HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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.

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.

My main use case for HPE Alletra Storage is for storage.

HPE Alletra Storage is simple. The features of HPE Alletra Storage have benefited my organization as we have many different business processes. 

HPE GreenLake ops enable me to get assistance from my senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations. We don't need to call; it's point and click.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like experience on-premises for managing data. HPE Alletra Storage manages data at scale for my organization very efficiently.

We're reduced time spent on capacity planning. 

HPE Alletra Storage pricing can be improved. The pricing, licensing, and software have changed.

I have been using the HPE Alletra Storage for six years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very minimal. I have experienced very minimal downtime or crashes.

I evaluate the storage services and technical support as awesome. I would rate my overall storage services and technical support as very easy to call and to get things fixed.

Prior to adopting HPE, I was using another solution to address the same needs, and it was also an HPE solution.

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

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage.

The pricing has recently changed for us.

My advice to another organization that is considering getting HPE Alletra Storage is to be sure of what you're looking for.

We primarily use the solution as block storage for VMware.

For us, the benefits that translate to the organization include less cost, maintenance, and management.

The simplicity of the platform is its most valuable asset. The management is very simple and it's straightforward to use. 

Alletra's performance has been very good. 

The solution provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for data management. It has improved our operations. As things progressed, we've been able to bring more of the HPE stack into GreenLake for management and monitoring. That's been very beneficial. It provides a single point of management. 

Alletra helps prevent and predict issues before they arise. We've had a few cases where, based on the data that they're collecting, we've been able to upgrade based on bugs that exist in our installation.

The guarantee of data availability was important to decision-making. We wanted 100% uptime and availability. Uptime is integral to our 24/7 manufacturing operation. It also minimized the need for standby hardware or data copies without having to accommodate a different solution that doesn't have the same uptime. 

We've increased uptime with Alletra to close to 100%. Although we have had issues previously, we have yet to have any problems with this solution. 

It's helped reduce time spent on storage provisioning by probably at least 75%.

We really haven't had to spend time fine-tuning storage in any way. We just provision and forget about it. The plugins for VMware are also great as we are provisioning VMs. We rarely have to go to the area itself to manage provisioning. 

It has improved storage performance in terms of IOPs by 60% to 70% compared to what we were running on previously.

Alletra has reduced the time spent on storage tickets. We haven't had any issues, performance-wise, and rarely have tickets. 

Technical support from HPE can be hit and miss.

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

The solution is stable, performance-wise. 

The scalability is there. With the models we're using, we have not had to scale up. We are on the small side. Most of our Alletras are anywhere from 42 TB up to 240 TB.

Technical support has been very good. It can be hit and miss. I'm not sure if it is hit or miss or if it is just HPE. It depends on who you get.

Positive

We previously used Nimble. We also used to be on 3PAR.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward. We did not have any issues with deployment. 

We had some help with the initial setup via our reseller. 

While I haven't calculated ROI, we have witnessed a positive impact. 

The pricing and licensing are good. Alletra's pricing model and configuration options are very straightforward. 

We did evaluate other storage vendors, including Pure Storage and one of Dell's newest offerings. However, we've always been an HPE storage customer, and it's always worked well for us. We wanted a platform and company that we were familiar with. We chose to stick with HPE. We didn't want different vendors for different applications. 

I'm an HPE customer.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I've been very happy with the solution.

I primarily use the solution for data storage. In the future, we'll use it for VDI and user profiles. 

We came off of the Pure and moved to Alletra. We're in the migration process of that right now. I haven't spent a lot of time on it yet. 

The installation of the agent that you put on each one of the file servers or host or clients, simplifies the process versus having to go through a process of manually configuring like NPIO and stuff like that for an ISCSI connection.

HPE has been great with some of the questions and the concerns we had coming up. We had an issue where we weren't getting the data deduplication and compression that we thought we were going to have, especially when compared to the Pure. They stepped up and gave us more storage.

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

The guarantee of data availability was an important factor in our decision-making when moving to Alletra. We want to ensure availability is always there. We were able to do an expansion the other day to add extra space, and it went flawlessly without any issues. The data stayed up, with no users complaining.

Alletra has helped reduce time spent with storage provisioning. I could just bring up a new volume and present and format it. It's probably very similar to Pure. 

Alletra improves our storage performance in terms of IOPS.

It has helped reduce the time spent solving storage-related support tickets. The only experience with that so far is during the upgrade to the expansion module, we had an issue where it wouldn't come back up. An automatic ticket was created. It was helpful to have a quick response from somebody higher up, a supervisor, checking in. 

We are a unique case when it comes to data compression. Mostly, everybody has VMware running on it. We're just using it for file storage. While our focus is dealing with compression algorithms, they just haven't focused that much time on that. They are putting their money where their mouth is, however, and helping us with more storage.

Due to their acquisition of Nimble, there are multiple portals. I'm hoping that that gets cleaned up. You still have InfoSight. That's just a traditional place for Nimble, and it was renamed and rebranded for HPE. There's been slow integrations into it, HPE Green Lake, and that web portal. Hopefully, that gets done quickly. It's confusing to know what portal to go to and for what.

There is a weird bug we're seeing. I always end up using the local on-site UI to do everything. As soon as that great one, it takes some time for it to show up in Green Lake or InfoSight. That said, I can see that it will help reduce time spent on storage provisioning.

I've used the solution for three months.

The solution has been rock-solid since we've had it. 

We just added 30TB onto it, and that went smoothly. It sounds like we could even add another if it happened, however, for now, that's enough for us. 

The setup was a little bit funny as we wanted to learn the system and they just wanted to program it. However, the people have been fine and we've been able to resolve issues. For the most part, technical support worked out well. When I get the right guy on the phone, it's great. There is some weird stuff going on with on-site support. They used to farm out on-site to third-party companies. 

Positive

We did previously use Pure. We switched when the contract came due. Everything we have is HPE. Pure was a one-off product. In the grand scheme of products and support, it just didn't make sense to renew.

We bought the solution outright. We aren't leasing the solution or anything. 

The deployment was pretty straightforward. We had scheduled it, and they showed up and helped us rack it. They could have been more clear on their process. They would say that we need a network discovery address, and we'd ask: "in what context?" They wanted an ISCSI discovery address. That probably should've been clarified beforehand and moments like that dragged on a bit. 

We have a TAM through HPE. 

I haven't seen anything faster. Now that we have 3/4 of the company on it, we'll need to start looking at performance metrics. 

I don't have any insights into pricing.

We've always had either Pure or HPE. There really was no other solution to look at.

We've only had the solution for a certain amount of time, and we are not 100% migrated over. I haven't had experience with many of the features just yet.

I'd rate Alletra eight out of ten. The compression may be an issue. I understand the theory of how it works (it compresses in deduplication as it's writing). The one thing I'm not a fan of is that you get compression at write-time, if, in six months, there's a firmware upgrade, and it helps the compression, the only way to get that added benefit of compression would be to write the data again. 

We use it for our primary production storage array as well as its DR capabilities, where we replicate our data over to another Nimble or Alletra.

The resiliency of its array capabilities and the data replication features they have available are the product's most valuable aspects. 

It provides a cloud-like operating model on-prem. It has positively affected operations. The management tools they have available make it easy to provision or add additional space. It's very easy to click through.

It's been a rock-solid system. We've had a couple of drives go down before we're even aware of it and they notify us and send us a replacement.  

It's important to have a data availability guarantee, being a hospital. We need to maintain that patient data. 

The workflows are very automated, for example, if we need something replaced.

We've been able to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning by 30%. It's so easy to provision a data store or a new chunk of disk.

We've improved storage performance. The all-flash system we have is incredibly fast. 

In the perfect world, it would be cheaper. 

I've been using the solution for about five years now. 

The solution is stable and rock-solid. It's been five years. A drive may be going out since it's been so long; however, beyond that, which is expected, we haven't had any issues. 

It's easily scalable. You can build up and out with this kind of storage. 

You can get around five additional shelves, and you're talking hundreds of terabytes of data that you can put on this solution.

Technical support is great. HPE provides some of the best support we've ever dealt with. We do pay for premium support. It's worth every penny. As soon as we have a problem, we open a ticket with them, and they immediately get back to us well within the four hour SLA that we have with them.

Positive

We have a 3PAR that's also an HPE storage array. We also have a Nimble. The 3PAR has been good. However, it's getting older, and it's in need of a change. 

We do use an Azure Cloud. However, it is a very small footprint. 

The experience deploying an Alletra was very good. It was nice and easy. 

We do go through a third party to order the solution; however, my colleague and I were the individuals who actually racked it. 

We have witnessed an ROI in terms of the IOPs. The speed at which we get the data from it is incredibly fast. 

If there was another solution that was evaluated, it would have been before my time at the company.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's rock solid with great support. It's just the price that is the sticking point.

We primarily use the solution for VMware. 

The ease of operation and ease of use are important aspects for us. The throughput of the units itself is really impressive. 

The solution provides cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data. You manage it through the cloud or on-prem as well. It wasn't a drastic change from what we used before, as we used HPE products. It's all NVMe-based. The IOs were through the roof compared to what we were using before. We'd see bursts of up to 17,000 IOPs, whereas before, we saw maybe 5,000.

I've logged into the analytics program, InfoSight, and it's good. With InfoSight, we can get on there and it can give us pointers about if we need more storage, for example, or insights into caching.

The guarantee of data availability was very important when we were deciding on a solution. With HPE's background and the support we knew we were making a smart decision.

We've been able to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. Compared to other HPE products that we've used, we have an ISCSI setup and we were able to build our storage setups very quickly. The simple UI made it so that it's just a few clicks to provision.

With what we've used the solution with right now, I haven't faced any issues. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't had an issue with it yet.

I'm assuming we can just add more drives if we need to. I haven't had to scale. We have two Alletras and they are sized for 100 TBs with current storage (with deduplication and compression) is maybe 50 TBs.

Support is good. I get all the answers I need. Some vendors were able to bring HPE people to answer support questions. I haven't had any issues when dealing with them. 

Of course, support always depends on who you talk to on the other end. Sometimes, with HP, there may be language barriers, and they seem to cycle through tech a lot more. That said, overall, I always get the answers I need. 

Positive

We've used HPE products previously. We also have Pure Storage.

It took nothing really to set it up. It was all online, and we were able to set it up and start using it within about three hours. We had experience with HP products that we used before.

We deployed the solution ourselves. 

We have not witnessed an ROI just yet. It has improved speed and performance overall. 

We did evaluate other options, and we have other storage that we have on-site as well. For what Alletras does, in terms of throughput, the cost is good. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for virtualization storage.

We have different use cases and 30 locations around the country. We use it to either replicate back from site to site or keep our footprint small at the edge.

The deduplication is very good. The array replication and V-wall storage are also really useful. 

We've been able to reduce our footprint. We get 4X on each array times 30.

The cost savings are pretty good. It does allow us to store more than we normally would. 

One of the best benefits I can think of is that the support team is top-tier. We've had a lot of good experiences with support, which I can't say for some other vendors.

It's pretty good at predicting and preventing problems. We can receive notifications on most of our problems, and, if not before, very soon after. Most of our problems are just failures such as power failures. We tend to receive notifications just before or right on time. If we didn't get those notifications our environment would be down.

The guarantee of data availability is very important to us. Data runs everything.

It's helped reduce the time spent on provisioning by over 50%. The way that we use it is mainly through the plugin into vCenter. It makes the provisioning of new data storage infinitely faster.

The solution has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPS. When I started, we had some other vendor arrays that were not as great, moving to Alletra, it's improved. We're a big SQL shop, so we're  running all their secret reports and all that faster. That's always a plus for the business.

Alletra helps reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets.

I'd like to see a smaller chassis in the hybrid arrays. The one they have is a legacy chassis and is a lot bigger than it should be.

I've been using the solution for five years. We were originally Nimble customers. We've used a variety of versions, from the C1000s up to the Alletra 530s.

It's a very stable system. We have no complaints. 

The solution is fully scalable. There's no issue adding additional shelving, and we've had zero downtime. 

Alletra suport is excellent. They are always responsive and knowledgeable, and our issues are resolved in a few hours. I don't dread opening support tickets with them. 

Positive

We have used EMC and NetApp. We moved all storage over to Alletra. We wanted continuity. We have a small team and Alletra has made it easier to train people when using one platform.

We deployed the solution ourselves. It's really easy to set up and the documentation is step by step. Getting it from out of the box to up and functional we can do in 30 minutes or less. 

I don't know what the pricing is.

We haven't recently evaluated other solutions. The transition was already in motion when I took things over. We don't have plans to change.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. It's reliable, has good uptime, and nice features. It doesn't cause me problems.

We primarily use the solution for VM storage, file servers, and things like that. 

We've got around 75 VMs that run on the storage arrays. So the deduplication and features like that allow us to store a lot more on them than if we just did physical drives. 

They are extremely reliable. They just work. The cloud tie-ins alert us if there are any issues well in advance. The auto ticket generation is really useful for us as well.

Deduplication is a big one for us as it reduces our data costs. 

Their service has been really, really phenomenal. We've had drive failures. We had a whole system failure at one point, and within 24 hours they had us back online. 

The ability to duplicate data between systems has been really handy. We've got two data centers, and they handle the cloning of data between sites as well.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. They call it One View. For us, it's more about active monitoring of our on-prem solution and letting us know if there are issues with communication to our VMware environment, hardware issues, drive degradation, and that kind of stuff. That has been how we've utilized it. 

It's been pretty good at predicting problems. Besides the controller failure, everything else we knew was coming before it was a problem.

The guarantee of data available to our organization is important. We're a manufacturing company. If our systems go down, we lose dollars every minute that system's offline. That's why having high availability has been very important for us. 

Alletra helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. We don't really have to manage it very much other than increasing the size of the data storage. We don't really have to manage the system at all. It's very hands-off. We really don't have to do much to manage storage. We may just have to increase the drive size, and we're done. It doesn't really change our workflow a whole lot.

We have improved storage performance. We were using spinning disks in the individual servers prior to Alletra. 

If we have a storage ticket, we usually get someone on the phone within fifteen minutes when we call in and we're able to get a solution going and have parts we need for replacement within two or three hours.

The solution could use more monitoring of their split-brain system controllers. That was the failure we had. One of our controllers failed, and it led to an error in the split-brain module.

If we could have had the failure we had to be handled in real-time and not have to be offline and have parts ordered, it would have been ideal.

I've been using the solution for five and a half years now. 

The solution is really stable. We've only had only one issue in five years, aside from intermittent drive failures. 

The solution is very scalable. We've added drawers to increase storage space, and they scale well beyond our needs. 

Technical support is very good. We have four-hour support, and 99% of our issues are resolved within that timeframe. It's been rock-solid. When we've called in for advanced issues, within ten minutes, they are kicking us up the line to get to the person we need. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution.

The deployment is pretty simple. We haven't had issues with the configuration side. It just works. 

We used a reseller for our deployment. Our experience with them was excellent. 

The pricing and licensing are pretty clear-cut. We have a vendor that we work with that gives us a plain layout. 

We evaluated Pure Storage. Pricing may have been a deciding factor when compared to Alletra. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement.