HPE Primera Reviews

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.

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.

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.

The primary use case is for all of the backend, the core storage infrastructure at this point.

It's the migration from spinning disk, it has all types of workloads. 80% are virtual machines, file services, and database workloads.

The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment. 

The integration with the compute capacity because this is just the storage side.

The orchestrations and management, and the performance and cost per capacity.

Another advantage is that HPE sells everything. All of the capabilities of the hardware such as replication, snapshot, and the specific features are all included from the start as opposed to being on another license.

When you buy it, you can do whatever you have to, to be able to do with it out of the box.

On the software end, in regards to the integration, everything gets aligned with the software-defined data center concept. Which means that everything needs to be done for software and programmatically. 

This is an area that needs improvement as well as on the hardware end, the ability to expand capacity to larger numbers.

In the next release, I would like the ability to do direct file services. This is a block-based solution, if you need to do file servers, you have to put servers around it.

On the controller side, I would like to see NAS capabilities. That would be helpful.

There are two lines, and they are evolving into one another. Primera is just a word, it was called 3PAR before that. I have worked with both.

Between the two lines, I have worked with these solutions for five years.

There are multiple components, there are many different versions. The software has versions and the hardware has versions. We are using the latest version, the latest incarnation.

It's a stable solution, it's rock solid.

This is running the data centers for the shop. Everybody in the organization will be affected one way or another by what is there. We have 6000 people in our organization.

Tell us about your experience with customer service/technical support.

Technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home. The hardware calls their NOC center and reports any alerts or events. Then they have a standard ideal protocol to call back. They are quite insistent, they send you emails if you don't acknowledge and they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Professional services are embedded. It can be done by the customer but it's a pretty sophisticated solution. We need to use vendor professional services.

It was not a third-party in addition to the cost, it was included.

The hardware came with installation services. We decided to go with it.

Stability is one of the reasons we chose this solution, and that we could buy storage and computer from the same vendor to optimize everything. It's designed to work with one another.

I will definitely recommend this solution. For anyone who is interested in implementing it, they should do their cost analysis very carefully. There's a multitude of solutions, but some of them are more software-oriented.

The math can become fuzzy but once they figure out the financial aspect of it, I think from a purely technical perspective, I would highly recommend it.

In terms of quality for block storage, it's one of the best on the planet, if not the best, in my view. 

If they had, block, NAS, and iSCSI out of the box, I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I would rate HPE Primera a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for my team is expandability. I am using Primera for production. It serves as the primary storage in my production environment.

With Primera in my data center, I feel comfortable. I also use deduplication and compression for all data, and it usually makes things easier.

Data replication and deduplication are the most valuable features. 

Primera should be more user-friendly. It's currently a bit disconnected. Moreover, there should be more availability in Brazil.

I have been using HPE Primera for six months. I use the latest version.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support were perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

I might see an ROI in another year.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. It is okay pricing; it could be cheaper. 

I would recommend using the solution. It is a good solution for storage. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine 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.

The use cases of our company's clients have been good enough to help us remove the competition of HPE Primera from the market.

My company takes care of the installation phase of the product for our customers, and we also manage the systems for our customers. With HPE Primera, I can say that it is great to have a tool that provides or serves as a single point of visibility for everything.

I haven't encountered any areas that need improvement since I consider HPE Primera a great solution.

HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement.

I have been using HPE Primera for ten years. My company is a reseller of the solution. I deal with the latest version of the solution.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company mostly provides solutions to our clients that are stable. Redundancies in a two-node system make the solution very stable.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

HPE Primera is a tool that just one user mostly uses. My company's clients who use HPE Primera are mostly enterprise-sized businesses.

My company provides support to our clients who use HPE Primera. My company directly gets help or support from the engineers in our company, which I feel is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I was never involved in the setup phase since it is a process taken care of by the experienced engineers in our company, who I believe wouldn't have faced a problem at all. I rate the setup phase a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The setup phase is fairly straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. There are no licensing or additional costs attached to the solution since everything is built in when it comes to HPE Primera.

HPE Primera provides proactive monitoring and a fantastic AI that helps find problems.

I rate the overall tool a ten 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.