantly helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. We have always used it, but I know from dealing with other storage devices that it significantly reduces the complexity and the time to deploy.

The operating system works well for IOPS. It has got more overhead than we use, so performance has been good. 

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. There is auto ticket generation and auto hardware replacement with support.

There is ease of use for junior admins. We have VMware integrations for data stores, cloning operations of existing data stores, and InfoSight analytics.

I do not have any issues with it. It has been good for us. There are no cons that I see, and that is why we use it.

There are no additional features that I would want to see. 

I have been using this solution since HPE bought Nimble. It has been five years.

It is stable.

It scales fine. We have added shelves on an add-need basis in the past without any issues.

HPE provides good customer service for us. We have never had any issues with response time and resolving problems.

Deployment was very simple and straightforward, performed by junior administrators.

In my view, we have got our return with the ease of use and reduction of technical skill sets. 

It is fairly priced. It is in line with industry standard pricing and cost models.

I evaluated IBM, NetApp, and Dell solutions. I chose HPE in the end because Nimble was a very stable platform that I have used for a long time with great success.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for simplicity, uptime, cost, and InfoSight analytics.

We use the solution for our data center compute. We have three HP ProLiant servers that use it for storage and 40 virtual servers. 

We now have much more storage and the uptime is very good.

The performance is very good. We expanded our storage four-fold over the previous product and managed it within a reasonable price range. 

It's increased performance and uptime. 

Uptime, to us, is very important.

It's helped us reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. There's less management that's necessary overall.

We have lessened the number of storage-related tickets. We don't really have any since we implemented Alletra.

They could be a little more intuitive and user-friendly in terms of management, and it could be easier to find technical documentation. 

I'd like the solution to offer more free training.

I've used the solution for two years.

I've had no issues with stability. It's very good. 

I'm not sure if we'll need to scale. I'm not an expert on scaling; however, we do have the ability to upgrade our system should there be a need. 

Support is good. I had to get a password reset and they were very quick about it. It's better than general HP support. I've had a bad support experience, for example, with Aruba. There were language barriers, and I needed to redo tasks. Alletra's support, however, is very good.

Positive

We used to use Pure Storage. I didn't have to spend too much time managing storage availability. However, I did have to manage it more. With Alletra, I barely have to manage it at all. We switched to Alletra based on cost. The cost to replace Pure Storage would have been similarly-priced to the Alletra 6000-series. It made sense to go with a newer, better product if the price was the same. 

It was very easy, especially with the help of a third-party party. They did most of the setup and some on-site training, which was helpful. We had everything set up with minimal to no downtime. 

We had a third party help set it up. The experience was good. The main problem we had was getting a long time to get the product after purchase based on post-COVID supply chain issues. 

We have witnessed an ROI. It's a cost we have to have regardless of our data center. However, we have additional ROI since we could reuse our Pure Storage as a sandbox/DR solution. 

The pricing is decent. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The only improvements would have been more on training and getting more out of my existing system.

The tool's notable feature is that we don't need to log a case directly with the vendor. The tool has access to all the logs on-premises. This is an on-premises solution. Additionally, we can provision data as thick or thin provisioned. Moreover, it includes data grid duplication and compression features.

We allocate volumes to various clients based on their requirements and requests. This has resolved the problem of bottlenecks for applications requiring a high number of I/O operations, as the storage was previously unable to deliver the necessary throughput due to SAS, NL-SAS, and SATA drives. However, with NVMe drives, a single drive can provide up to thirty thousand IOPS. We can configure rate levels and disk drives according to the client's needs, ensuring no bottlenecks in IOPS.

The cloud-integrated feature allows users to HPE Alletra access from any location, eliminating the need for VPN connections or on-premises access.
It offers high-intensity IOPS for data operations and delivers extremely low latency for disk operations, often within sub-millisecond response times. This ensures minimal latency experienced by databases or applications, resulting in significantly faster read and write operations than other solutions. This is particularly beneficial for scenarios with many users accessing applications simultaneously. For instance, for many users checking results concurrently, the tool ensures optimal performance without latency or slowdown in the application portal.

The cloud-native connectivity feature allows you to deploy your private cloud infrastructure. However, it's important to note that integration with public cloud services is unsupported due to its hybrid channel-based solution, primarily designed for on-premises deployment. It will not give you any bottlenecks and offers the best performance on storage. 

It would be better if there were an option to incorporate the NVMe feature alongside other storage tiers. Currently, the system operates on Autotier but can manually peer and mix different types of drives, such as SAS and SATA drives. 

I have been using the product for 12 years. 

The tool's stability is excellent, providing a hundred percent uptime.

The product is scalable. Approximately 10-15 major customers are utilizing the product, with almost 400 plus servers.

The product's support is good. It is better than Dell EMC. 

The tool is very easy to deploy. It's like a plug-and-play system. You need to plug it in, and it's ready to go. There's no need for extensive configuration or setup. When the engineers from the HPE vendors arrive, they connect the HPE Alletra system, which requires Internet connectivity. After that, the person who registers will receive a signing code. This code must be input during the installation process, along with configuring the management IP.

The solution is expensive and can cost around five lakhs. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.I advise those considering implementing HPE Alletra to thoroughly evaluate your requirements and workload. It is a top choice in the market if you primarily need block-level database storage. However, it's worth considering other options if you have a mix of workloads and require unified storage.

On-premises

We’re using Alletra as our primary data center for critical servers, including web and e-commerce services. It also handles our data and storage servers.

The solution offers faster resolution. The developers have noted how quickly it performs when they configure the application. The snapshots have been helpful as well. In the past, we experienced data corruption and were able to restore the entire volume using the snapshot feature without any data loss.

The solution is five to seven times faster than Nimble Storage and responds quickly to data requests.

The user interface is user-friendly and easy to manage.

The snapshot feature is very similar to that of Nimble Storage.

The solution offers easy management and scalability.

Alletra provides a cloud-like model for managing on-premises storage. I am already using GreenLake, and it has been good. The cloud-like model is decent, although we are not fully on the cloud yet. We have high bandwidth, so we haven't noticed much difference between on-premises and cloud.

It is good for preventing problems before they occur. Everything goes to the cloud, so we receive notifications if there is an issue. If there is a link disconnection or a system issue, I get notified.

The 100% data availability has been important for us. We knew that Alletra was scalable and more stable in terms of storage. We depend on Alletra 100% for our data and need to ensure its availability.

It has helped us reduce time spent on storage provisioning by 25%. For example, if I am creating a new volume, it takes just a few seconds and replicates quickly to the vCenter. The entire process is much faster than other solutions.

Alletra ensures that the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets remains consistent. It is always fast and scalable.

The solution is already quite effective, and I haven’t identified any shortcomings. In the future, it would be helpful to receive text notifications for alerts in addition to the current email notifications.

I've been using the solution for five months.

The stability is great.

The scalability is excellent. 

The customer and tech support are excellent. The technicians are quick to respond, and the overall support has been good. However, there can be a slight delay on weekends compared to business days, usually around five to ten minutes. Despite this, the response remains fairly prompt.

Positive

I've used Storwize by IBM. We also used Nimble. Alletra is a faster application.

The integration was straightforward and easy with vCenter and Nimble Storage's connection management tools. We also utilized the deployment tools from Alletra. We started with a hybrid setup with the goal of transitioning to the cloud. Currently, we are using GreenLake.

The deployment process was excellent. The shipment was prompt, and we had a technician on-site who assisted with the storage racks. Another technician handled the management setup, while I took care of the configurations. The entire process was smooth and hassle-free, with no complications.

We handled the initial setup ourselves. 

We made the right Invesment by choosing Alletra. 

The pricing is reasonable. We got Alletra at a great price, almost the same as Nimble. However, we doubled our storage for nearly the same cost.

Yes, we did. However, we found that Alletra is the best fit for our business.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten. I’ve never experienced a hard disk or hardware failure, which is great.

Hybrid Cloud

Right now, we're using DHCI cloud infrastructure. It's primarily going to be the backbone for our ESX environment between stretched between two data centers.

It's been a cost-reduction and space-reduction asset for us. It uses less storage rack space and therefore, less power. It has less physical connectivity. So far, it's working fine.

The replication between the two sites, the presentation to the ESX environment, and the plugin that allows us to go directly into ESX and not have to manage the storage itself directly are all valuable aspects. It's easy for anybody to use. With 3PAR or any of the others, you have to go into the storage directly.

Right now, it's offered both cost reduction and space reduction. It uses less Storage rack space. Therefore, less power. Less physical connectivity. And so far, it's working fine.

The solution does offer a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. However, I don't use it that way.

It's helped with predicting and preventing problems before they occur. So far, that's been working well.

The plug-in with vCenter and integration into vCenter is spotty at best. The last three upgrades that we've had have been absolute nightmares. That said, we found if we did an upgrade outside of the DHCI infrastructure that it is part of and just did the Alletra upgrade itself, it's better.

For me, the solution has not helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. I've had more tickets open for this than any other system I've ever had.

I've been using the solution since November 2023.

The storage itself has been stable. It's just working. 

The scalability looks pretty good. It's all connected through switches and ICSCI. 

The support guys are on-point. They are next-level. You can talk to them like somebody you've known for years. You don't talk to them tech to tech. It's like talking to a normal human being. 

We previously used 3PAR. The purchase of Alletra was made while I was away.

The deployment has been a challenge. I've had more open tickets with this solution than any other that I've done. The software coding between Nimble and HPE has been a challenge. The backend Python script wasn't as fleshed out as it should have been. 

The ROI will end up being pretty good as we did get a good deal and it is replacing two racks of storage for six years. 

The pricing so far has been pretty good. 

I was looking at Pure Storage and the upgraded version of 3PAR, Primera, and one other option.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. I'm coming from fiber channel. I feel it's a downgrade from ICSCI. Plus, with the backend, they tried to shoehorn Nimble Storage into an HPE product. Transitioning from one company to another is where they are having a problem. However, they are getting better about it. That's where I see the main problem - the transition.