HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console. The interface is very good.

This solution is very easy to deploy.

The performance is very good.

I would like to have this solution easily integrate with VMware.

I have been using HPE StoreVirtual for the past four to five years.

This solution is very stable.

This solution scales well and it maintains very good performance as the storage increases.

I have not contacted technical support for this product because it is very easy to use.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when compared to other products, automatic tiering, availability, and disaster recovery are very good.

This solution also integrates well with the Recovery Management Center. We have a backup solution for VMware and Hyper-V, and it is simple to use with HPE StoreVirtaul.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We do the implementation of the solution.

Our customers are using it for their backup and file storage.

Catalyst handling.

The software is perfect.

Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

It is stable. I am not getting many calls about the product, only about disk failure.

We are working on single node only. That is a limited edition for this solution.

We have several customers. There are 50 to 70 users connected.

We use the technical support. 

Documentation is all available on the HPE site for all the products.

The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure.

We always recommend this to our customers, but we only have one solution.

I would rate the solution as a seven (out of 10).

Primary iSCSI-based storage using P4000 series nodes for HPE lefthand.

VMware compute on BL465G7s within a P4000 series chassis

StoreVirtual has proved to be a highly available, very stable and robust solution. It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime.

The most valuable feature is Network RAID 10.

We use SAN datastore replication for DR, along with VMware SRM.

There is no next release. The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Enterprise data and health care. All our data was in a P4500 StoreVirtual, now it is gradually moving to a 4 Node VSA.

Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI. We also plan to build a Metro Cluster using VSA.

• Data replication (Network RAID 10) 
• Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage.

Product looks like it is in the end of development. HPE will be probably be merging with SimpliVity. I hope they will continue the product as we already have multiple HW servers besides HPE, and a software SDS means more flexibility for us.

Primary usage is just to operate our daily business.

Performance, so far so good. No problems at all yet.

The stability and flexibility are the greatest improvements to our organization.

• Stability
• Flexibility

I can't say at the moment. I'm happy with it right now. There is always room to improve.

Using our current license we have just a 5TB limit. If we acquire a new license we can upgrade to the bigger storage. It can definitely scale to our needs.

Technical support comes from our partner. We have never had any issues with them. We haven't had any large-scale issues.

Before this we were just using a physical service and then moved to the virtual environment using VSA.

Our partner recommended this solution. We took a deep look, analyzed, and decided we can go with this solution.

It was straightforward, I would say. We did it with our partner.

We had a few options like Lenovo, Fugitsu. We went with HPE because it had the best price to performance ratio, and service as well. 

It's been a good experience, so far.

When deciding on a vendor to go with we look at 

• service
• stability
• performance.

Explore it yourself. Talk to your colleagues, talk to the technicians, the experts.

• Input/Output (I/O) has greatly improved.
• Easy updates without taking down storage and virtual machines (VMs).
• HA is now a real possibility which I could not fully achieve with normal NAS datastores.

• Ease of carving out storage.
• The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management.

I just let it do its thing. I don't worry too much about it.

Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen.  

Shared storage in the organization allowed for higher availability and simplified server maintenance.

Enables us to build highly available shared storage from a standard rack server, such as HPE Proliant DL. However, it is not limited to that. Thin provisioning lets us get the most value from the hard drives. I found the architecture to have less single point failure than a traditional SAN.

Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately.

In terms of stability, the optional MEM (Multipath Enhancement Module) was unstable in one installation with 1GB iSCSI network. Long running, intensive file copying tasks between VMs produced a storage latency "explosion". The issue disappeared immediately after removing the MEM drivers from the ESXi hosts and restoring the default vSphere Path Selection Policies. We did not have an opportunity to review the environment or test an updated MEM.

There were no scalability issues. The 3 x 4TB license is a very good start for two nodes. We can add a third node for additional storage and compute power. If the performance demands increase, we can simply install or replace the current iSCSI network adapters with 10GbE. The system also supports SSD and auto-tiering with higher licenses.

The HPE technical support for StoreVirtual VSA is very good, but it requires some time to contact them. To get a simple piece of software means registering StoreVirtual VSA. This is a complicated process. The SAR (Service Agreement ID) is associated to the VSA Licenses. It requires you to open a request on the HPE website and this is hard to obtain.

We did not use a different solution before this one.

There's an installation wizard which is quite simple. However, you need to have a clear image of the final scheme, especially for the network. At the time, I missed a reference blueprint, but a recent publication of "StoreVirtual VSA Ready Nodes" filled the gap.

Review the licensing options, because the smaller licenses are time limited. If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down. I wouldn't keep a traditional SAN in production without support anyway.

Spend some time reading StoreVirtual best practices and consider buying redundant solid switches, like HPE Aruba ProCurve 25xx, or better. Layer-3 is useful, but not mandatory thanks to split network support introduced in VSA 12.5.

It offers, while still affordable, a really high end storage solution that I can present to my customers.

I guess on the top of the list is certainly ease of use. We're a smaller company, and we don't have a lot of engineers who can dedicate their time to a single product. I guess I'd also say reliability. I need something that just kind of works all the time. I don't have the time to be dedicating resources to fixing things.

For this particular product, I was talking to one of their storage people about it. They already added the few things that I needed. So I don't have anything major. But it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products.

Stability is excellent.

Scalability is good, as well. We are certainly going to push the upper bounds of what it can do.

We have used technical support and it has been great. It is quick to get access to their support engineers, but also they solve every problem.

This is actually what we selected when we started this search. When selecting a vendor, cost is there, of course, but more than that, some of the other things I've mentioned: Ease of use, reliability, and support. The relationship goes a long way, too. Having access to people directly, whether that's sales engineers, or the sales team themselves. We are a small company, so getting attention from a big company like HPE is great. We probably wouldn't get that from other companies.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very simple.

We started using this before HPE purchased it. It was LeftHand Network before. It was them versus HPE's SAN, so technically HPE was the other vendor. Now HPE owns it. We chose this solution because it was cluster storage, so for us and our size, it was a better product line.

I would say with this particular solution, you're getting a lot when it comes in price point. You're getting a lot of features compared to some of the other products out there.