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.

Improving HPE Alletra Storage is challenging to answer because there are several different metrics to consider. From a performance perspective, the improvements and large jumps are fantastic as is. From a deployment perspective, I was a big fan of the on-premise deployment model and then connecting it afterward to GreenLake. Now that's being sunsetted. From a sensor and metric standpoint, there is just enough data without getting useless metrics, where you become blind to what it provides. The HPE Storage Technical Assistance Center is still probably the best out of all the storage vendors. 

It's difficult to improve upon being able to call in and get assistance almost instantly.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for five years.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as a nine out of a 10 or a 10 out of 10. While we're not a shop that has thousands of arrays, we do have a significant number of them. We've had a controller that needed to be replaced before, but we've never experienced any data loss.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with our growing needs and has been able to keep up with our requirements. Recently, we over-provisioned one of our data stores. We were able to do this because the data reduction was better than we originally anticipated.

The customer support for HPE Alletra Storage is second to none. There are many different areas to get support within HPE, but the storage support, specifically Nimble support, has been excellent.

Regarding the support process, you dial the storage support phone number for your region. In our case, North America. They use a follow-the-sun model, so there's always somebody available during local hours who is alert and ready to assist. For a critical situation, you'll get assistance almost immediately. Otherwise, you leave a message and receive a call back within 10 to 15 minutes maximum. All that's needed to get started is a description of the issue and an array serial number. There are no complicated procedures or permissions required.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using Dell Unity, which wasn't addressing our needs.

I have seen a return on investment on our 6010 and 6050s because they solved our storage problems, which directly translated to fewer man-hours being spent mitigating issues and better efficiency of the end-users using the applications that run on the storage.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage are in line with the market from both CapEx and OpEx perspectives. Speaking specifically of the 6K Alletra series, the renewal process can be complex due to the sheer volume of SKUs. It requires careful tracking, but that's primarily the responsibility of the partner rather than the end-user. We haven't had any renewals on any of the Alletra MPs or the Synergy chassis or anything larger than that.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we evaluated Pure Storage, the Dell product portfolio, and briefly looked at iXsystems.

We do not use HPE's GreenLake AIOps. We are evaluating different AI platforms and what they can do for our business and clients regarding HPE's GreenLake AIOps, but we don't know what we need. I don't have enough knowledge to determine if we should be using it.

Regarding additional features, the Nimble Connection Manager and plugin integration within the vSphere environment is being discontinued. As a VMware-heavy shop, we find HPE VM Essentials and Morpheus interesting, but they're relatively new. Until they have full integration with major backup vendors and include features like immutable storage, immutable backups, hypervisor level native backups, and integrations for other tools, the existing plugins shouldn't be discontinued.

What stood out about HPE Alletra Storage is its ease of use, which many of our clients are familiar with. The biggest selling point, besides the performance metrics, is the exceptional storage support experience. While HPE compute support is a separate entity that isn't as good, the storage support is outstanding.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage as a nine out of 10.

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.

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.

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.

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

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as being quite robust, as we haven't had an outage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most are the ease of management via CLI, as we have written many homegrown scripts that access the CLI to automate our processes to either increase storage, create snapshots, and refresh snapshots. The whole process can be done through automation.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations, and that's actually part of the whole GreenLake system. When we have issues, it's excellent. The engineers have come in to analyze our cases and helped us get through our issues.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce our data management operation expenses. Back in the day, CapEx was always the hard thing to do, and by going through GreenLake, we were able to convert that CapEx expense of buying storage to an OpEx by going with the GreenLake rental of the HPE Alletra. It's reduced data management costs. It's hard to say by how much. We've been with HP for years. 

GreenLake has reduced the time spent on capacity planning. We're charged on usage, and there's more storage than what we need. We don't have to do a five-year plan or stress about running out of space. We only pay the minimal amount or for what we use.

We use seven development database QA and development databases based on snapshots of our production We refresh every about four to six weeks, each of those databases. And that's all done through automation that we've created. It has greatly reduced our need for additional storage space, however, they are allowing us to do the dev and QA on snapshots.

The solution provides a cloud-like management platform, although we don't necessarily use it that way.

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved by adding support for file-based or S3 storage, as we have NetApp as our NAS storage. While NetApp is not our Tier 0 and doesn't provide the high critical speed, integrating such functionality into HPE Alletra would be great.

We've been using HPE Alletra Storage for just about three years.

We have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Alletra Storage.

We have expanded usage with HPE Alletra Storage, and even if we are getting rid of some items, somehow our usage continues to go up. I always expect at least a 10% increase in use year over year.

My coworker is currently working with HP engineers to perform a firmware upgrade this weekend on one of the HPE Alletra units, and then in two weeks, we will upgrade the other HPE Alletra. Every time we need to do an upgrade, we contact or have a monthly call with our HPE team, and we set up firmware upgrades for the HPE Alletra. They have always supported us greatly for that.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using the 3PAR.

We often do our own setup, however, coming from a 3PAR, the HPE Alletra was an easy migration, an easy setup, and I expect the same for the new HPE Alletra units with a similar code base that will allow for easy migrations.

I haven't specifically calculated the ROI with HPE Alletra Storage. We've been using HPE storage forever. The storage essentially runs our business and our ERP systems.

My experience with HPE Alletra Storage in terms of pricing, setup, costs, and licensing has been excellent.

We didn't really consider any other solutions before selecting HPE Alletra Storage; we were content transitioning from the 3PAR directly to the HPE Alletra.

My advice to another organization considering HPE Alletra Storage is to enjoy the speed. Once it gets configured, it's not hard to configure, especially if you come from that background; it just sits in place, and you can run with it without having to worry about it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as a ten.

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.

The best way forward is to continue keeping the product lines within the Alletra brand specialized to what makes them good, ensuring that the features from where 3PAR was good, Nimble was good, and Apollo was good are maintained so that customers who have relied on them can continue to count on their availability.

We have been using HPE for storage since 2010, utilizing Nimble Storage, then continuing through the Nimble acquisition and now the rebranding to HPE Alletra Storage, having bought those appliances from the CS240 all the way now to the 5000 and the 6000.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as fairly unsurpassed; it's an appliance I haven't had a problem with, with only minor bugs here and there that are usually fixed without any real downtime, making it a great product for reliability.

HPE Alletra Storage scales very effectively with the growing needs of our organization, especially through the GreenLake hardware-as-a-service, where we don't have to worry about resource planning because the resources are available or if we do grow beyond what the appliance already has, we know that service will take care of it and grow the appliance for us without needing to forklift upgrade.

My experience with the support we have received has been very good, with no complaints on that side; HPE has maintained the people who built the platform, keeping Nimble's engineering team mostly intact to ensure they know how to drive and support it.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, the big competitor we considered during our last refresh cycle was Pure Storage.

Deployment is usually pretty good. We had a hiccup when we deployed our last SAN. The 6000 that came in, they were transitioning the onboarding to be fully cloud, GreenLake-driven. The problem was we're in a regulated air-gapped environment. So it took us a while to figure out what we needed to open to get that SAN to call home so that then we could then chop off the connection and have it run on correctly again. 

I have seen a return on investment from using HPE Alletra Storage, absolutely.

My experience with the pricing, licensing, and setup cost of HPE Alletra Storage has been that pricing has always been great, especially when compared to some competitors in the field, and we have had no issues with any additional licensing fees related to the products we are using. 

We buy the appliance knowing it will perform how we want, and although there is subscription pricing now, it's similar to before where we are paying a support contract, making it still fundamentally access to the support team.

For the one SAN I'm paying monthly as GreenLake hardware-as-a-service, the total cost of that subscription has a value that far outpaces what it would have taken to buy the same capacity outright.

Historically, with Nimble in the past, we measured everything in IOPS, which enabled us to derive more speed in that traditional storage server application architecture with Nimble than we had with other vendors, and even forward to today, the different product lines align with what we're doing as a very traditional computing concept.

We are not into containerization, we are not public, we are still on-prem, old school architecture. That said Nimble as a platform, or HPE Alletra Storage now, has allowed us to provide that service at a high enough level at a reasonable cost compared to Pure Storage and some of the other vendors.

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

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are to run our private cloud and use it with iSCSI.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I most appreciate are the super fast new NVMe drives, which are amazing. 

With HPE Alletra Storage, we started with the Nimbles, and when we moved up, they became 25 times faster, which shows significant improvement. 

HPE Alletra Storage has definitely reduced our data management operation expenses. We condensed three parts that were full entire racks down to an 8U with the same amount of storage, which is amazing.

GreenLake AIOps enables us to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through a full support escalation. The direct access to senior support engineers is important. 90% of the time we troubleshoot it ourselves because we've been using it for a long time.

The solution has helped reduce the time spent on capacity planning. We use InfoSight to forecast, and it works great. We spend very little time on capacity planning; we monitor the InfoSight and add storage when indicated.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity and efficiency as super simple to set up. It integrates into vCenter, so when deploying data stores, you can do it from one source.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The integration with vCenter means you don't need to log in separately. The cloud-operational model has improved operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by cutting down on time. You have a single pane of glass to manage everything.

One person can monitor and deploy thousands of VMs where it previously required three or four engineers. We set up a secondary cluster for our DR side because we were so confident with it in our production. We run it both on our DR and production side.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, I suggest adding more expansion capabilities. We are currently limited to a certain number of shelves, so extending it to even greater capacity would be beneficial.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for probably about six or seven years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues since I've been using HPE Alletra Storage. We keep on top of the firmware updates and when they reach out saying we should patch it, we follow their recommendations and have never had any issues.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very stable with minimal problems. It's great to have something trustworthy that works consistently.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of our organization immensely. It is super simple. We've added shelves in the previous years and it is very scalable.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as excellent. Every time I've had to reach out, I usually get someone who is very knowledgeable and they resolve our questions fairly quickly.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using another solution to address similar needs. We had previous NetApp, Nimble, and EMC solutions.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as super simple. I've taught several people over the years how to do it, and it takes a couple of hours to get it up and running.

I've seen return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. The management provides significant time savings.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that GreenLake made it super simple and allowed us to utilize only what we needed at the time. They provide a buffer, so when you run out, you're not stuck. When you get into that buffer, they reach out to add more.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered other solutions including EMCs and NetApps. When we started going into compute and working with HPE, we started with the Nimbles. We were very happy with Nimble from the beginning and their support and the way they worked. When HPE bought them, it was a natural choice.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten. I would recommend HPE Alletra Storage as it's an amazing product.

My use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are that it replaced aging, end of life hardware that we had. We have a main one in our headquarters and I also have a secondary in one of our warehouses in Nevada. I'm in New York, it's in Nevada, so we replicate.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage benefit my organization through stability and ease of configuration without having to jump through hoops to spin up a server and add a new datastore or reconfigure it. It's all point and click.

The most valuable features of HPE Alletra Storage that I have found are performance and ease of configuration. It's overall fantastic. 

HPE Alletra Storage has reduced my data management operation expenses. I went from older systems where I was lucky enough to have support on it and it was more expensive, yet now this is cost-effective. HPE Alletra Storage has saved us about 30% to 40%.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped me reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by 100%. It has probably saved me a few hours a week, just from older systems trying to figure out what we have, how far things have increased, and where we need to go.

I assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as great. We get the dedupe and we've saved a ton of space. We didn't have to buy as much, so it's definitely beneficial for that.

HPE Alletra Storage does provide a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure, as we can manage it through Central. The cloud-like operational model of HPE Alletra Storage has been a game changer for our operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management. I can do it from anywhere. Having the ability to do it everywhere with HPE Alletra Storage has meant that it frees me up to do other tasks that I need to do and run my department and get the business moving in a better direction.

HPE Alletra Storage is more simple, easy to use, and straightforward.

HPE Alletra Storage is pretty darn good the way it is, however, in terms of cost, costs are what they are. I don't know what could be done around that. I would like to see the costs of HPE Alletra Storage go down a little bit. Everybody would want that. I would like to see the costs go down overall.

I have installed HPE Alletra Storage for less than a year.

My experience with HPE Alletra Storage support has been great. We actually had an issue about a month and a half ago where the management NIC went offline, and it just required a firmware update and they took care of it. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage support as a ten. They're very good.

I was using a different solution prior to HPE Alletra Storage, which I inherited, and it was Lenovo, old, five separate systems connected with Nutanix, running VMware. To say it was a cluster is not in a good way.

The deployment was great. Once HPE set it up, my VAR took over from there and and explained us how to do everything on our own. So it was good. Fantastic.

HPE services came in, unboxed, rack-stacked, set it up, upgraded firmware, and got it going.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. Just by the savings that we've had on daily tasks to do and complete, it's much faster. We've definitely seen ROI.

I did not consider other solutions before using HPE Alletra Storage, as I was tied to HPE.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten out of ten.

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage involve production storage and production data.

The compression is good. I have a huge dataset from other legacy storage, and Alletra helps compress that.

The feature I appreciate most about HPE Alletra Storage is compression. With compression, if I have a huge dataset from legacy storage and I move to HPE Alletra Storage, it takes little storage because of the compression.

The solution has reduced my data management operation expenses by approximately 20%. 

The solution has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by 20-25%.

I would assess HPE Alletra's capacity efficiency as faster and good, with better performance. 

HPE Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-operational model has affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by making the deployment model very quick.

We have access to senior support engineers, although we haven't faced any problems.

I would like to see more compression and more scalability in the next release of HPE Alletra Storage.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for one year, or about 12 months.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very positive until now. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization. I have not expanded usage yet.

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations. Direct access to senior support engineers is important. Until now, we haven't faced any problems, but if issues arise, there will be examples of why direct access is important.

I would evaluate customer service or technical support as very good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service a seven. Sometimes we have to go via a partner, which adds some delay.

Positive

We were using HPE before adopting HPE Alletra Storage, however, with a different model. The model we were using was 3PAR. The factor that led me to consider the change was the end of life of the previous model.

The deployment model is very quick. We had no mahor challenge.

I have not seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage yet. We are very new to this.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that pricing is on the higher side; this is a disadvantage that has to be reduced.

I considered no other solutions before adopting HPE Alletra Storage.

What stood out to me about HPE Alletra Storage is HPE itself. I have not encountered anything negative. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall a nine and would advise other organizations to use it.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage include high-performance computing clusters (HPC) and as a storage solution for data storage. 

It is being used in educational institutions. We are acting as a system integrator and reselling the solution. For our customers, the main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are focused on research. They store their research data in HPE Alletra Storage.

We have provided Alletra 6000 on-premise. The usage depends on the customer's specific needs. Currently, they have deployed it as an in-house operation and are using it purely for internal storage on their premises. There are various features available, but these customers—mainly from the educational and government sectors—are unlikely to utilize even 50% of the storage’s capabilities. Their basic needs are being met, which is sufficient for them.

HPE Alletra's capacity and efficiency are good, and the upgradability option is excellent. Its console makes the management easy.

HPE Alletra Storage has definitely helped our customers reduce the time they spend on capacity planning. As for whether the tool also reduces the data management operations expenses for our customers, they have fixed jobs and data requiring regular backups on the storage. Wherever we have provided HPE Alletra Storage, it is still not completely filled up. Once the storage gets filled up, we will examine data management further.

I find the replication, snapshots, and deduplication features of HPE Alletra Storage most useful. Since the deduplication and replication parts are there, the data is compressed and stored, which is why users are happy with the storage performance. The input-output operations per second (IOPS) of the storage are very good, and the performance of the storage is impressive. The read-write operations are fast. 

HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations such as provisioning and day-to-day management, and I find it good.

Its performance is good, but we do have some concerns with Alletra. The challenge I face is that the recent models launched are not available now. When we pitch a solution to a customer and sell HPE Alletra 6000, the customer sees that the product has been discontinued by HPE. The transition of the storage is happening too fast, making it difficult for us, as we normally declare to customers that the product will not reach end-of-life for the next five years. These challenges arise as HPE transitions for the betterment of the product, but we are left answerable to the customer when they ask why we are offering something that the OEM has discontinued. This transition is occurring too fast, and historically, HPE had 3PAR storage that lasted a long time. We need a stable product, and with HPE Alletra, we are unsure about the stability of the product for the next one or two years. Customers now inquire about what happened to Primera storage, which is no longer available, and we lack answers.

I feel that HPE Alletra Storage could be improved, as all our competitors offer storage with options for both file and block and object within a single model, while HP still considers HPE Alletra as block storage only. In many government bids, when the government specifies a need for storage that supports both file and block, we lack a solution for that. A customer will not purchase two storages—one for file and another for block—so we need HPE Alletra to come with a solution that accommodates all data types: file, block, and object. This is critical since government purchases often rely on tenders.

I have been working with HPE Alletra Storage since the launch itself for the last two to three years.

The backend support from HPE is good.

I did not talk to their technical support. My engineers deployed it. They had a chance to talk to them.

The initial setup of HPE Alletra Storage is straightforward. The deployment is not very difficult. 

Our customers mainly utilize HPE Alletra Storage on-premises. Nobody is using the cloud version, as government rules in our country mandate that storage must be on-premise or on a MeitY-approved cloud that must be located in India. Due to these guidelines, customers are currently favoring on-premise solutions, although they may transition to cloud in the future.

Our engineers were able to handle the deployment without needing assistance from the HPE team.

My customers' return on investment (ROI) with HPE Alletra Storage depends on different factors. We can ascertain the ROI once warranties and everything else conclude for one or two storages. As for performance, I can say that the ROI is satisfactory since the IOPS are high and failures are low, indicating good ROI.

Generally, I find the price competitive for HPE Alletra 5000. However, for the higher version of HPE Alletra, the price does not seem competitive when compared to competitors EMC or NetApp, which have higher prices.

I don't believe HPE Alletra has helped reduce the cost per terabyte, as it is competitive with other products, maintaining a similar price point.

To summarize, the biggest benefit of HPE Alletra Storage for our customers is the higher IOPS and read/write performance. However, there remain numerous concerns regarding the product being too format-specific as it only serves as a block storage solution, presenting challenges.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten.

We are using HPE Alletra Storage as our storage for our VM environment, a storage area network for us. All of our VMs that we put on are on it, approximately 20 or 30 VMs. We provide storage for that. We also use it for our backups with Veeam.

It keeps it simple. It makes it easy for my team. It doesn't necessarily make it easy for us to figure out stuff; however, it makes it easy for us to get to what we need to get to after we figure out stuff. It makes it easier for my team than to have conversations around terminology, around what we're doing, how we're doing it. And that for us is worth its weight in gold for us. We're a small team, so I need that when person a is doing something and person b is doing something, if they're doing the same things that they can speak to each other and see what the other is doing and understand what they're doing.

My experience with the deployment of HPE Alletra Storage has been good. 

I like the single pane of glass approach. I like the fact that when I log in, I can get access to all of my different infrastructure components, and I can manage them through the web portal, and that makes things very easy as opposed to having to jump through different management interfaces or administration consoles.

These systems are intelligent enough that when an issue is detected, before we're even aware of it, tickets are automatically opened and closed. I receive copies of these tickets, and instead of things breaking and impacting the business, issues are handled proactively, which is fantastic.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. We have a pretty small dev environment and it hasn't impacted our dem environment as well. The team is freed up; we can be anywhere and log in and do something. We like that we have a stable platform that is more mature and allows us to do some amazing things.

Reducing the price for HPE Alletra Storage would be fantastic. However, we need better education that is specifically geared toward our sector and industry.

In our specific case, we are very labor sensitive. As we examine AI opportunities with our vendors, we are very conscious about which AI opportunities we pursue due to the sensitivity of our team and staff, as the adoption of AI could impact their jobs. During a recent session, there was discussion about level one and level two engineering roles being replaced by generative AI, which was concerning for a labor union where staff are worried about job security.

We would appreciate more education that's geared toward our sector and is sensitive to these concerns. The conversations should focus on how AI can augment what people are already doing, allowing them to move to higher-value tasks rather than replacing their positions entirely.

I've been using the solution for a year. 

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as top-class.

We're still old school and over-provision. We purchase more than we need. We expect not to have to scale for a little while. However, we have a good partner that can bring forward new capabilities for scaling and right-sizing. 

I evaluate the support I received from HPE as excellent. The engineers who helped us during pre-sales have continued their support after implementation. They've followed up on features we weren't initially ready for and have maintained open communication. Now that we have a better understanding of HPE, we're able to advance to the next level. It has been a very good experience.

Positive

We were with Cisco, and prior to that, we were running with IBM. It's been better than expected thanks to the breadth and depth of HP.

The deployment has been good. We didn't just do Alletra. We're doing Aruba as well, and OpsRamp. So far, our experience has been good. 

We have not noted an ROI beyond the stability we get day to day, which is quite valuable. 

The pricing is high. It's a fairly significant investment in us. 

We're implementing more than just HPE Alletra Storage; we're also implementing Aruba. The experience has been positive, and I would recommend it to others.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are dHCI and virtualization.

The benefits of using Alletra for my organization are that the amount of time it takes for my team to define storage and allocate storage for projects has reduced, and there's less training, too. It's just easy to teach the team how to do it.

The feature I appreciate the most about HPE Alletra Storage is how easy it is to provision storage. 

We've reduced time spent on capacity planning by 25%.

The capacity efficiency is good. The deduplication and compression seem to be getting high in terms of ratios.

We use it through GreenLake. It's simplified management.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, it would help us if CIFS is included in one of the later versions, especially since they recently released NFS.

We struggle to gain access to senior support engineers. Typically, we need to escalate via sales.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for nine months.

We have had one failed drive, however, we didn't have any downtime. Knock on wood, we haven't had any issues. 

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization.

We had some support engineers who were not qualified to do the work, and we had to wait until we could get some qualified people to come out to fix it, which was a low point from support. It was our first experience with HPE in years. We'd used HPE in the past, became Dell EMC customers, then transitioned back to HPE, so that was not a great experience. Since that has been resolved, however, support has been really good. 

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using Dell Unity and VxRail to address similar needs. Alletra gave us more flexibility to expand and the pricing was better.

Initially, we had some struggle points. The Array that came out was new and there was some technical issues. However, sine then, it's been great. 

The implementation process was smooth. We had professional services come out to help us.

We have seen an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage since the maintenance costs of our previous solution were higher.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing was that it was fairly simple, and the cost was better for us than a Dell solution.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we considered using our Alletra deployment as part of a dHCI solution for hyper-converged. However, we were looking at the competitor Dell VxRail solution.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to ensure that when you deploy it, you have all the necessary components in place that the teams that will install it need.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as a nine on a scale of one to ten.