Huawei OceanStor Reviews

We primarily use the solution for multiple network locations. We use XL servers and EIP software.

The performance of the solution is good.

Technical support could be improved on the solution.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is easy to scale as needed.

The technical support has been a let down for us. It's something the company has to work on. We haven't been satisfied with their level of service.

The initial setup isn't complex. It's quite easy and straightforward.

I handled the implementation myself.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd recommend the solution. We'd buy the solution again without any hesitation.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

Customers using in production environment

We deployed Huawei OceanStor because we had some problems increasing the number of users on our database and were suffering from slowness and downtime. Then we just thought the All-Flash represented a quick win. We implemented it and now most of our data-intensive transactions are sitting under All-Flash. 

We've gotten quite a good response from our users since we began using All-Flash.

The management is fine. And we get a quick response in case any component defaults. We have seen the benefits mostly.

We've been using this solution for about one year.

At first, we had some component failures - none that were critical because our system has built-in redundancy. We had a number of these failures at a component level, but that was quickly resolved through a firmware upgrade. We had some doubts we were going in the right direction by using the OceanStor solution, but all the problems got resolved through the firmware upgrade. I don't have much to say. Maybe our period of using it is too limited for me to say much about it.

I've had experience with support. In fact, even for this type of solution, hyperconverged, we took the product support that is standard. In fact, the alerts go to us and they also go to Huawei support because it's a critical system for us. We sometimes have Huawei contacting us to say we got something even before we contact them. This is good. Support has been good.

We've used NetApp, HP, and EMC.

The physical installation itself is quite fast, but we had to go through the requirements with the connections and servers, etc. I would say it took about five or six weeks.

Not yet measured

Since Huawei is a Chinese product we've got the tendency to think that it is very cheap. But Huawei is not that cheap. We compared Huawei's price before purchasing. We compared costs per GB to other suppliers, as well. We compared the cost to EMC and NetApp, which are quite nimble solutions. We had to also evaluate the local support that is in our country. We evaluated other criteria, as well. After these evaluations we chose Huawei. It was not only cost. Basically it's not the cheapest but it's in the mid-pricing. We've got the high end, the mid-price, then we've got the low end. Huawei would be in the middle.

I will keep it general and not provide a detailed analysis in terms of storage and the All-Flash requirements. In this case, people, especially application guys, should understand that All-Flash is not for all applications. This is important because of the cost of All-Flash compared to other storage solutions. In fact, you need to emphasize this very well and tell application guys that you're spending a lot of money on All-Flash when it's not really required. In my opinion, this is the main thing. Otherwise, you end up upgrading and upgrading and it's quite a budget for All-Flash compared to other storage.

We evaluated NetApp and EMC.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at a seven. 

I gave it a score of seven based on my experience with other storage solutions. We've used NetApp, HP, and EMC. We've used quite a number. In fact, I gave this score because of the support. It is quite a high score. But frankly, we're still going through the steps of implementing. We have our main database there. Now we are going to optimize further. It's not only because All-Flash costs money. We should use it optimally. There is a tendency for users to put all their data on the All-Flash. We also have cache solutions whereby a part of the data is on the All-Flash. We are trying to convince users that they don't really need All-Flash for all their data, for all their applications. Maybe in more time, I can compare and give you an idea, but not yet at this stage. I can't tell you which features we need, not yet at this stage.

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

The replication, both the synchronous and asynchronous are the most valuable features. 

The management is not a good feature in all of Huawei products. It's not easy or simple. Huawei has some problems with management and handling storage information from one interface.

Technical support needs improvement. It would be helpful if there was more support in my country. I'm from Poland and there's no big Huawei support here. We are a country and we have only two technical people from Huawei. Sometimes it's not enough.

Sometimes, we have problems with the storage controller, but after adjusting it works fine. Generally, it's a very good solution.

Technical support could be a problem. We have no big problem with the storage, but we do have problems sometimes. I have Huawei service with my license. In our country, there is no support center and generally, the support center is in China. Sometimes there are language barriers.

The initial setup was straightforward. The time it takes to deploy depends on the configuration. It can take a few hours if you are including mounting the storage and bigger deployments with the many controllers can take longer. It can take up to three days, depending on architectural complexities.

I'm an integrator, so I only sell it and deploy the solution in the customer environment.

The customer should know what he wants and the person who manages the storage should outline the needs. You should be aware of what the seller wants to sell and what he wants to do. But this is relevant to every storage product. As a seller, it's very important to not promise the customer better than what the solution delivers. OceanStor is the best Huawei product for the data center.

I would rate this solution seven out of 10. I've never had a storage solution that I've wanted to give more than an eight to. There is no solution without disadvantages.

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.

• High storage capacity integrated with the core business.
• Possibility to create new virtualized IT services connected to this storage.
• Possibility to share very high quantity of information between high quantity of users.

Stability: The product is designed to have always HA (High Availability) with redundant network and processors.

Scalability: Willing to integrate high quantity of volumes from different protocols for storage/HD (SAS, SCSI, etc.).

Compatibility: Fully compatible with network based storage both TCP/IP for NAS and FC (Fiber Channel) for SAS.

Configuration complexity and the tools available.

No. Very stable, once it has been properly configured.

No. Very scalable.

Could improve. There is a lot of documentation, fairly complete, but the technical assistant in my experience could improve.

No. Just using before an open-source-based solution and not scalable.

The configuration process is very complex, and the proprietary tools/software available for configuration are kind of tricky to install and run.

It's roughly affordable.

Yes. HP and EMC. Those are considerably more expensive than OceanStor.

Check for the new version (V3). It seems to have some interesting features and improvements on the configuration process.