HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

It's HP's attempt to put everything into one box, which we've found to be a real blessing. Previously we didn't have a consolidated, unified solution for compute, storage, and networking. It's also simple to configure and to operate.

We operate in the healthcare sector, and there aren't a lot of solutions that allow us to make sure that our solutions are ready to go in our environment. We have a unique staging environment. We literally test the solution to death before it goes into the hospital environment with the 80/20 rule. If it's 80% configured, we'll run it step-wise before it gets over the doorstep. This helps us to mimic a real-life environment on a smaller scale.

For our use, it provides what we need. I don't think there's much else they can throw into the converged box. I don't think, however, it would be suitable for our actual production environments because we need something much more sophisticated and expandable. It would need more constituent parts for storage and compute to work faster.

We've had no deployment issues.

It's stable for how we use it.

One reason we chose this is because our test systems are not huge and, therefore, don't need to really scale. We have historically tried to reduce our compute needs to be simpler. So even the smallest ConvergedSystem has enabled us to grow. For our small-to-medium-sized customers, we don't need too many alterations. For our larger customers, we typically invest in higher specs. So it's a solution that works perfectly well for us for what we need it to do.

We have a solid second-line support for our hardware and we train our own staff to take up first-line support. This empowers us to triage anything and not have to worry about HP resolving minor hardware elements. We're still able to escalate something quickly if there's a catastrophe. By doing the initial triage, you could say we have 24/7/365 coverage.

As we move away from physical tech and look more into virtual solutions and sharing infrastructures in the medical world, we need to secure our data. Even our test data needs to be locked away and separate from other data for security reasons. So we were looking in particular for a small environment but yet big enough for our test environment. ConvergedSystem hits that sweet spot where we have just enough compute, storage, and networking capability.

We are moving more into the enterprise solutions now. The HP ConvergedSystem enabled us to take a step in that direction but not be overbearing in terms of the technology. The configuration and initial setup was a little bit of a challenge for us as we needed to train our staff. Now our staff that are trained up and it's fairly simple and straightforward.

Be sure to look at your requirements, not just short-terms but also medium-to-long term. Make sure you invest only to the typical three- or five-year window to give yourself the flexibility to move into something else if necessary.

We run a small service provider platform so we need reliability. We need a much tighter level of system-management capability. In live support, we need corrective maintenance, and they provide us with the generic monitoring 24/7 capability around their ability to interface with IT service management tool sets.

HP really gives us that full spectrum of everything under one umbrella as well as the platform integration at the back, specifically with HP Virtual Connect on the Cloud system platform. It's absolutely revolutionary compared to anybody else in the market -- and we've worked with other vendors in the past. There's nothing that competes against what HP has to offer.

We're a private hybrid cloud service provider, so we're very focused on personal sales. We don't have large investments to trial and make mistakes. We have to get it right each and every single time. With the infrastructure capability, it gives us the confidence and peace of mind to get it right time and again. Dealing with vendors, there's always going to be ups and downs, but the key thing with HP is that they make sure that they test the issues.

Room to grow is always there because we're in the technology space and the day we get complacent with ourselves and we get self-satisfied, the game is over. I think the key for us is flexibility. We're growing as a company and we have to scale and we don't want to get caught up with a baseline infrastructure that doesn't scale and grow over time. So far, what we've seen in terms of HP's roadmaps, we're very satisfied that we're not going to find ourselves in a difficult situation. HP is there supporting us and making sure that they will be able to meet our future growth requirements. Everything in HP's roadmap really gives us that flexibility and a very good price point.

I wouldn't say that I'm not satisfied. Yes, there's always going to be challenges because there's people of varying levels of skills, capability, experiences, defects who all come to the floor. But the good thing about HP is that they they're happy to have their internal ecosystem cover all the gaps in support.

We had configuration and design changes through our journey of deploying our cloud infrastructure. HP was very understanding and very flexible. We started from some basic principles and we realized that we needed to make changes to be successful in the future. HP was very flexible in addressing some of the gaps that we came across through our deployment journey and took those on as challenges and addressed them. They made things happen.

Rather than say that it was too late, or that we've agreed and signed off on things, or that they're sorry but we'll have to go through a second round of investments, HP was very happy to reopen designs and to reconsider parameters and constraints. They gave us an evolutionary path through our deployment cycle to make sure that when we were up and running with our initial customers, we'd be able to meet all the requirements.

I don't want to name competitors because we have had excellent support from various vendors through our journey, but what we've found was that all of our requirements were met by HP. They gave us a good road map for the future and price-point wise, HP gives us more value.

I think the one piece of advice is that HP has an absolutely enormous, very broad, very conclusive, comprehensive infrastructure portfolio. Study that with the HP specialists. Make sure that you find the right insertion point and then be very clear about your notion of growth. Be absolutely precise about what you believe your 12-24 months will look like, how they play out, and keep that vision visible to your HP-partner team up front.