HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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.

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.

My main use case is that I'm on the technology stack for a rehabilitation company.

The feature of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most is the GreenLake suite one-stop shop. 

It has benefited my organization by allowing us to reduce our licensing costs from VMware from about 170,000 to about 70,000. Our footprint has reduced from 14 hosts to 6 hosts.

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved with greater compatibility of the HPE KVM or VM hypervisor with our other products, which would allow us to migrate off of VMware.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for three months.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very good; we've had it for three months and we haven't had any downtime yet.

It should scale with the growing needs of my organization; we haven't had to grow it yet.

My evaluation of customer service and technical support has been good just on the initial setup; we haven't had to call for support for any reason.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using Dell vSAN, and the biggest reason for changing was that the hardware was getting older and we wanted to reduce licensing costs.

I would describe my experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage as super easy.

Everything worked well during the deployment. The engineer from HPE provided great white-glove service and was able to deploy it easily for us.

We will see an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage. It was just implemented three months ago, so it will take time, but just on licensing costs we expect returns.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of HPE Alletra Storage was good—the whole gamut was impressive pricing.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered mostly Nutanix. HPE just had a greater growth opportunity than Nutanix.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to make the move. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage include Oracle storage, Oracle databases. It provides our Tier 0 main storage for enterprise.

Our main ERP database, an Oracle ERP database, is now around 12 terabytes, and from that, we have seven development copies, which are all snapshots off the production HPE Alletra Storage. These are snapshots off the peer persistence part of HPE Alletra Storage. 

We have two HPE Alletra units and two databases that do peer persistence, and off the standby HPE Alletra, we create our development snapshots, saving us seven times the storage for our development and QA Oracle databases.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most are the ease of management via CLI, as we have written many homegrown scripts that access the CLI to automate our processes to either increase storage, create snapshots, and refresh snapshots. The whole process can be done through automation.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations, and that's actually part of the whole GreenLake system. When we have issues, it's excellent. The engineers have come in to analyze our cases and helped us get through our issues.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce our data management operation expenses. Back in the day, CapEx was always the hard thing to do, and by going through GreenLake, we were able to convert that CapEx expense of buying storage to an OpEx by going with the GreenLake rental of the HPE Alletra. It's reduced data management costs. It's hard to say by how much. We've been with HP for years. 

GreenLake has reduced the time spent on capacity planning. We're charged on usage, and there's more storage than what we need. We don't have to do a five-year plan or stress about running out of space. We only pay the minimal amount or for what we use.

We use seven development database QA and development databases based on snapshots of our production We refresh every about four to six weeks, each of those databases. And that's all done through automation that we've created. It has greatly reduced our need for additional storage space, however, they are allowing us to do the dev and QA on snapshots.

The solution provides a cloud-like management platform, although we don't necessarily use it that way.

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved by adding support for file-based or S3 storage, as we have NetApp as our NAS storage. While NetApp is not our Tier 0 and doesn't provide the high critical speed, integrating such functionality into HPE Alletra would be great.

We've been using HPE Alletra Storage for just about three years.

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

We have expanded usage with HPE Alletra Storage, and even if we are getting rid of some items, somehow our usage continues to go up. I always expect at least a 10% increase in use year over year.

My coworker is currently working with HP engineers to perform a firmware upgrade this weekend on one of the HPE Alletra units, and then in two weeks, we will upgrade the other HPE Alletra. Every time we need to do an upgrade, we contact or have a monthly call with our HPE team, and we set up firmware upgrades for the HPE Alletra. They have always supported us greatly for that.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using the 3PAR.

We often do our own setup, however, coming from a 3PAR, the HPE Alletra was an easy migration, an easy setup, and I expect the same for the new HPE Alletra units with a similar code base that will allow for easy migrations.

I haven't specifically calculated the ROI with HPE Alletra Storage. We've been using HPE storage forever. The storage essentially runs our business and our ERP systems.

My experience with HPE Alletra Storage in terms of pricing, setup, costs, and licensing has been excellent.

We didn't really consider any other solutions before selecting HPE Alletra Storage; we were content transitioning from the 3PAR directly to the HPE Alletra.

My advice to another organization considering HPE Alletra Storage is to enjoy the speed. Once it gets configured, it's not hard to configure, especially if you come from that background; it just sits in place, and you can run with it without having to worry about it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as a ten.

The clients' use case for HPE Alletra Storage is mainly for banks and telco companies, which are mostly the sectors who use this solution.

HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations. One of the strong points of HPE is its friendly UI, which is super easy, and users can have a short tutorial and start working on it.

HPE Alletra Storage provides predictable performance and capacity for applications. This prediction may not be entirely accurate, as it's more about prediction, but it gives insights about the average compression and some statistics on the stored data.

The main benefits people receive from HPE Alletra Storage include saving money, as its price compared to other high-end storage is competitive, and it's easy to manage, with an uptime availability of almost 99.999. While all storage boxes must be available at that level, I haven't encountered any issues with it.

The most valuable features in HPE Alletra Storage that I have found are the compression and deduplication, along with the availability of the storage box. In the last two years, I haven't received any negative feedback about it from customers.

HPE can improve HPE Alletra Storage by adding some features to be available from the offline GUI, especially related to snapshots and taking a snapshot for the whole storage, as some customers need this feature. This feature is available in Dell storage but not in IBM storage and Alletra Storage, and it's available from the Data Lake for snapshotting the whole environment at once.

I have been working with HPE Alletra Storage for almost two years.

It's very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It's easy to scale. I have performed many scale-ups and scale-outs successfully. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage's technical support a nine out of ten. I don't give the full mark for any vendor or any product, as if you're the best, you don't need to improve. Before I joined HPE, I was a customer, and I raised tickets, which were solved easily, and the support representatives were very helpful. This was one of the reasons I joined this company.

Positive

I have worked with other vendors and products before I joined HPE, including IBM Storage, all-flash FS9000, and A9000, and the efficiency is almost the same. It holds up competitively.

The capacity and efficiency of HPE Alletra Storage are good. I am satisfied with HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as it performs deduplication and compression with a good ratio.

The initial setup for HPE Alletra Storage is very simple. If you do the prerequisites correctly, you can complete it in a few minutes. It all revolves around the prerequisites, such as ensuring the ports are opened and the account for the Data Lake is created correctly.

The main competitor in the market for HPE Alletra Storage is Dell Storage, as they are selling at a low price. Dell Storage PowerMax VMAX is a competitor, alongside Dell and IBM storage, though IBM storage might be more competitive.

It is helpful to integrate HPE Alletra Storage with HPE GreenLake, but not all customers have integrated it with HPE GreenLake, as there are some regulations here to connect the storage boxes to the cloud. However, a few customers have integrated it to get all the features available on HPE GreenLake and some statistics and insights. 

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a nine out of ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage include general block storage for backing our VMware environment and for handling all our Microsoft SQL Server storage, as basically all our production workloads are either on the hybrid, the Alletra 5000, or the all-flash, the 6000, depending on their resource needs.

HPE GreenLake AIOps enables us to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations, as it used to be Nimble's InfoSight, which was proactive, automatically opening tickets to inform us about issues, whether it was a code fix or shipping a part. 

Storage is the last thing I ever have to worry about in my environment because I know there's someone looking at it, and if something starts to go wrong, proactively, we're going to get that fixed.

HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operations expenses, as we can do a lot with fewer resources because we don't need to have a full storage team anymore, and we are able to consolidate that back into more general technicians who can take care of that because of the backing of a good support team.

The solution has helped to reduce the time I spend on capacity planning, and specifically, the GreenLake hardware-as-a-service has contributed in that we own outright the 5000 series, while 6000 series is through GreenLake, allowing us to know our fixed CapEx per month for storage, and if we grow beyond the original means, we don't have to do a lift and shift anymore; we'll just grow and scale that cost as needed.

While we haven't personally used the direct access to senior support engineers, the peace of mind knowing that if I have a major production down issue, I can get someone who can fix it as quickly as possible is incredible peace of mind for us.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing our data infrastructures, although I still interact with the SAN in the traditional on-prem way.

HPE Alletra Storage is a really good product, and we've stayed with it for all these years for a reason. 

I assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as good, especially noting the benefits from Alletra's compression and deduplication. Based on some of my workloads that are duplicative, I see around 20 to 30 terabytes of savings from just three or four of our systems.

In our evaluation process, both the cost of the solution and our familiarity with the way that solution worked were what stood out to us as driving factors, with no significant negatives to report.

The best way forward is to continue keeping the product lines within the Alletra brand specialized to what makes them good, ensuring that the features from where 3PAR was good, Nimble was good, and Apollo was good are maintained so that customers who have relied on them can continue to count on their availability.

We have been using HPE for storage since 2010, utilizing Nimble Storage, then continuing through the Nimble acquisition and now the rebranding to HPE Alletra Storage, having bought those appliances from the CS240 all the way now to the 5000 and the 6000.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as fairly unsurpassed; it's an appliance I haven't had a problem with, with only minor bugs here and there that are usually fixed without any real downtime, making it a great product for reliability.

HPE Alletra Storage scales very effectively with the growing needs of our organization, especially through the GreenLake hardware-as-a-service, where we don't have to worry about resource planning because the resources are available or if we do grow beyond what the appliance already has, we know that service will take care of it and grow the appliance for us without needing to forklift upgrade.

My experience with the support we have received has been very good, with no complaints on that side; HPE has maintained the people who built the platform, keeping Nimble's engineering team mostly intact to ensure they know how to drive and support it.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, the big competitor we considered during our last refresh cycle was Pure Storage.

Deployment is usually pretty good. We had a hiccup when we deployed our last SAN. The 6000 that came in, they were transitioning the onboarding to be fully cloud, GreenLake-driven. The problem was we're in a regulated air-gapped environment. So it took us a while to figure out what we needed to open to get that SAN to call home so that then we could then chop off the connection and have it run on correctly again. 

I have seen a return on investment from using HPE Alletra Storage, absolutely.

My experience with the pricing, licensing, and setup cost of HPE Alletra Storage has been that pricing has always been great, especially when compared to some competitors in the field, and we have had no issues with any additional licensing fees related to the products we are using. 

We buy the appliance knowing it will perform how we want, and although there is subscription pricing now, it's similar to before where we are paying a support contract, making it still fundamentally access to the support team.

For the one SAN I'm paying monthly as GreenLake hardware-as-a-service, the total cost of that subscription has a value that far outpaces what it would have taken to buy the same capacity outright.

Historically, with Nimble in the past, we measured everything in IOPS, which enabled us to derive more speed in that traditional storage server application architecture with Nimble than we had with other vendors, and even forward to today, the different product lines align with what we're doing as a very traditional computing concept.

We are not into containerization, we are not public, we are still on-prem, old school architecture. That said Nimble as a platform, or HPE Alletra Storage now, has allowed us to provide that service at a high enough level at a reasonable cost compared to Pure Storage and some of the other vendors.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are to run our private cloud and use it with iSCSI.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I most appreciate are the super fast new NVMe drives, which are amazing. 

With HPE Alletra Storage, we started with the Nimbles, and when we moved up, they became 25 times faster, which shows significant improvement. 

HPE Alletra Storage has definitely reduced our data management operation expenses. We condensed three parts that were full entire racks down to an 8U with the same amount of storage, which is amazing.

GreenLake AIOps enables us to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through a full support escalation. The direct access to senior support engineers is important. 90% of the time we troubleshoot it ourselves because we've been using it for a long time.

The solution has helped reduce the time spent on capacity planning. We use InfoSight to forecast, and it works great. We spend very little time on capacity planning; we monitor the InfoSight and add storage when indicated.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity and efficiency as super simple to set up. It integrates into vCenter, so when deploying data stores, you can do it from one source.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The integration with vCenter means you don't need to log in separately. The cloud-operational model has improved operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by cutting down on time. You have a single pane of glass to manage everything.

One person can monitor and deploy thousands of VMs where it previously required three or four engineers. We set up a secondary cluster for our DR side because we were so confident with it in our production. We run it both on our DR and production side.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, I suggest adding more expansion capabilities. We are currently limited to a certain number of shelves, so extending it to even greater capacity would be beneficial.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for probably about six or seven years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues since I've been using HPE Alletra Storage. We keep on top of the firmware updates and when they reach out saying we should patch it, we follow their recommendations and have never had any issues.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very stable with minimal problems. It's great to have something trustworthy that works consistently.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of our organization immensely. It is super simple. We've added shelves in the previous years and it is very scalable.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as excellent. Every time I've had to reach out, I usually get someone who is very knowledgeable and they resolve our questions fairly quickly.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using another solution to address similar needs. We had previous NetApp, Nimble, and EMC solutions.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as super simple. I've taught several people over the years how to do it, and it takes a couple of hours to get it up and running.

I've seen return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. The management provides significant time savings.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that GreenLake made it super simple and allowed us to utilize only what we needed at the time. They provide a buffer, so when you run out, you're not stuck. When you get into that buffer, they reach out to add more.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered other solutions including EMCs and NetApps. When we started going into compute and working with HPE, we started with the Nimbles. We were very happy with Nimble from the beginning and their support and the way they worked. When HPE bought them, it was a natural choice.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten. I would recommend HPE Alletra Storage as it's an amazing product.

My use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are that it replaced aging, end of life hardware that we had. We have a main one in our headquarters and I also have a secondary in one of our warehouses in Nevada. I'm in New York, it's in Nevada, so we replicate.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage benefit my organization through stability and ease of configuration without having to jump through hoops to spin up a server and add a new datastore or reconfigure it. It's all point and click.

The most valuable features of HPE Alletra Storage that I have found are performance and ease of configuration. It's overall fantastic. 

HPE Alletra Storage has reduced my data management operation expenses. I went from older systems where I was lucky enough to have support on it and it was more expensive, yet now this is cost-effective. HPE Alletra Storage has saved us about 30% to 40%.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped me reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by 100%. It has probably saved me a few hours a week, just from older systems trying to figure out what we have, how far things have increased, and where we need to go.

I assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as great. We get the dedupe and we've saved a ton of space. We didn't have to buy as much, so it's definitely beneficial for that.

HPE Alletra Storage does provide a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure, as we can manage it through Central. The cloud-like operational model of HPE Alletra Storage has been a game changer for our operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management. I can do it from anywhere. Having the ability to do it everywhere with HPE Alletra Storage has meant that it frees me up to do other tasks that I need to do and run my department and get the business moving in a better direction.

HPE Alletra Storage is more simple, easy to use, and straightforward.

HPE Alletra Storage is pretty darn good the way it is, however, in terms of cost, costs are what they are. I don't know what could be done around that. I would like to see the costs of HPE Alletra Storage go down a little bit. Everybody would want that. I would like to see the costs go down overall.

I have installed HPE Alletra Storage for less than a year.

My experience with HPE Alletra Storage support has been great. We actually had an issue about a month and a half ago where the management NIC went offline, and it just required a firmware update and they took care of it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage support as a ten. They're very good.

I was using a different solution prior to HPE Alletra Storage, which I inherited, and it was Lenovo, old, five separate systems connected with Nutanix, running VMware. To say it was a cluster is not in a good way.

The deployment was great. Once HPE set it up, my VAR took over from there and and explained us how to do everything on our own. So it was good. Fantastic.

HPE services came in, unboxed, rack-stacked, set it up, upgraded firmware, and got it going.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. Just by the savings that we've had on daily tasks to do and complete, it's much faster. We've definitely seen ROI.

I did not consider other solutions before using HPE Alletra Storage, as I was tied to HPE.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten out of ten.

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage involve production storage and production data.

The compression is good. I have a huge dataset from other legacy storage, and Alletra helps compress that.

The feature I appreciate most about HPE Alletra Storage is compression. With compression, if I have a huge dataset from legacy storage and I move to HPE Alletra Storage, it takes little storage because of the compression.

The solution has reduced my data management operation expenses by approximately 20%. 

The solution has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by 20-25%.

I would assess HPE Alletra's capacity efficiency as faster and good, with better performance. 

HPE Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-operational model has affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by making the deployment model very quick.

We have access to senior support engineers, although we haven't faced any problems.

I would like to see more compression and more scalability in the next release of HPE Alletra Storage.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for one year, or about 12 months.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very positive until now. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization. I have not expanded usage yet.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations. Direct access to senior support engineers is important. Until now, we haven't faced any problems, but if issues arise, there will be examples of why direct access is important.

I would evaluate customer service or technical support as very good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service a seven. Sometimes we have to go via a partner, which adds some delay.

Positive

We were using HPE before adopting HPE Alletra Storage, however, with a different model. The model we were using was 3PAR. The factor that led me to consider the change was the end of life of the previous model.

The deployment model is very quick. We had no mahor challenge.

I have not seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage yet. We are very new to this.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that pricing is on the higher side; this is a disadvantage that has to be reduced.

I considered no other solutions before adopting HPE Alletra Storage.

What stood out to me about HPE Alletra Storage is HPE itself. I have not encountered anything negative. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall a nine and would advise other organizations to use it.

We deploy HPE Alletra for enteprise clients requiring extreme number of IOs and fast low latency, on-demand storage. The customers who opt for this usually have a larger budget and are not cost-sensitive, in a nutshell.

Alletra has elevated our ability to deliver on our 99.99% uptime for clients, aligning with my experience managing enterprice infrastructure at iOCO especially with the response time during heavy workloads. Seamless Replication, Snapshot Management and data encryption align with my certifications in Veeam and VMware, enabling us to implement disaster recovery and compliance. The management capabilites reduce operation overheads, even surprassing my HPE Synergy and 3PAR Deployments.

From my perspective, the management and upgradeability of the product are valuable. The technology uses NVME for increased storage, latency, high bandwidth, and sub-millisecond response times. Even under stringent usage, customers opt for Alletra for its high performance. We find the way we can replicate, use snapshots, secure data, and manage it very beneficial. The ability for independent management is another advantage.

I would say that maybe the user interface and experience could be improved. There are a few areas where enhancements can be made. One can find everything, but sometimes it requires time to navigate. Over time, I am sure engineers will provide input to categorize customizable features better. Maybe that's the only area that needs a few adjustments. Drawing from my CompTIA and ITIL certification, a more intuitive workflow design would benefit less technical users. 

I have used the solution for four months, but I have been had prior HPE training on it for a bit longer than that.

It runs for five years without fail, and even if a component is not changed immediately, it would still continue running. Obviously, it will give the red light and send alerts, but it remains operational. So, I can say it is extremely resilient.

Effortless scaling due to non-disruptive storage expansion which is a great demonstratable selling point. Evidence for this is the ability to add components and upgrade storage while the storage array is still running. I can just add it to particular groups, RAID groups, or others - similar to HPE Synergly blade deployments i've previously managed.

The customer service has improved dramatically. They are extremely quick to respond. When the problem reaches level one before escalation, logs and XML logs have already been taken and sent over. Within three hours, HPE is calling and providing a call to action or escalating to level two if necessary. The service has improved significantly, especially with the Alletra division of HPE.

Positive

I have worked a lot with HPE 3PAR. My first company of employmnet spearheaded HPE 3PAR deployments as they were the first to bring it into Africa before HP's acquisition, so I was well-versed with 3PAR from the time they used spinning disks to when they offered all-flash storage arrays. 3PAR set the bar on a top level, but Alletra's cloud native acrchitecture and GreenLake's integration have surpassed 3PAR's capabilites, particularly in hybrid cloud flexibility.

I find it straightforward because I have been working with HPE hardware and software since 2011. I have seen how HPE works and the expectations for deployment, and it has been fluid. This has been simple, nothing complicated. Rack and stack are easier over the years. It is extremely easy to install, get your IP addresses and details, and get everything up and running. My previous HPE FlexNetwork and SimpliVity based certifications and knowledge all put together helped gain knowledge to streamlined deployments at this point..

All in-house and Two engineer suffies. I would always deploy solutions with just my other colleague in my team, if need be. We work extremely well together, especially when giving the customer confidence. No more than two engineers are needed on site, to help carry the equipment safely - mirroring my iOCO projects where teamwork ensured rapid, risk-free installations.

It is still too soon to tell as I haven't run the solution for long enough.

Scheduling a Proof of Concept to demonstrate ROI - Will be a well documented way to portray Alletra's performance, justifying its premium cost. My AWS hybrid cloud projects (example: Multi-Region Disaster Recovery) can showcase how Alletra complements modern infrastructures.

I am further certifiying in Pure Storage (FlashArray/FlashBlade) and have deployed Nutanix Hyperconvered Solutions. I have also worked with Dell Products but I find Alletra's performance and the HPE ecosystem integration superior for enterprise-scale environments and i'm not just saying this as I have years of experience with seeing HPE's enterprise product range develop.

I would give them a presentation on the essentials they need to be aware of, and tell them to ask all the questions in detail. I would demonstrate the performance in an actual use-case. If needed, I’d suggest scheduling a proof of concept to justify aligning a budget for this product. I would rate it a nine out of ten because nothing can ever be perfect due to its balance of performance and manageability.