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.

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.

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.

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.

We primarily use the solution for virtual machines and hypervisors. We use it mainly in data centers. 

The solution has provided us with a solution that is reliable and cost-effective. 

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.

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 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.