HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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. 

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. 

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are for warehouses.

It benefits my organization by reducing management needs. 

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most involve less management. The benefit of HPE Alletra Storage is that it doesn't need much management. 

HPE Alletra Storage is effective since it automatically has deduplication, requiring less management, and requires minimal effort; after purchase, it automatically provides deduplication, compression, and related functionality.

It helps reduce data management operation expenses. I manage 30 remotely and it's easy to manage now.

We can reduce time spent on capacity planning.

The capacity efficiency is pretty good. There's less management. You don't have to do anything. 

We get cloud-like management on-prem.

I'm not sure how the solution could be improved. I'm not looking for new features. It's doing the job.

The only challenge was having to register with GreenLake, even though we weren't using it. Some places didn't have access to the internet - and if you don't have access to the internet, how can you register? If you can't register, you can't create data storage. This was one of the big drawbacks.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about three years.

HPE Alletra Storage has been stable and reliable. I've never had any issues or crashes; it continues doing its work.

We have more than we need. In a couple of places, we had to add another shelf and that was very plug-and-play.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as excellent. 

HPE Alletra has much better service than 3PAR and others. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support at a ten. When you call, you don't have to go from person to person. With 3PAR and others, you call and they direct you to another person, then level one, level two, level three, which can be frustrating. With HPE Alletra or Nimble, the person who answers your call can handle level one, level two, and level three support; they can do anything.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using HPE MSA to address similar needs. We also used Nimble. We wanted better performance and scalability.

My experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage is that it's really easy. It's a one-click process and not difficult to configure. 

There was a simple configuration process; there is not much to do as it's an easy setup. 

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

I didn't purchase the solution; I don't have pricing experience. 

I used to have EMC, however, then we used Nimble for smaller places, which was awesome. These were the other solutions I considered before selecting HPE Alletra Storage. 

The positive standout in my evaluation process when comparing these options was that HPE Alletra Storage requires very little work and is easily manageable remotely. I am not aware of any drawbacks of any of the solutions.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage would be to make it more efficient, make it easier to manage, make it more reliable, and have better service. 

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

We primarily use the solution for workloads in healthcare. 

The sizing is very good. We have new applications and new workloads and we have found the performance is very good.

The ability to use different workloads and different data is useful. It offers a good way to treat our data while guaranteeing high performance. We have 1 PB of data.

It offers a cloud-like operational model on-prem. Healthcare data is complicated, especially for data in the cloud. 

It's good at predicting and preventing problems. 

Guaranteed data availability is very important for us in health care. Having that guarantee of availability to us was integral to choosing this solution.

Alletra has helped us reduce time spent on storage. We've witnessed a 120X improvement in performance.

It's improved storage performance in terms of IOPS. It depends. If we compare it with other solutions, the performance is 2X better.

Alletra has helped us reduce storage-related tickets by 2X.

We have more than traditional use cases. If they could explore new configurations for data storage, it would be ideal. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability is very good. It's better than other solutions. 

We have just started a project to scale the solution as we need more capacity. For the moment, the scalability is good. What you need to do in order to expand is very clear. 

HPE support is very good. We have a decent relationship with them. All of our questions get answered in a short time and the communication is very good. 

Positive

We previously used some solutions from IBM. We needed to change solutions and we decided to go with Alletra. 

The deployment was very easy. All of the documentation and instructions are very clear. 

We did have the help of an integrator. 

We have witnessed an ROI. In healthcare, people use a lot of Alletra. For us, it's easy to share the application. 

Licensing is expensive at the moment. Maybe they will lower it as more and more people begin to use Alletra. 

We did evaluate other vendors, including Pure Storage. Alletra was good for integration. Also, people who have worked with applications in healthcare know Alletra and have confidence in the product.

We are customers and end users.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use Alletra for virtualization.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the 100% uptime guarantee. The guarantee of data availability to our organization was one of the top priorities. Our business is 24/7/365 high transaction rates and it was very important that the storage was always available

Its ease of administration is great. It's really simple to maintain.

The firmware updates on it are non-disruptive, which is amazing. Most people say they are nondisruptive; Alletra actually is not disruptive. 

The IO performance has met our expectations and exceeded them. 

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managed data infrastructure. We rarely use it, but it does. We know that can do the infrastructure as code administration through the cloud APIs. We just haven't yet, so we haven't leveraged that much.

Alletra is helpful for predicting problems and preventing them before they occur - although we have had virtually zero problems with it. When we have, it has called support for us. That's been pretty good.

Alletra has helped us to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning by at least 50%. The use of application groups means that we just have to tell it how big we want our next provisioning slice to be, and the rest just happens. 

The solution has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs, probably by at least 300%. It's helped reduce the time spent resolving related support tickets as well. So far, we have opened two support tickets versus the approximately 40 tickets we had to open for the old storage. 

Long-distance, high-latency replication enhancements would be delightful to see in future versions.

I've used the solution for two and a half years now.

The stability is incredible. We haven't had a single storage event since we put it into production.

Scalability is great. The devices they sent us still have tons of room to grow. All we have to do is add a disk, and then the rest of it happens.

Overall, support is very good. We recently moved to GreenLake managed services. I only see tickets now when they've identified a problem and that comes with a list of how they're going to fix it. For the most part, it's hands-off for me right now, which is awesome. The only issue is they haven't quite figured out our internal structure yet, so sometimes they reach out to the wrong person. They just need to put their process documents in order. It's no big deal. 

Positive

We had an HPE solution previously, an older 3PAR storage array. It was old and not as good, which is why I switched.

In terms of deployment, we're an almost strictly private cloud, and it's all happening under the VMware Umbrella right now.

The deployment was actually a bit of a pain. It seems that we were running a slightly older version of VMware, and it didn't like talking to the Alletra models at first. We were having a lot of storage disconnects. Luckily, we hadn't put it into production before it got resolved. However, we couldn't get HPE and VMware on the same page about it. 

Eventually, we just upgraded our version of VMware and all the problems went away. That was probably a month's worth of engaging with both parties and trying to find a solution. We just gave up, upgraded, and the problem went away. 

We did have a reseller that was involved that we deal with fairly closely. They've been very good to us. They know their stuff pretty well, and they're always willing to throw down when we need them.

We don't have a lot of metrics in terms of ROI. The ROI to me is the amount of time I spend managing the device. It's very low compared to the old solution. 

The licensing and setup costs were very simple. We used the GreenLake purchasing model (the OpEx purchasing model). It all came as one bundle.

We evaluated HPE's Primera. We didn't really look outside of HPE. The Primary pro for Alletra was that it was an all-in NVMe storage array, and we were looking for maximum IOPS.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. Of all the storage platforms I've had over the years, this one has caused me the least amount of grief overall. The metrics coming out of it really do help me identify if we are having any IO problems. The only thing is we haven't had any, so I just look at a bunch of green bars that say, "you're good!"

I use the solution for cheap and deep tier-two VMware storage. I use it for smaller SQL databases as well. 

Since we've implemented the solution, we've had zero downtime on the arrays. We get high-quality replication and a quality product overall. 

I like InfoSight and now the new GreenLake management platform to help me manage all my arrays in one location. 

The product provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. While I haven't used the on-prem cloud model myself, I've heard it's good. 

It's good at preventing problems. The support is really good. They actually fix 90% of errors and remotely fix them. They get there first and log in and I am told before I know there's a failed drive.

It has reduced time spent on storage provisioning. I give VMware admins access to provision their own data storage. 

Alletra has improved storage performance for IOPs. I've been using the hybrids and get really good IOPs performance out of the hybrid models. It's even comparable to the Pure X50 systems.

It's helped us reduce the time spent on storage-related support tickets. We rarely have tickets now. We've reduced them by 70% or so.

It could use improvement in correctly identifying and naming the systems. The solution keeps changing the names of everything. It's been hard to track.

I've been using the solution for five years. 

The stability is very good. It's very stable. I'd like to have a more of a hands-off support solution - an HP technician replace option. 

Customer support is very good. 

We were a Nimble customer previously.

The deployment and implementation were very easy. It went really fast.

We have witnessed an ROI. Our ROI is down to two years on the purchase.

The pricing is okay. There's not really a smaller-scale model for mid-tier and upper capacities. That said, the pricing is comparable to everyone else.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It would be a ten out of ten if they could do block and file on the same system.

I added two shelves to the two Cisco systems and it's running well.

The management costs are very low. That's a big benefit for us.

They've been great. I have no issues with them.

Provisioning works and is very simple. It's easy to use. 

Setting up snapshots is very easy, and replication between the two systems is easy as well.

The solution provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. I just use it for day-to-day management tasks. Other than that, I don't do provisioning or anything like that. I use the native interface for that.

I keep it pretty up-to-date so I don't have to really worry about any issues. I had a couple of failed drives and they went as planned. It was no big deal.

The solution helped to reduce the time spent on storage for messaging. That said, I don't have too much to compare it to.

Its performance is very good - especially when I added a second shelf to the system. It spreads the data out over more spindles and also more solid-state drives.

They have a new update coming out that I'm going to be using as far as lack of snapshots. I'm going to put that into place as soon as I upgrade to the new version.

I've been using the solution for probably 12 months now. 

It's stable. I've had no issues so far.

It's easy to scale. I just added two new shelves to the systems, and it was straightforward. 

I've never had to call technical support. I've had two failed drives, and they had automated tickets set up with the driver arriving four hours later. 

I've been an HP customer for a long time. I've been happy with their support and reliability.

I've previously used Trinti. However, it is no longer a company.

The deployment was pretty simple. I figured out how to provide or provision the storage and set up replication, and I was done quickly.

The pricing and licensing are streamlined. I didn't have any issues. 

I did look at NetApp, among other solutions. I decided on Alletra based on its interface, ease of use, and the time I didn't need to spend worrying about it.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's simple to use and we haven't had any technical issues.

We are using HPE Alletra Storage as a block storage to our virtualization environment, in the central data center and in the hospital data centers too.

It is much easier to manage HPE Alletra Storage systems compared to the storages before, such as the 3PAR storage. Previously, virtual machines needed to be running to manage this. With HPE Alletra Storage, it's cloud integrated, so it's easier to make it up and running. In the healthcare sector, we have just a few engineers, so the human capacity is under the normal or wanted level, and with these automated technologies, these integrated features of HPE Alletra Storage help us to integrate the new systems to our systems.

HPE Alletra Storage has made it much easier to operate this system compared to before, which has reduced our data management operation expenses. HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent on capacity planning, but we often use system integrators to help us with the capacity planning and the newest technologies make it easier. We have a lot of data in healthcare, so HPE Alletra Storage helps us to reduce the cost by facilitating the management of duplications.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data operations, such as deployment, provisioning, and data management. I'm currently planning to deploy private cloud-like operations to the hospitals because they don't have engineers, storage engineers, compute engineers, virtualization engineers, and with this cloud technology, the operational aspects could be much easier.

HPE Alletra Storage is absolutely stable and reliable.

HPE Alletra Storage does scale with our growing needs. Currently, there is no plan to expand the usage of HPE Alletra Storage; it's enough for the current deployment.

We have no problems with the customer support for HPE Alletra Storage. We always can reach the Hungarian support team, and if needed, they can ask for help from other engineers, so it's fast and effective.

When we adopted HPE Alletra Storage, we were using another solution similar. We were using 3PAR, and we are changing our 3PAR storages to HPE Alletra Storage.

In hospitals, we're using Dell solutions for storage, and we have HPE solutions. If a hospital is using Dell infrastructures, we try to upgrade it to a homogeneous platform, so we're planning with Dell. But in our central data centers, we are using HPE solutions, and there were no other solutions we found that could be better for us, so we are thinking about HPE technologies.

The management capabilities of the storage system might be the most preferred feature of HPE Alletra Storage. We have not used the AI features of HPE GreenLake AIOps yet, but we are planning to use it and implement it in the operational part. I don't have the numbers to quantify how much HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operation expenses. I'm not up to date with topics regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage. However, I have no problems with it, as our HPE contact can answer all of the questions we have. On a scale of 1-10, I rate HPE Alletra Storage a 10.

We are running different types of workloads on HPE Alletra Storage, and it provides us with good performance.

We purpose-built it for a specific requirement, consuming features like encryption and deduplication between sites. It offers good deduplication ratios, comparing well with Pure Storage. HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations, integrating with vCenter. Many modern storages provide a unified view, which we utilize. Overall, it has streamlined our analysis process, thanks to automation and reporting features.

We recently started consuming HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE Alletra Storage provides predictable performance and capacity.

We have not faced any scalability issues with HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE technical support is good, with no complaints so far.

We already had Pure Storage and replaced Nimble Storage, leading us to adopt HPE Alletra Storage for the upgrade.

The initial setup was straightforward, taking about two and a half weeks from data center configuration to full provisioning and testing.

Our internal team handled the deployment. The backend physical setup was simpler, while the process took time for completion.

I will know more about ROI in a couple of months as we recently commissioned the storage. So far, it is breaking even with our investment plans.

I cannot quantify the cost reduction yet, but modern storages come with many features that benefit customers.

The consideration was an upgrade from Nimble, and so we evaluated HPE Alletra Storage.

I rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight or nine. I would like to see further support for features like ransomware protection. Exploring Alletra MP in the future could be beneficial. The current interface is satisfactory.

It is for dHCI, which is the hyper-converged infrastructure for HPE. It is replacing the tradition where when you have node storage, you have to purchase a model of switches. It combines the compute and storage.

Its benefits vary because I have used many models. I see it now handling VDI. Previously, when I had VDI and I put HPE for it, I would always go for Simplivity, whereas now, with the new model and GreenLake, they have attached Alletra to the cloud. It is serving people working from home a lot. They do not need to log in to do VPN anymore, create volumes, and manage their backups. If they have a full system for virtual storage, and they have Zerto for application replication, they can manage everything on the cloud. Zerto can also be managed on the cloud. If you have a stack, it does not matter how many systems you have. They all are going to show up in one interface. This is a huge benefit. Anything living in the storage can be monitored through the cloud.

HPE Alletra Storage has different models to cover SMBs, midsize companies, and enterprises. Enterprise companies with modern compute, CPU, and memory can have more virtual machines. It is easy for Alletra to grow and expand with the shelves. Customers are happy with it. Only one time I upgraded Alletra from 6010 to 6030 to add more storage and change the controllers. Customers are happy with Alletra. They do not complain. I never see them complain.

It is the simplicity of the deployment. They have unified all the features they have. For example, the creation and management of the storage was previously done through the plugins but with limited features. It was slow and had some challenges, whereas now, they have modern plug-ins that have more features and simulate the interface for the storage. Customers love it. The thing that they love the most about the plug-in is the one-click upgrade. They do not need to go to each device.

There can be more visibility and statistics for the customers to see. The customers would love to see AI. Even if it is not AI, there can be more visibility and real-time statistics that IT people can monitor and show to their bosses and impress them. To monitor things, they have reports, but the report system is old. Reports are by email. If they can show monthly growth and advise on the usage, it will make the lives of customers and IT people easy. They are going to love it. They would like to have one tool that can take them everywhere. There should be a single pane of glass. If they sit in a meeting, they should be able to answer questions related to whether they need more storage. They should not have had to go to different portals to get results, which creates confusion. If they have one place where they can see everything in graphics, it will be great.

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage for three years.

I have been working with HPE for six years. When I do an upgrade, I can see the Nimble that I installed for the customer five years ago as it is. No one touched it.

They continue to do a good job. I did not reach the max for anything. Every time I add a shelf for the customer, it takes 15 minutes. You just add a shelf, put the SaaS, and you are good to go.

Their support works very well. You can just grab the phone and reach out to their support. Their support answers you immediately. This is a big deal for the customers. 

I do deployment as well. Every time I get stuck at something or something goes wrong because something is missing or the customers do not have a proper configuration, I can reach out to their support immediately. I just pick up the phone, and they answer. We talk for ten minutes, and their support engineer understands the case. I open a secure channel for him to access or I give him a CLI with remote access. He applies his magic and reset the things.

I would rate them a ten out of ten because they get my issues solved. If the support engineer can not resolve an issue, he just escalates it. Being a technical person, I understand that the response can take longer. There could be some bugs, and their support team cannot give you the answer immediately.

Positive

I am HPE ASE certified. I do not bring any other customers to the game. I always present HPE. It has been six years since I have been doing this work for my company. We are beating Cisco. We are beating anyone with Dell PowerVault. We beat all of those models.

All the other companies have the same solution, but it comes down to knowing the expectations of the customer and putting things together for them from the switch to the compute to the storage. When you present them together, the result is going to be a yes. The price also plays a role, but HPE is what customers like to go for most of the time. About 70% of customers decide in advance where they will go, but some customers are surprised with the combination that we bring. We put Zerto, and we put the cloud for them. We provide them visibility and make the deployment easy for them. We give them administrator training. All these things that we add on top make customers comfortable to go with HPE even if they do not know HPE.

About 60% to 70% of customers go with the cheapest price, but they also need to see the performance and other things. We have a lot of customers. We took them to HPE Headquarters in Houston. We bring customers to events like HPE Discover. Last year, we brought a customer here and sold four sites to him with dHCI. We finished the Dallas one or the last one three months ago.

Our clients mostly use it on-prem, but they also use it for the DR site and HQ. 

The deployment is simple.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a nine out of ten. There should be 99% uptime. There are no issues with dHCI when it comes to upgrades, but with Alletra, they need to have the ESXi upgraded to the latest version. They need to use the correct or compatible plug-ins for it. Every time you go up with the storage, you need to look at your environment. Customers are probably not aware of all this because they do not create volumes every year or every day. There are certain things they need to keep in mind to upgrade. I do not blame the device. They need to initiate a call with the support for compatibility to ensure that everything will work.

We run our VDI systems off of it as well as a lot of VMs, SQL databases, and things like that. We use it for a little bit of file storage as well. 

Moving on to the platform is fairly simple. Upgrades are easy. We just put it in a new shelf, and that didn't cause any downtime. We really appreciate that. We're running 1,000 VDIs on a single Alletra. I don't know if we could have done that on any of our last storage systems.

The deduplication feature is great. It's a pretty standard feature at this point. However, it's really important for the workloads we run to keep the storage cost down. The speed and reliability are excellent. 

It has all of the technologies in place to make sure our data is still there when things go bad. 

Predicting and preventing issues before they happen seems great on Alletra. All of our failures have been very predictive. We haven't had any downtime. We had some controllers throwing early warnings, and Alletra caught that before anything went bad. We know the stuff goes bad; however, the way that Alletra treats it, we've never had any downtime from hardware issues. It always disables itself and pulls a bad drive out of the pool before any data corruption occurs. 

Alletra has improved the storage performance in terms of IOPS. We don't have any issues. Our infrastructure is a little bit different on the back end, so some of our stuff has a little trouble getting to it. That said, we already know that that's a back-end issue for us and we are going to be resolving that by the end of the year. 

It's helped reduce time spent resolving storage-related tickets. We don't have a lot since it's so reliable, and setting it up is fairly easy and hassle-free. If you need something new, you get it, attach it to the storage, it hooks up and sets up the VMware using the connector software really easily. I don't have to think about it anymore after that. 

Moving from Nimble to Alletra was a little difficult. The process involved adding new cards - which was quite a bit more of a headache for us. Having to console in and turn off the controllers to add the new card for the storage shelf itself was a hassle compared to a Nimble, which was almost plug-and-play. They're very similar, the downtime was zero, and the instructions were great. It was just a lot more work than we were used to with Nimble.

I've been using Alletra for three years.

The support is great. It's easy to just call them and have somebody pick up the phone and easily talk to them about issues. Support is amazing - and that's one of the primary reasons that we use it. 

I previously used Nimble. 

The deployment and installation are generally fairly easy. It's technical so it takes a bit of time. The last time we put in a fresh Alletra, after we racked it, it only took a few hours to get it up and running. More often than that we've done shelf deployments. The new Alletras are a bit more difficult, however, it doesn't take long. 

The ROI is in the reliability and ease of use. The uptime is ROI. We're in the public sector, and uptime is of primary importance. We have a hard time getting a Windows update downtime. Having uptime from our storage, when we never have to worry about it at all is ideal.  

It's expensive. That said, we know what we're buying and we're okay with it. We're generally okay with what we're paying.

I'd rate Alletra nine out of ten. We really enjoy the product. We don't have a lot of issues. And the support keeps us there. We wouldn't consider anything else due to the phenomenal Alletra support that migrated along with Nimble. They are proactive and that's why we love it.