HPE Primera Reviews

HPE Primera is a multipurpose process. 

We have one customer in the banking environment using the solution at one of their locations. 

We use it for configuration and perspective, and for data storage. 

Our customer is happy with HPE Primera. They said they are getting good information and performance from the product. 

The solution is good and has 100 percent availability.

I would like to see improved training offered with HPE Primera. Being the front-end facing the customer, it would be beneficial to understand better how to support the customer with their questions. Currently, the customer reaches out to me with their questions and I take the questions to customer service. It would be better if I had the knowledge to be able to resolve the concerns myself.

I have been using HPE Primera for two and a half years.

HPE Primera is stable.

The product is scalable. 

Our customer has employees that are using HPE Primera, and also their end users using the product through the mobile application and mobile banking. 

HPE provides good support through their customer service.

Neutral

The initial setup of HPE Primera is easy.

HPE Primera is less expensive than HPE Alletra.

We did not evaluate other options. I had experience with HPE Primera and recommended it to our customer because it had a good impact, 100 percent availability, and has all-flash devices with the best performance.

Overall, I would rate HPE Primera an eight out of ten.

I used it purely from an OEM perspective. I used it as a solutions architect working on behalf of our customers. They've got several different versions of Primera. Specifically, it was a Primera 650. They've also got Nimble Storage, GreenLake.

The use case was basically application data that was made available for OLTP online transactions. It was designed to have quick access to typical legacy data for online systems and to have high availability.

They standardized on the HPE Primera so that they weren't running multiple different storage vendors' products. Because of the higher availability, they could set up the environment so that it could work with pretty much whatever data they had. HPE offers pay-as-you-go pricing that allowed them to put a sizable footprint in.

The high availability was most valuable because they come with what's called 100% data availability. With special terms, they license and guarantee 100% data availability. That was probably one of the key features or components that HPE was offering with that model.

Like most storage, we want to see flash become more and more stable. Like any flash that uses MLC or TLC techniques, over time, the more writes you have, the less usable the storage becomes. They try to plan for this and have a lot of extra space in the arrays, but over time, their performance does degrade. This is true for any flash storage.

It probably would be advantageous to make the storage solutions from HPE more inclusive with the add-on software. A lot of people say, "Well, we don't really need that extra software to do this or that." In most of the cases, if it's done right and they use it right, there is a value-add in these additional software tools that are optional.

Their support should be improved. Currently, it depends on who you get on the phone.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half. I last used it about six months ago in my previous company.

It is very stable and rock solid. It has got the clause for 100% availability in it.

Its scalability is outstanding. You can add more chassis with more drives pretty easily. It scales out pretty large. I don't remember exactly how much it scales out to, but it's quite large.

With the online transaction system, they potentially had more than 1,000 users using the system. So, there were a lot of transactions. They've purchased it based on their project and sized it for three years. At the end of those three years, based upon the functionality, how well it is, and the technology, they might just simply purchase more storage for it to increase its size. Depending upon the dated growth of those applications, they might turn around and double its size in three years.

It is hit or miss. It depends on who you get on the phone. One day they're great on the phone, and the next day, you get somebody who is just not capable. I don't want to be too rough on them, but I'd give them a six out of 10.

They were using Dell, and they were just tired of the cost and the maintenance cost as well. The initial cost was good from Dell, but to re-up on maintenance after three years was not worth it. It was cheaper to buy new storage, and that was the main reason why they replaced it with HPE.

It was very simple and straightforward. It was very easy. We could configure it in an hour.

The implementation strategy was really about having a landing zone for new data. So, we just set it up and configured it for the appropriate block type data, and then they just started writing new data to it. It was pretty easy.

We sold it to them and then installed it for them as a service. It was basically a project that the customer was working on, and we basically won their favor as a value-added reseller (VAR), and then we basically deployed it for them.

The staff required for maintenance purposes was minimal. They were able to use their existing team to manage it.

Based upon what they were doing, a return on investment is hard to calculate when you're basing it on an OpEx model because it's an operating expense. It's a cost center. Because of the way it's being used, you're not making money with it. To get into true return on investment, you'd have to understand what exactly the data is providing, what the value is of that data, and how does it compare to what you were doing before? You would need more of a data scientist to do the analysis and understand what the return on investment really is.

Because it has high availability, the cost is above average. The cost depends upon the sizing, and every customer has a different size.

It is slightly above average in terms of cost compared to its competitors, but the value add was that they could know what their maintenance cost was going to be going forward. They knew what their renewal or expansion costs would be.

There are no additional costs for this model. There are additional software components that provide additional analytics that HPE offers. It really comes down to whether or not the customer decides to purchase those or not. You can use it out of the box with the base pricing, but if you want advanced analytics and insights, you'll need to purchase additional software.

It's an excellent solution. HPE definitely stands behind it. I would put it up against most of the storage arrays that are out there because it is enterprise-class.

I'd give it high marks. I would rate it an eight out of 10. I don't give anybody a perfect score. Eight is very good in my opinion. My rating is because of the high availability of the storage and the fact that it's based on very solid technology. It has been around for a long time, and it's backed by an excellent company. In other words, they're not going anywhere.

We are using HPE Primera as a storage solution.

There has been a lot of changes in HPE Primera OS, and most of the time any package related to it is simple to upgrade. It does not require any support for the operation. The customer can easily deploy any code directly from the GUI which is very good. Additionally, we have individual storage we can allocate and easily manage.

We used to receive hardware errors a lot of times. The ambient temperatures rise rate was approximately 35 to 55 degrees, but when it was approximately 27 or 28, we used to get errors a lot.

I have been using HPE Primera for approximately one year.

The solution is stable. However, in the older versions, we used to see a lot of hardware failures and any indications we have a node battery to be replaced. We have almost 18 storage for the last three months, we are not receiving LSA messages, whereas before we were receiving one per month. We used to receive storage or hardware issues from the HPE Primera side. Things have been better.

The scalable of the solution is good. Recently, we have upgraded one of the storage from 50TB to 100TB. It's very easy to mount and connect. There is be no issue with expansion. We can easily upgrade the endpoint and does not take much time. It all can be done without downtime for that. Adding in an SD card is similar to how we have mounted the expansion.

We have around 20 storage HPE Primera's, and we have approximately 30 applications that are using HPE Primera storage. We have a dedicated mobile application used for banking purposes and a database dedicated to working on HPE Primera.

I would rate the technical support of HPE Primera a three out of five.

The support could improve because it would take a lot of time to get an expert to analyze oh problem. We would be connected to the L1 support and then L2, it can take a long time. If the issue is a P1 case, they are taking a lot of time to get back to us with a solution. P1 is the highest priority and the support we receive from the P2 level is the same.

High availability of primera storage .

The initial installation can take almost one hour. You only need to install the hardware to the rack and application. Once we powered it on, there is no need to create any write groups. Everything is automatically created by the HPE Primera OS.

The deployment was done by HPE.

Other than the support for HPE Primera it is a good solution.

I rate HPE Primera an eight out of ten.

HPE Primera is used for hosting databases and applications.

I have been using HPE Primera for two years.

HPE Primera is stable.

The scalability of HPE Primera is good.

We have approximately 20 people using the solution in my company. We have plans to increase the usage in the future.

We have not had a good experience with support from HPE Primera. They can improve.

The installation of HPE Primera is straightforward and it took one day to complete.

We used help from the vendor to do the implementation of HPE Primera.

The license for HPE Primera is all-inclusive.

I rate HPE Primera a six out of ten.

We use HPE Primera for all our storage requirements.

What we like most about HPE Primera is that it's an all-flash storage solution, and it's a new generation of storage.

I'm very satisfied with HPE Primera, so I can't think of an area for improvement, but if they could increase the value of the IOPS and the throughput, that would be good.

I've been using HPE Primera for two years.

HPE Primera is a very stable product. We don't have any issues with it.

HPE Primera is scalable, it covers our needs, but if our needs are too big, the support or expansion is limited. Its scalability could still be improved.

On a scale of one to five, with one being the worst and five being the best, I would rate the technical support for HPE Primera a five. I'm very happy with their support.

We previously used NetApp. We switched to HPE Primera because it's a new generation of storage, so we preferred it over NetApp.

The initial setup for HPE Primera was easy for me, because an HPE engineer installed and configured it, but I'm not sure if setting it up was easy for the engineer.

We used a third-party to deploy the product, an HPE engineer.

The ROI for HPE Primera is good. I'm happy with it because it's an all-flash array solution, and there's this huge capacity of SSD all-flash disks. Electricity expenses for HPE Primera are lower, and its storage capacity is higher. Its ROI is better than the ROI we got from NetApp.

I don't know the licensing cost of the product because we ordered all bundled licenses, so I don't have pricing information for them.

I evaluated Pure Storage Flash Array and NetApp.

I used Pure Storage Flash Array in the past, but our current customer uses HPE Primera for storage.

The maintenance of HPE Primera doesn't require staff, but we had one engineer who took care of its installation and configuration.

I'm rating HPE Primera nine out of ten.

My primary use of Primera is as a storage solution for a huge conglomerate with multiple critical businesses including banks, airlines, and retail chains.

The most valuable feature is an all-flash system, which means the data access speed is amazing while the latency is almost nothing, and it can deliver IOPS up to 16,000.

An area for improvement is how the product gets integrated with the technical support and how cases are raised. There are also certain features that require engineering-level access, which should be accessible to storage admins as well. In the next release, I'd like to see support for external KMS (key management system) because some organizations want encryption based on their encryption appliances or methodology.

Primera is quite stable.

The technical support is very good and very effective in resolving any problems.

The initial setup was quite straightforward - everything went very smoothly, it took a few hours, and I didn't face a single issue with implementation.

Our implementation was done by HPE consultants.

I would give this solution a rating of nine out of ten.

We not only use HPE storage, we use their hardware as well. We use it for our incubated environment because we have some applications which are running on these journeys, applications, and APA . That storage actually helps us because there are multiple transactions and queries. Our applications are running and that's why we require fast storage.

HPE Primera is mostly integrated with our compute infrastructure and because of that, the particular storage is very much compatible with that compute. It's efficient.

Reporting can be improved.  The reporting console should be better and there should be some out of the box reports. That's the only thing.

I have been using it for two and a half years.

It's very stable. We didn't face any issue with stability.  

As per HPE, they said that it's pretty easy to add more storage in HPE Primera. With the existing controllers, I think it's pretty easy to add more storage. Right now we are using around 600 TB, not more than that, but it can support up to four petabytes.

Their support is fine although it can be slow. It's mostly regional so we can't comment on it, because for it to change regions, it'll take some time for them to know about our whole setup, and then get used to it. Eventually we'll have to get used to it. If they were to change regions and a new engineer is assigned, then we could face some issues. There could be some kind of delay, so that's the only thing. Other than a lack of communication, the support is not that bad. The engineers are capable enough.

We previously used Dell EMC PowerMax, which is a five to six year-old setup.  Primera is a two year-old setup. With Dell EMC, the discs crashed, which needed to be replaced. In the two years we've used Primera, we haven't faced this kind of issue. 

PowerMax has very powerful storage. The number of IOPS and the control stability are the things I liked very much, but it's more expensive than other solutions. They are top of the line, but on a higher price range. 

Setup was a straightforward. We didn't face any hurdles in that because it was a new deployment during that time. It was a new setup when we were going for this new journeys and application service. The deployment was straightforward.

Deployment was done by HPE's partner.  I would rate it a four out of five.

I you compare it with some other storage, then the HPE licenses are much cheaper.  If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 3 out of five in terms of pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Until now, I haven't given any thought to Primera and how it's going to work for us because we are moving towards cloud transformation. In a year, we may not require any on-premise solution, since our whole idea is to take all the workers to the cloud.

For advice, it all depends on what the requirements are. There are other solutions to consider. In all-flash, there are many other vendors, so it all depends on what kind of solution is being deployed and what kind of compute infrastructure they have which can work with that storage. If you're using HPE, then I would recommend HPE Primera because its performance is very good.

We primarily use the solution for customers, for their hosted virtualized infrastructure storage.

HPE Primera had helped us achieve very low latency performance, hence enhancing the customer experience of higher IOPS demanding applications. 

We really like the HPE infosight. it is an AI driven interface for hybrid cloud. it gives some more insights into any virtualized infrastructure such as performance issues, proactive recommendations etc. for example, get alerts and items of that nature It's been quite helpful so far. 

The performance of the solution is excellent. It performs far better than you would expect.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

It outperforms on latency. It's very fast. We're talking about 0.4 milliseconds. The faster, the fast data works, the faster you'll get the response. This is really low latency; it's a great performance.

The dashboards are very good.  It has a very user-friendly kind of dashboard that is easy to understand. There isn't any complex stuff or too much information. That said, it has deep integration in to HPE Infosight. It gives you so much information, even more than you want.

The customization capabilities are excellent.

We haven't come across any issues with the solution. I don't recall missing any features.

They could work to make scalability easier.

It's quite expensive to upgrade right now maybe just now as its a new model.

Their latency is good, however, if they can continue to push their capabilities, that would be ideal.

I've only been using the solution for just over one month. It hasn't been an extremely long amount of time just yet.

The stability and performance are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable.

We haven't attempted to scale the solution just yet. It's still very early on in the process, as we have just had the solution for about a month or so. Therefore, I can't speak very well about its scalability. However, it's my understanding that scaling it not that hard. 

Primera supports all flash additional enclosures, where you can expand SSD

Good support from HPE and local suppliers as well. 

The solution is quite straightforward. It's not complex. We had already done the sizing and we had already done the planning. The HP engineers were well aware of our needs. In the end, we just plugged in and gave them access, and they themselves did the configuration as per the initial requirements.

HP engineers did all of the heavy lifting on the implementation. We simply provided them with our exact requirements.

We are under a perpetual license in terms of software. 

Evaluated Huawei OcenStore Dorado storage and DELL Unify 380. As per the sizing and cost, HPE Primera A630 was better and most cost-effective.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this point. the model number is HPE Primera A630

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. It's fast and the performance is very good. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.