What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I prefer the most are the ease of provisioning and encryption, where the ability to provision a volume used to be difficult. It's easier to do now.
Feature-wise, it's pretty simple; just a one-click button to enable it, so implementing it was pretty easy too.
As for provisioning, in the old days, we had to be really specific about what type of volume we wanted, the parity size, and the cage protection model. We used to be a 3PAR shop, and transitioning to HPE Alletra Storage made provisioning very simple and easy.
HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning as InfoSight plays a big part; it tells you what to expect to a degree, and the tools it provides give you good insight on when to expect to expand, alongside the support, which also gives you good insight. It has reduced the time I spend on capacity planning by about 80%.
When assessing HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency, if you're talking about data dedupe, it dedupes fairly efficiently; coming from older storage model systems that did one-to-one, we see at least a two-to-one dedupe, so that's definitely a 50% reduction.
Performance-wise, you're looking at different models; a 6030 gives you more than a 6010, and a 6050 gives you more than a 6030. When we transitioned from a 3PAR F400 or an 8200, the performance definitely increased by 100%.
HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing our data infrastructures; we are a private cloud/managed service provider, so we don't prefer the level of cloud management of the infrastructure or the storage. We prefer to keep it in-house, however, it obviously gives us more options, where you can be just on-prem or have management from the cloud, providing a lot of flexibility.
What needs improvement?
To improve HPE Alletra Storage, it needs to have a true active-active controller; it claims to have an active-active controller from the back end, however, the second node is pretty much sitting there doing nothing. The MV 10000 series, which is the next series, is an improvement to HPE Alletra, and HPE is already doing that. In the next release, I would prefer to see better dedupe features; I know other companies do excellent dedupe, and they have protection group policies, meaning you have immutable data in case of a ransomware attack. If you're on the SAN, it should give you a way to protect that data without being erased. Other vendors have that capability built-in, ensuring that you can't erase the data, so features similar to that would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as being quite robust, as we haven't had an outage.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of our organization; we size it based on customer needs and plan for immediate growth in the first and second years. The expansion process is pretty straightforward; we estimate growth after two to three years, building in enough space and power to expand easily. The process is very simple; it just involves connecting another shelf and adding the storage.
How are customer service and support?
When evaluating customer service and technical support, I want to highlight that, similar to my experience with 3PAR and Nimble, Nimble support was outstanding, and I never had an issue.
The support for HPE Alletra is about the same; however, there are occasions, especially after hours or on weekends, where we might get the B team, resulting in a bit of a runaround as you have to gather logs and go through troubleshooting steps. If it's the A team during the day, the solutions are usually quite good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as a nine.
To make it a ten, I would prefer avoiding the runaround and the delays I sometimes experience with weekend support; in previous years, I would get immediate responses and solutions, and now the process can take several days, which can be frustrating. Streamlining that process to get quicker answers would significantly improve my rating.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I wasn't using another solution to address similar needs, as we're an HPE shop, and we were on 3PAR, which effectively transformed into Primera and then into HPE Alletra. So, all our products have been HPE.
How was the initial setup?
During the evaluation process, I did not notice anything that particularly stood out, both positive and negative; it was a better product than what we had and fulfilled our needs from our previous solutions. It was just a learning curve to adapt to the new product and the new UI.
The deployment model for HPE Alletra Storage is on-prem.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. The return on investment is a bit of complicated math; the way we sell storage to our customers is by the terabyte, with locked-in prices for three or five years. It's not possible to go back and compare it and factor money in, but we try to achieve a return of interest within around 18 months for a three-year contract and 36 months for a five-year contract, just as examples to get the money back.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I am not directly involved; we go through our third-party vendor, and we pretty much just stick with what he gives us in terms of good pricing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we considered various other solutions, but we're an HPE shop, so we stick with whatever our vendor gives us. Our vendor said that after Primera, HPE Alletra is the next big thing, so we just set it up.
What other advice do I have?
The solution's impact on data management operations expenses depends on what model you had, what model you went to, the size of the data, and the type of data, so it depends on many factors.
While I'm not sure if it reduced or increased costs, it definitely did not go down. HPE GreenLake AI Ops enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations, and the basic support has been pretty good.
I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as an eight out of ten; while it has dedupe numbers and encryption at rest, the IOPS depend on the model, and similar models from different vendors tend to have better IOPS.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
