Huawei OceanStor Reviews

We use Huawei OceanStor as a storage solution for our organization.

The solution could improve by having better integration.

I have been using Huawei OceanStor for a few years.

Huawei OceanStor is stable.

Huawei OceanStor is scalable.

We have many users using this solution in my organization.

The technical support from Huawei OceanStor is good.

We previously used another similar solution to Huawei OceanStor and we switched because the price was better.

The installation of Huawei OceanStor is easy and took approximately three hours.

I am able to do the implementation myself.

The price of the solution could be less expensive. However, there are not any licensing costs.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Huawei OceanStor an eight out of ten.

We are integrators so we're selling this solution to our customers. Many are from the transportation sector, public broadcasting sector, or they are service providers. They use it for internal IT systems. Our clients cover the full range from small to enterprise size companies. We are a gold partner with Huawei and I'm an IT solution architect. 

Most clients tell us that the most valuable feature of the solution is the value for money. They feel that they receive numerous great features for a reasonble price. IBM and HP charge a lot more for what OceanStor customers get as part of the product. 

There are some small things in the solution that can be improved. Supporting software is one of them and the integration with mainstream solution technologies could be better. They are small issues and generally the technology functions well. It's not an issue caused by the vendor but rather due to external circumstances and the cessation of cooperation between Chinese and US companies. 

I've been using this solution for about eight years. 

It's a very stable solution. 

The scalability is an easy process. It has a good capacity. 

Technical support is good, we're very satisfied with it. 

Initial setup is very straightforward and easy. Deployment takes no more than 10 or 15 minutes. It takes three or four people from our company and the client company to carry out deployment. We carry out maintenance, it usually takes three people. 

I would recommend everyone to try the product, they will be surprised at how good it is. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

The solution makes migration very simple. 

The initial setup is very easy.

The management of the solution is easy and documentation is very much simple. 

With the help of its documentation, if someone is new to the solution, all they need to do is follow the documentation and they can handle the product with ease.

The solution is scalable.

The pricing is very reasonable. 

I cannot recall coming across areas that need specific improvements. 

Technical support could be more helpful.

I'd like to see some cloning or snapshot functionality in the near future. 

I've been working with the solution for the last five years or so. It's been a while. 

The solution can scale well. A company that needs to expand it can do so with ease. 

Technical support is okay. However, sometimes within the support system, they provide some sort of canned automatic reply to the customer instead of setting up communication with the customers.

The initial setup is very simple. Even if a user is new to the product, they can just look at the documentation, and it will guide them through the process. 

We do not find the pricing to be very high. It's quite affordable. 

We are a distributing partner of Huawei. I have experience in terms of installation, configuration, and professional services.

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

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd also advise on Dorado Storage, however, they would need to use a professional service. 

We have some Huawei 9000 cases for our virtualization, and for the storage block-level and mass as well, For HyperMetro too, for 18560 and 6800, this solution is critical for our company. The product is the main one on the line, it serves the entire company. Our usage expands daily.  We are partners with Huawei and I'm the technical lead. 

The solution is easy to install and configure. It's also very stable. 

I'd like to see a more stable, lighter Metro and better logging system for issues and resolution in the future. 

We've been using this solution for the past 12 months. 

For HyperMetro there are some requirements for stable and dark fiber links. We have some issues with the dark fiber, but mostly their storage is very stable. We have around 3,500 users for 6800 and a total of almost 6,000 users. We used Huawei for the initial deployment but for the second deployment we mostly did it by ourselves.

Customer support is very good but if you want support and you don't have SNS switches as well, the complete solution is not there. Sometimes Huawei support doesn't extend to that. For other products they generally ask you to contact other principals. I don't think Huawei isselling their SNS switches anymore.

We didn't abandon the solutions we were using before Huawi. We have some EMC solutions which are also installed and running. 

It's very easy to install and configure the solution. It didn't take too long, it was more about fulfilling requirements for storage and deployment, so probably a month to six weeks. 

I would recommend this solution and rate it a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case of the 6400 and 6800 is as flash in our private cloud and the 5400's we use for backups in private cloud.

The most valuable feature is the availability. 

The upgrading process needs improvement. Deploy it and notify the customers when new versions and stuff comes out. I don't think they're doing that well.

In the next release, they should have encryption. Compliance is a very big thing in security. If we got encryption in the boxes, clients would be satisfied. We'd also like to see deduplication, compression, and NVMe capabilities. 

It's stable. What we're currently working on is very stable. 

We've got about five or seven clients that are using it.

We struggle a bit with technical support with the language barrier. 

The initial setup of the 55-5400 didn't take long because the guys knew already how to deploy. The 68's took long. 

Pricing is very fair. It's competitively priced. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I would recommend it to someone considering it. Pricing is very competitive and the routing is very good. 

We use it as primary storage for our Virtualization environment (vmware) under HP Blade system. We store the VM and the data on int (SQL Server, etc).

The solution has improved our organization by speeding up our operations and increasing the scale of operations (growth capacity).

I like the solution's speed and the use of SSD technology. If I have to compare it to what we had before, I would say that it's easier to maintain and to support (on top of performance). It offers great capacity.

it servers not only as SAN but also NAS. The conectivity has a lot of options and prepares us for the use of Ethernet 10Gbit.

The configuration (web interface) is very simple and the dashboard provides all the basic information (health, etc) in a glimpe.

We haven't experienced any problems since we started using the solution a few months ago. I hope that this continues. Considering that this is a new technology and not a fast prototype, I don't think there will be any stability problems.

According to their specifications, the scalability is very good. We didn't have to scale yet, but in the future we might add more disks.

So far we never had to call support. We currently have a contract who is available 24 hours a day with four hours response time. But as we haven't used it before, I don't know if it's really good or not.

We had an Hitachi SAN AMS 2100 system, that provided us a great service along a lot of years, but that at the moment was completely obsolete (limited FC speed, disks starting to fail frequently, low relative capacity). The storage was not in par with the new servers and their capacities. The main cause of removal was the lack of official support. 

The deployment took a little longer. The installation and setup were just like any other product. It was not complex at all. We want everything to run smooth, so deployment took us about a week or two. But it could be done in two days' time, it is just that we preferred to be more secure and going step by step. In our case, we were moving a lot of data from the old system to the new one and we did this one thing at a time. So that is why it took so long.

We use a vendor team with great expertise in the solution.

Pay attention to other systems with licensing. This system included everything in perpetual mode. Setup cost and time is very simple. As a new player price is very competitive.

There are many different companies and products out there and we did look at a few of them, like HP, Dell, PureStorage and IBM but in the end the best quality-price ratio made this product the winner.

It would be very pretentious to give advice to anyone since the product is very simple and easy to use and we have it only for less than a year. I think the system has more features than we are using right now. Fortunately we have not the opportunity to check the quality of the service as till the moment we have not any problem. 
Perfection is difficult to achieve, so on a scale from one to ten, my rating is nine. F

Once we had to implement a completely new environment and we didn't need to buy another storage because of it's flexibility.

If your virtual machine that resides on it completely fills the storage space, thanks to it's built-in function of all-zero data space reclamation, you just have to ask to System Engineer to run a zero-free on hosts (thin provisioned) and you will get more space instantaneously.

The horizontal scalability up to eight members and the possibility to distribute disks in domains made it my choice, it's perfect for any purposes because there is no waste of space.

The possibility to split disks into domains also provides a way to get the best "money saving" over "performance" ratio using tiering of disks, so you can use the right tier for any application you want to run on.

For example: for a server that only need to stream videos (sequential reading) you will create a mixed tier using SSD for caching and HDD for backend storage.

Unfortunately, this product doesn't support Flash Disks, but it's IOPS capacity is a great compromise.

The kernel stability makes it the best choice for preventing disasters, every member in cluster also had at least two active intelligences for redundancy, but in my experience, I never encountered any kind of problem. I think this hardware can last 50 years.

Absolutely not, as explained previously, with it's up to eight members for cluster, you can also start a new cluster if you need to expand the business over and over.

Unfortunately (or not), I've never had to interface with it, not even for an initial setup. It's really easy to implement in any existing environment.

The company for which I set up the system was born with this core solution.

Absolutely not, the product work out-of-the-box, you just need a knowledge about networking (in case of ISCSI) and FC protocol (in case of FiberChannel LUN provisioning that was my case).

This product value matches its price.

It's the best co-worker you could have with you! And he never gets holidays.

We are using OceanStor for enterprise and block storage. It is connected to our company and used as backend storage for different virtualization and database solutions. 

We purchased the HyperMetro feature, but we have not really used it. It would've been very interesting, but we have mainly used the option and clean features.

CFS integration is one area where OceanStor has some room for improvement. The CFS on OceanStor is dedicated, so it's not integrated with the existing active directory domain. That's a big issue with this service. Huawei could also improve the power unit on this storage solution. When we conducted some tests, we noticed that the autonomy for the BBU is not really long. Within 15 minutes, it totally went down. OceanStor is out of support and off the market, so Huawei is moving now to Dorado.

Also, the interface is in Chinese in some places. It would be helpful if they could release some versions without Chinese.

I've used OceanStor since 2017.

OceanStor's overall stability and performance are quite good. In terms of storage in full flash, we have not been pushing it to the extreme. But we haven't had any performance issues so far. 

OceanStor is supposed to be scalable, but we have not really tried it. For scalability, the company chose to move to another solution. They have a couple of systems for storage, with more than 200 hosts. 

Huawei technical support was not needed to fix production issues. But I got in touch with them once, and it wasn't very good because we did not get the solution. They were pushing us to embed it, which didn't work for our use case.

Setting up OceanStor is pretty simple compared to Dell EMC, but the time needed for deployment depends on many things. It took around a month because it has to go through several processes to access the data center, get approval, plan the activity, and follow all the internal procedures. So these things make the process take longer.

In terms of maintenance, we load patches from Huawei by open request. They have patches that need to be applied from time to time. Three people are administrating OceanStor directly within the company. We have outside support who can access it on demand, but three people are storage administrators within the company. 

OceanStor's pricing is based on features and volume. If you have a feature like IPCC One or HyperMetro, you will get the license for a specific volume. So when you reach that volume limit, you need to extend the license. That is a significant issue with it.

With many other vendors, the licensing model is mainly based on the feature. For instance, if a file is part of the license for Snapshot, once you have the license, it's not linked to the volume or the number of snapshots you do, even when you extend your storage capacity. It is a perpetual license not based on volume. But with Huawei, that is an issue because you need to extend it to still benefit from the feature if you exceed the volume. You have to pay a lot for data. I would estimate that it accounts for about 10% of the license, but the fact that it is based on volume is not a good point, in my opinion.

OceanStor is cheaper than Dell EMC, and its management interface is quite simple. Dell EMC's interface is also straightforward. When I compare OceanStor with the full flash of another vendor, I will say that it performed well with the full load, and we have not seen any efficiency issues.

I rate Huawei OceanStor eight out of 10. I would recommend it to other people.