HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

Our main use case for the HPE Alletra Storage is VMs.

The feature of the HPE Alletra Storage I appreciate most is the speed. These features have benefited our organization by providing general data for our customers.

The GreenLake AI Ops enables me to get assistance from the senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations.

The solution has reduced our data management operations expenses; however, I could not provide a specific number since we were offline for a few years.

The solution has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by approximately 80%.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as oversizing everything, so we have never really hit any kind of limit.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-like operational model has affected my operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by making it very easy to navigate and easy to get to everything I need.

There is nothing I can think of offhand to improve HPE Alletra Storage or for additional features that should be included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for probably eight months now, while we have had Nimbles for years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as something we do not want to experience downtime, crashes, or performance issues with.

HPE Alletra Storage scales very with the growing needs of my organization. I have expanded usage, and the process was smooth as we upgraded just to add size.

I would describe my customer service experience with technical support as good. On a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best, I would rate customer service/technical support as a ten. We have a good response time.

Before adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were replicated, which is what we considered to address similar needs.

My experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage was that it was an expansion, not a brand new hire, and it was pretty much the exact same.

I have not seen a tangible return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that I see a price, but that is about it.

We have been an HPE shop, so I have not really seen the need to switch from that when considering other solutions before selecting HPE Alletra Storage.

My advice to another organization that would consider HPE Alletra Storage is that Zerto is probably one of the best, as we do SQL servers and everything. 

For using HPE Alletra Storage overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have two 9K arrays in two different data centers. We primarily use them for VMware and database backends. 

The ease of setup was huge for me, as I'm the only storage admin for our company. The ease of upgrading is great as well. We just recently did an upgrade to it and added a couple of more shelves. 

The simplicity and the ease of having everything in one solution are important for us. With the 9K we run pretty much 90% of our company's data on there. Outside of VDI, VDI, we're using Nimble. We've had the Nimbles for six years now. We're actually looking to replace those here in the next 18 months, and I'm looking at Alletra to do that with. 

With the tie-in through GreenLake, it offers a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. It's helped with deployment and provisioning. With ease of setup and provisioning, it's much simpler than even the 3PAR was. It's helped us speed up.

The guarantee of data availability is important. We have 100% uptime. It was a big deal for us - especially since I'm the only administrator. It seems to imply an ease when it comes to fixing issues, although we haven't had any.

We'd reduced the time spent on storage provisioning. It's 60% to 70% faster than what we're used to. Once we got the base set up, it's easier to go through the provisioning and upgrades. The usability from an administrator standpoint is just so much faster. 

Alletra itself seems really solid. We had a good base with 3PAR, which we're replacing Alletra right now. However, the integration with DCCS could still use some work. It's in its infancy and needs more features. 

I've been using the solution for about a year and half.

The stability, so far, has been good. I haven't had any issues or downtime. I've never needed to call support.

It's very user-friendly in terms of scaling. When we added shelves, the install took no time at all. Adding servers or storage to two servers is very easy. It's much easier than the 3PAR was. The interface has just been spectacular. 

Alletra customer support has been really good. They are speedy and really knowledgeable. HPE support overall is fair. I do a lot of calls for compute and storage. In some other areas, it is hit or miss. Alletra support is excellent. 

Neutral

We are replacing 3PAR with Alletra. We knew we wanted to stick with HPE. We also had some older Dells that we replaced with this. 

The deployment is very easy.

We have witnessed an ROI, however I do not have specific KPIs.

I have a great team at HPE that helped me out with sales and engineering. The pricing was very good, especially when we were figuring out bundles. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are strictly for block storage, with no SMB, no NFS, no SAN replication, snapshots, or anything; it's strictly block.

One example of how the features of HPE Alletra Storage benefited my organization is the Nimble reliability. We had a single hard drive failure with all the other units we had, and we got a notification saying, 'Hey, we've detected a hard drive failure. Parts coming out.' It arrived the next day, and it was good.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I most prefer are its speed, as we were having issues with some of our VMs running into wait time on the older all-flash unit, and moving to the new Alletra's fixed the issue with no tweaking, no tuning, and it's awesome—basically set and forget, as Nimble has always been.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization, eliminating the planning for growth since it tells me, 'You have this amount of capacity, this is your deduplication, we estimate you could throw on this many VMs or this amount of storage.' I just sign into the stats page and see what I can do.

Regarding capacity planning, HPE Alletra Storage has helped us. We used the calculator on the website to figure out what we would need, and when we started moving over the VMs, we were surprised with more caching and deduplication than we had on the other units, so now we don't have to think about capacity.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as good. It was only half-populated when we purchased it, allowing us to buy additional disks and slide them into place as we've done with the Nimble's in the past.

Our usage of HPE Alletra Storage is unique. We just use it as two standalone units for block storage, without replication or a metro cluster. I wouldn't say HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operations expenses since we spec'd it out with the size we needed and with the projected growth.

HPE Alletra Storage offers a cloud-operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure through GreenLake, as the web interface provides access to the GUI, which features the same interface as the rest of the HPE website.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, a couple of things could be addressed. This is more on the support side, as the initial cost is for a very large company. Especially for smaller companies, it would be nice if there were more disk add-ons or incentives, such as 'If you buy our system with our forever warranty, you get new controllers every three years.'

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage since it was still Nimble before HPE bought them, and we went through the CS100, 300, the hybrid flash, the all-flash, and then the Alletra, which we got last year around March.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as good. It works just as the Nimble's have, and we haven't had any issues; it's basically set it and forget it.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as good. We ran into a small issue with some licenses that came through email not working for whatever reason, and we had to get a couple of different technical people involved who were confused and just regenerated new licenses, which fixed the issue.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using the Nimbles and we also had some older 3PAR equipment still floating around.

My experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage was pretty simple. I basically unboxed it, put the rails in, slid it in, and turned it on. It couldn't have been any easier, and I was happy, seeing no improvements needed.

I wouldn't say we have seen an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage as we purchased it knowing what we were going to get, so it's just there, and we use it.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage, we talked about the pricing earlier, so it would be nice if there were incentives to use. 

When we purchased everything, it came with the GreenLake support and add-ons, which seemed okay. It was around $1,000 on the bill, and while that doesn't account for much when you're buying something for $60,000, it could be better with credits or something for the support person running after it—even if it's not monetary, it could be 'Get one of our HPE shirts.'

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered Pure heavily. The only reason HPE won over Pure was that HPE had the GreenLake integration and was still rolling out the Gen11s and Gen12s, promising more features to come. Pure was substantially cheaper and significantly faster than HPE Alletra Storage.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to go with it if you have other HPE hardware as it integrates so seamlessly. If you don't, I would suggest Pure, as Pure is still faster when put up against the Nimble; they offer better incentives, but since we have HPE everything, it was just better to stay in the same ecosystem.

I rate HPE Alletra Storage eight out of ten.

We use it for general-purpose virtualization and workloads - everything from SQL servers to web servers and everything in between.

The key part is reliability, and, by being simple to operate, uncomplicated, I don't have to have a massive team of people to support it. I've managed to reduce my headcounts or reallocate the headcount to other purposes.

The ease of use and ease of installation are great. It requires very little maintenance once it's up and running.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing the infrastructure. The easy-to-use makes day-to-day management easy. 

I don't need to send people to week-long training courses. They don't have to be specialists. I can put a generalist onto it, and they can pick it up within a few days with very little supervision. It's making my life easier.

It's always been very good at predicting problems and preventing them. It's based on the Nimble Storage technology, which I have had before. I've always been very happy with that. It logs cases to preempt issues when failures come along. And sometimes I've even been shipped to parts before I know parts have failed. I can't really ask so much more. 

The guarantee of data availability to our organization helped encourage the decision to go with Alletra. This aspect is crucial. We're a financial services company. Data is very important to us. If we lose a customer's record or it gets corrupted, we are potentially fined by the regulator for that loss of information. Reducing or removing liability is critical.

Alletra has helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning in a way. There used to be two teams dealing with it. It's moved into the general virtualization space. One team now looks at it rather than having a separate storage team looking after it. In that sense, it's saved us time.

Alletra has helped us reduce time spent on storage provisioning. It's not going from team to team. It's a single process, and it's baked in. Automation can be kicked into the whole process of provisioning a virtual machine. My workloads are all virtualized. It's now a simple click for me. The script runs and then it provisions the storage, allocates the virtual machine, and powers it on.

The solution has helped us with the storage performance in terms of IOPS. We've stopped having calls about peaks and workload stress. I just don't get those calls now. We no longer need to measure out IOPs now since we no longer get calls. 

Alletra has helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets by about 40%.

Apart from the obvious improvement of making it cheaper, I'm pretty happy with it. Some of the upgrades can take a while to come through. The release cadence of versions is a little bit slow. That said, it fits the build for my workload.

I'd like the pricing to be better for renewals. It would be ideal if they could co-term together. If I buy the base unit, then I upgrade something, and then I buy an additional shelf, they all have different life expectancies and warranties. Instead, when I upgrade, I'd like to co-term everything together at the time of upgrade so that everything aligns over time. This would be better than having multiple renewal points in the future. 

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The stability is rock-solid. 

The scalability has some limitations. You have to be careful that you get the right control ahead of time. Some of the lower mid-end do have a limited number of shells you can add on. It would be nice at that lower end to do the maximum number of shelves as well. That said, I understand it all comes down to economics at the end of the day. 

Technical support has always been brilliant. Thanks to the in-built reports, they get all the metrics. They get all the logs. Half the time, they are telling them what the problem is. It's always nice to have a more proactive experience on the support level.

I've only had a couple of problems in terms of having to spend, maybe, five minutes on hold once with technical support.

The support has slowed a little bit in terms of response times since HPE took over. However, they're selling many more units to a much wider variety of customers. It's still the same support experience. I don't have to send logs in. They've already got the logs. It's already been analyzed. Half the time, I rang up, and the person said, "I'm already looking at the logs. I found the problem." And I haven't even been able to start to explain who I am.

Positive

I've used Nimble in the past. Prior to that, it was EMC which had moved to Dell. EMC wasn't fit for purpose and was due for replacement, so we took the opportunity to move to a different platform. 

I've moved away from a complicated fiber channel network that required a storage team to do meta-LANs, LANs, worldwide zoning, and all that sort of thing to just being an ISCSI-based solution, which the virtualization team could work within their workload.

The setup was very easy. We did the initial array with the support and then after that, we installed every other array ourselves. We don't we don't use support services at all.

We will be moving to Green Lake, hopefully, sometime next year, and updating the existing units into Green Lake along. It's part of a much larger deal we're doing to try and transition from Capex to a more Opex model through Green Lake. We use Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Clouds. 

Deploying was very easy. The box gets shipped. It went to the racks very easily with no problems at all, and I was up and running within half an hour. So there's minimal cabling required, and minimal everything is required. You just need a direct connection to a laptop, and you can set it up. The setup installation is designed to be simple.

We did not use any outside assistance. 

The ROI has been good. It's increased operational efficiency. It's increased uptime and it's reduced operational overheads.

Pricing was more about deciding the solution and having the procurement team deal with costs. I don't have any visibility on pricing. 

Licensing is not an issue, as everything's been baked in. There are no separate licenses to add on. Unlike other providers, where you get the base model and then you add licenses on top, everything's included. I don't have to worry about licensing with Alletra.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It meets my operational workload in terms of internal support. Prices are always going be the tricky as, obviously, I'd always always like it cheaper. The support model is excellent and upgrades are available. 

Alletra is used for our SAP environment, strictly. We needed a high level of performance.

We were on our SAP environment on a 3PAR, and we moved over to Alletra. When we got all the data moved over to the Alletra, the deduplication was so much better. Our space usage was so much better on this product, and we actually saw a better performance.

I've always said I love that it's easy to use. At one point in time, we had a 3PAR. And with 3PAR, I always thought it was a little more difficult. There was so much more to maintaining it, setting it up, and everything. With the [HPE] Alletra [Storage], it's just easy. It's easy to provision space to use and to set up.

InfoSight is invaluable to me. With it, I can just quickly go out there and see what is going on.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operation model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. 

[HPE] Alletra [Storage] is very good for predicting problems and preventing them before they occur. InfoSight has really helped with that. I honestly don't have to look at it much. However, there's the alerting and everything that will tell us what's going on. That said, I check InfoSight every once in a while. 

[HPE Alletra Storage] reduced the time spent on storage provision. It's so much easier than the 3PAR. It's just so much easier. I don't spend time in there at all. 

The product improved our storage performance experience in terms of IOPS. Our end users that use the SAP environment were a little concerned at first. We said we were going to switch over from the 3PAR to the Alletra since they've always been more familiar with the 3PAR. However, when we moved them over, they noticed a performance increase. 

I cannot think of a specific area that needs improvement. 

I've used the solution for probably just a year. That said, I've been with Nimble for many years, so I am very familiar with the product itself. 

Technical support is excellent. If I have an issue like a hard drive failure, and I've only had one or two, or if I just wasn't sure how something was working, I'd call into support. It was always phenomenal.

The deployment experience was really good.

My previous experience was more with the Nimble iSCSI within our VMware environment. This one was just setting up the fiber channel switch for us and doing that stuff.

We worked with a vendor. They came in and set up. We did a fiber channel on this one, and they came in and set everything up for us. We even had a little training session. 

We have seen ROI in time spent and money savings. 3PAR cost more and we had to do more maintenance. We used to have to do more maintenance with the 3PAR and when we would do upgrades, we always had to engage HPE at the time to do the upgrade. I would just sit there and wait while they did it, and it took hours. With With [HPE] Alletra [Storage], it downloads the software, and you just hit the button, and go.

The price is great. If you come from a 3PAR world to an Alletra, it's great. The vendor that we use was phenomenal in getting us great pricing.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's just so much easier to use than any of the other storage environments I've had. It's been more dependable. I've had Dell, which was awful. It's not easy to use. With anything that happens, you have to spend so much more time researching. From the get-go, it's been a great product. I've always loved it. 

If anyone was looking into the Alletra I'd tell them to 100% get it since it is so much easier to use.

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are our data center, internal use, and also for our warehouse automation system in our customer warehouses to automate their operations. This is growing as we're at about 40 warehouses today, and we'll be at 100.

One example of how HPE Alletra Storage features benefited our organization is by addressing technical debt. We've only been a startup for about three years and in the process, we replaced older technology, specifically Cisco HyperFlex, and from a cost basis, Synergy has stepped in and been cost-effective.

The features I find most valuable about HPE Alletra Storage are the throughput and the visibility it provides because we have different workloads, and the flexibility we're looking at, being able to operate on a single platform.

I'm going to skip discussing how HPE Alletra Storage can be improved as I'm not in the technology area right now and haven't paid attention to that.

I've been using HPE Alletra Storage for approximately six months.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as having had no issues so far. It has been stable and we haven't experienced any problems during the last three months since the actual productive load has been on it.

HPE Alletra Storage scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization, and I don't see limitations or complexity for growth at the moment, as it has been selected among the top players.

Regarding customer service and technical support, we haven't had many direct interactions, but we do have calls with HPE, and they have been fairly responsive. I can't speak specifically to customer service and technical support since I haven't engaged with them directly for HPE Alletra Storage, but HPE in general has been responsive and our engagement has been positive.

Before adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using Cisco HyperFlex and Pure Storage for similar needs.

I would describe my experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage as seamless.

We have great engineers who handled the analysis and evaluation, making production deployment a straightforward process.

Regarding ROI with HPE Alletra Storage, there is some level of return if more hosts are being hosted on the same platform since it reduces power consumption and the footprint is lower.

I didn't oversee the pricing, setup costs, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage, however, the HPE partnership has been phenomenal and we appreciated their support during deployment, including evaluating the hardware.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we considered cloud solutions to put all VMs into the cloud as other hardware options such as Pure and Cisco HyperFlex. We selected HPE Alletra Storage for its benefits, performance, and the partnership with HPE. 

In my considerations for changing solutions, key factors included performance, cost, and HPE's partnership with us, as the persistence of the HPE customer manager ensured our leadership made informed decisions during the evaluation.

For other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage, a lot is driven by HPE's reliability and the importance of the partnership and people behind the hardware. On a scale of one to ten, I would give HPE Alletra Storage around a seven.

We use it to connect to our Synergy chassis as Storage. On the chassis, there are 12 blades running Hyper V. We put those in failover clusters - two clusters per Synergy chassis. Alletra is the storage where the virtual machines are stored in those failover clusters, Hyper V clusters.

It's simple to use and deploy, unlike its predecessor, which was a 3PAR system. I like 3PAR, but it is overkill and extremely complicated to manage.

The simplicity of use is great. You define the storage size and space that you need, the volumes, and then you give access to the clusters or to the host, the Hyper V blade servers. From there, I can build all the virtual machines that I need on Alletra.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managed use data infrastructure. Although we use everything on-prem, we do have some cloud-based storage with Microsoft Azure. We are doing a lot of stuff in Azure, although personally, I stay away from that. I'm the hardware guy, and prefer on-prem solutions.

Cloud-based is so much more expensive.  The on-prem stuff is cheaper; Microsoft charges us through the nose for Azure.

We have redundancy built into our products and Alletra through the Hyper V clusters. There is a lot of redundancy built in, so we never have downtime. \

It's easy to configure and provision. 

It's helped us reduce the time spent resolving storage by 50%. The cost vs convenience is very good.

Previously, the 3PAR gave us the ability to build on SSC or spindles. The Alletra doesn't allow for this. You can put spindles and you can put SSDs, but the operating system decides what goes where. If I could build a volume that was SSD only for some of the things like our databases, our Microsoft databases, which require a lot of IO and a lot of speed, that would be ideal. The 3PAR was better at that.

I've been using the solution for as long as it's been available - for about two years now. We used to use Nimble.

We've got several of these products running with no issues. 

Scalability is pretty good. 

We run them with the main head unit, which has 24 or so drives on it, and then we add the subunit, a secondary chassis, which has one more drive. The top one has 24 drives and the bottom one has 25. We get to choose whether they're SSD or spindles, and we use a mixture of both.

We carry five-year extended contracts with HP on all of our equipment. Support is pretty good.I dial their number and go through things with them, and overall, it works out well. 

Positive

The installation is straightforward. I help our reseller manage the deployment. 

Our reseller physically does the installation. I'm always present, giving them the IP addresses and access to our data center. 

I'm a field engineer. I install what is given to me. I know little about the cost. That said, my understanding is that it is considerably cheaper to go with Alletra. The pricing is cheaper, the setup is easier, and the licensing is likely the same

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It does what we need it to do, and it is more than enough. Plus, it's easy to set up and maintain. 

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.