It would be beneficial to have direct cloud connectivity for backups, micro applications, and other data needs. However, these features are only available in enterprise-level solutions, not SMB ones. The products are available, but the pricing makes them unaffordable for many small and medium businesses. If the technology could trickle down to this level, it would allow many more organizations to benefit from these solutions.

While HPE StorageWorks MSA meets my needs well, some clients have suggested room for improvement in expanding storage capacity beyond the base traces. There has been occasional feedback about minor glitches and the desire for even greater scalability, possibly accommodating more than the current limit of 138 hard drives for advanced storage configurations.

HPE StorageWorks MSA should add features like adaptive features and storage replication. The solution's license should be integrated and not separate.

There is room for improvement in terms of scalability. There are times when we need to upgrade the device and the firmware. Sometimes, that can be a struggle.

They've been adding some different things to it. Maybe if it was a year ago, I would have said yeah, it might be nice to see this, but they've started adding in some different SSD and caching to it that really has revitalized it or reinvigorated that system a little bit.

Rather than it being just dumb storage, they're adding some of the features of the higher-level SANs back into it. Customers can take advantage of some of those things that previously they wouldn't have been able to.

I'm not sure about improvements. I think so far, the way that they're going, the way that the HP roadmap is so far has been pretty good, so I'm happy with what we have, the direction that it's been going so far.

They fit our bill very well. We buy a lot of them, so I think they're just fine. However, we did have some issues at first but we worked through them and currently we have no issues.

We had some differences between the 10 GB and the 1 GB platform that we kind of didn't know about, so we had 1 GB where we needed 10 GB and the flexibility for changing out the hardware wasn't there when we needed it.

This product is getting a little bit older, so new features like deduplication are not included. We would like to see the environment updated.

The solution requires hardware. 

We are only really using the solution for CCTV purposes. It's very basic. We don't need a lot of bells and whistles. Therefore, for our purposes, we aren't really finding anything that is lacking.

It would be ideal if there was a better management interface. The solution should allow for integration with Java.

The support contract is expensive, although they are very responsive.

• GUI can be improved
• Firmware updates need improvement
• Hardware could use a little refinement. (The fiber ports on one controller pushed through the case causing us to replace that controller under warranty.

In the future we'd like to see more block-based storage. This is because more and more storage is moving in that direction.

The solution could improve by adding configuration tools.

HPE StorageWorks MSA could maybe include a pay-top of texture feature or something like job replication.

Maybe a few more feature sets with snapshots and application, and things like that. That's been coming with the 2040's, so they're slowly adding that in. I understand for what I'm paying for, your not getting all the features, but I see they're coming down from there, maybe with some of those feature sets.

Synchronized replication is very important for MSA; however, HPE StorageWorks MSA doesn't provide synchronized replication.