HPE Primera Reviews

Regarding clients and day-to-day use cases, we normally slice the array and then identify the solution name, and we also take care of the implementation.

The highlight of HPE Primera is its compression feature, and the user interface looks good; we can easily automate the tasks we want to accomplish.

I have seen a return on investment from using HPE Primera, particularly due to the improved compression which allows us to store more data even in limited space.

In terms of advantages, I don't see any improvements needed; however, when comparing HPE Primera with Hitachi and KvSP Harrison, it's not on the enterprise level, but we can go ahead with mid-level to enterprise cloud solutions.

I don't have any specific ideas for additional features for HPE Primera in the next release; currently, all the features seem good, and I don't see any missing functionalities.

I believe architecture could be scaled up to rate controllers, but I don't have any specific suggestions for improvements.

Stability could be improved because maintenance-wise, issues with the controllers can sometimes be challenging; enhancements in high availability architecture could help.

I have been working with HPE Primera for almost five years now.

HPE Primera is stable.

If I were to rate the stability on a scale from one to ten, I would give it an eight.

The reason I rate it eight instead of ten is that ten would mean it's perfect, but issues could arise with the controller replacement and troubleshooting; it requires more skilled maintenance.

Stability could be improved because maintenance-wise, issues with the controllers can sometimes be challenging; enhancements in high availability architecture could help.

HPE Primera is completely scalable.

Tech support from HP for HPE Primera is good.

When rating tech support from one to ten, I would give it a five, indicating it's very good.

The installation of HPE Primera is easy; the initial implementation is handled by the vendors, mainly HPES, and the subsequent configuration is straightforward.

The installation time for HPE Primera is typically one or two days, and that's for the sync.

For engineering and architectural requests related to HPE Primera, two engineers are fine; we don't need many more than that.

For maintenance, one person is enough to manage HPE Primera effectively.

I have seen a return on investment from using HPE Primera, particularly due to the improved compression which allows us to store more data even in limited space.

Regarding pricing, HPE Primera is moderate; it's neither cheap nor costly, but it's a reliable solution with reasonable costs.

The licensing for HPE Primera is typically on a yearly basis, though sometimes it may be permanent for certain pages where partner relations are involved.

We only pay for the license of HPE Primera; there are no additional costs for support, and we only require help for urgent fixes or new advanced routers.

My advice for those looking to use HPE Primera is to take advantage of the redo conversion and visualization solutions like VMware.

Overall, I would rate HPE Primera a ten, as it's a very good product. I give it ten points out of ten.

I don't see any challenges with HPE Primera at the moment; everything runs smoothly without problems.

I'm uncertain about future integrations or APIs for HPE Primera since I currently don't have any API solutions; we automate some processes through Python and other tools but I don't know if AI features will be added.

I'm not sure about wanting better documentation or reporting because HPE Primera fulfills our current requirements.

My overall review rating for HPE Primera is ten out of ten.

HPE Primera is used for shared storage. We have two servers connected via fiber channel to primary storage. In these two servers, we are running three databases. These three databases are installed in the shared storage. So, the shared storage is into the HPE Primera storage or disks.

We have 80 volumes of one terabyte each, and we have a total of eight terabytes capacity on Primera storage with an extra capacity of four terabytes for the caps. The applications running on the HPE server mount all the mounting points in the shared storage, including the database.

HPE Primera is used for shared storage.

Recently, we had many issues with HPE Primera storage, mainly in the leveling process, which caused many problems for the customers. In this architecture, the full application running over this storage gets stuck when one disk fails. We noticed that one leveling process, ungrouping process, and grouping process took around 12 hours to conclude. It was not a good experience.

The main issue was that we dimensioned the solution to 1,300 IOPS. The solution has 10 + 2 spare disks, and when one disc fails, the application gets stuck because the IOPS moves to 5,000 IOPS when it happens.

We noticed some specific limitations with the solution's graphical interface, which was not rich. The solution's main problem was the grouping and ungrouping process. We confirmed that the problem was with HPE Primera by stopping the whole application while labeling.

No IOPS was consumed from the application to the storage, even though the IOPS was 5,000. This means that 5,000 was just for the leveling of one disk. If two disks had failed, the problem would have been bigger than we experienced.

We delivered the first Primera storage in 2022.

The solution's performance using SSD disks is fantastic, but its performance using HDD disks is not so good. I don't know if that is because of some problem with the controller. We have a lot of customers that use 3PAR with HDD disks, and they don't have any problems.

Unlike 3PAR, HPE Primera storage only supports rate six. Whenever you have a problem with rate six, you need to spread and make a lot of copies. That could be the reason you have problems when you need to do an ungrouping of one disk. That could be the reason the performance was not good.

The experience of HPE Primera storage with HDD disks using rate six was not good. However, the experience of HPE Primera storage using rate six with SSD disks was fantastic.

HPE Primera has good scalability. You have 24 slots for SSD disks, and you can expand them well. You can put more controllers. I rate the solution's scalability a nine or ten out of ten.

Technical support's first response was quick. They analyzed and acted on the problem very quickly. However, the responses in levels one and two were not proper enough. We expected to receive a response about why one disc going down consumed 5,000 IOPs just for the ungrouping process. When the disk failed, the other 11 disks tried to share the checklist of the disk, and it consumed 5,000 IOPs just for that.

Neutral

An HPE third party did the initial setup of the solution. We did not face any issues implementing the solution.

The pricing for HDD was good.

My customer required that the storage be 3PAR. However, we could not deliver 3PAR, so we presented HPE Primera to them as the new HPE storage. Our HPE partner who sold the solution to us mentioned that HPE Primera is a very robust solution that could replace 3PAR in terms of life cycle.

When the problem happened, we opened a critical ticket with HPE. HPE analyzed it, and everything was okay with the configuration. The response HPE gave was to replace the HDD with an SSD. When we did that, the solution's capacity moved from 1.3 terabytes to 30 terabytes. One application that was expecting 1,300 IOPs moved to 30,000 IOPs. Any problem you face that consumes around 5,000 IOPs will be unimpacted by the application itself.

We won the competition because we were the existing vendor except for the hardware. We won the deal three years ago because we sold the solution together with the hardware. The hardware was not a big problem at that time. Later, the customer had to replace all the HDDs with SSDs due to problems.

We are still arguing with the customer that the problem was not ours because we only use 900 IOPs for 1,300 IOPs with SSD. It's not a problem from our end when the disks fail during HPE Primera's ungrouping process. We knew nothing about that when we bought the hardware through the HPE partner. Our experience with HDD was not good, but it seems to be good enough with SSD.

I would recommend the solution to other users, warning them to be careful when dimensioning their solution over HPE Primera. If they use HDD or SSD, they should consider that the system will use 5,000 IOPs when one disk fails.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for virtual machines. My company uses Cray ClusterStor E1000 NVMe Gen4 for all HPC clusters. HPE Primera is useful for data replication.

I can't see any useful features in the product since it is the staff members in my company who primarily use the product.

HPE Primera's deduplication area is not as good as the one offered by Dell PowerStore, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using HPE Primera for a year.

For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.

It is a scalable solution. It is possible to add or scale up the product.

The product is useful for medium-scale companies and not for large-scale businesses.

There are no plans to increase the use of the product currently in our company, but we may plan to increase its usage after five years.

The solution's technical support is good since it is available twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. The product's support team can be contacted via phone or email. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series and HPE MSA 1060 Storage. HPE Primera is a built-in storage. While NVMe is also the same. HPE MSA 1060 Storage is an entry-level storage. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series is in an end-of-life phase, so since our company wanted to shift to some other storage, we chose HPE Primera. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series was a good tool.

The solution can be deployed in a couple of days.

The product's vendor installed the solution in our company.

HPE Primera is a little bit higher than Dell PowerStore. The price difference between HPE and Dell is not a big deal. HPE NVMe Storage was purchased for around 60,000 USD. HPE Primera costs around 80,000 USD. My company has purchased HPE Primera under a five-year contract, so we are at peace now since we don't have to pay anything more to HPE.

The product is cost efficient in my opinion.

I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines.

The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks.

The product's interface is simple to use.

I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product.

The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines.

Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore.

Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB.

I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

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I cannot assist with that request. The review rating is .

There was a bank that used HPE Primera. Earlier, the bank was one of the main users of Primera. Now, HPE 3PAR StoreServ is used primarily in Serbia's banking sector.

HPE Primera's good features include its quality, stability, scalability, and other features that are good for storage. The software is almost all software. Though HPE 3PAR StoreServ claims to use different software, I feel it is the same as HPE Primera. I think that owing to its software, HPE 3PAR StoreServ was sold for almost thirteen or fourteen years by my company. In general, HPE is a very great and stable product. I think that the tool provides stability, and they have service. I think HPE was the first company to use chunklets. HPE is a great solution because it works actively in the production stage for all the use cases where it is currently required. Now, almost every main storage vendor has tools, like IBM EMC.

HPE Primera is not good enough as a storage solution as it does not provide a good NAS storage. The solution's NAS system is a part that is only used during the product's marketing. I think the area revolving around unified storage needs to be a little better at work. To be honest, during the implementation stage of HPE Primera, my company never used NFS or CIFS to create file sharing.

I have been using HPE Primera for two years. My company is a reseller of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

HPE Primera is not meant for enterprise-sized businesses, as it offers only two controllers. I don't know what the definition of an enterprise-sized storage solution is. Ten years ago, an enterprise-sized storage solution was something that had more than two controllers. Nowadays, everybody talks about storage solutions offered by NVMe, which is a two-controller storage system like IBM. I only see a few storage systems in the market that sell enterprise-sized storage, among which the first storage system was Hitachi VSP 5000 series, after which Dell PowerMax Storage and Huawei Dorado were released as enterprise-sized storage with several controllers. Serbia is a small country where my company doesn't have many customers with billing systems or something like that, so they need enterprise storage systems like IBM FlashSystem, which is used in a big telco company as a server for billing purposes, and they are very, very satisfied with the solution.

Five years ago or so, my company was availing of the support services offered, but my company doesn't receive support from any local HPE support team. Now, my company receives support from HPE through a company called Selectium, which represents Huawei and HPE at my place. The support from Selectium is great, but if you want to extend the warranty or some equipment, you are made to wait for a month or more, which was not something that was done before, meaning that it is not a technical issue from HPE's support team that operates locally in my country. Selectium represents HPE locally in my country.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

My company has access to HPE's knowledge base for the product's setup phase. HPE provides training with the help of dummies, which is very good. Suppose you plan to work with the storage solution for more than ten years. In that case, receiving detailed training from scratch may turn out to be the main reason why users can use the storage tool easily and may not find it complex to install and configure for applications.

The time required for the installation of the product depends on the number of tasks my company has and, especially if it is a new storage service, the installation task may take up to a week. In the last version of the software, HPE Primera, my company alone upgraded the software because in HPE 3PAR, we had to schedule the upgrading part considering that the upgradation functionality is chargeable, but now we can opt for upgrade strategies without help from HPE's support.

Two years is more than enough to take care of the installation part of HPE Primera. If my company sells an application to a bank, and they have a disaster recovery site, then we need two people to take care of the deployment part. One person will configure the tool, and another person will create and configure replication. My company's main customers for HPE Primera type of storage tools have a good SRM product for disaster recovery.

Cloud providers don't sell cheaper storage like HPE Primera since they have to earn money, and if you price your product half a million for the storage part, I don't think cloud providers will make any money. The main thing with storage systems is that many don't use expensive storage systems with cloud services.

I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the solution. In Serbia, every storage system comes with a license, which comes if my company places an order with HPE, especially for scenarios where my company wants support for applications after they expire, and the warranty charges are something my company must pay for such functionality. If my company faces some problems with any of our applications, we cannot contact support since we didn't pay for extended licenses for applications.

Suppose a user opts for extended warranty and repair services offered by the product. In that case, I believe that there is a need to pay almost 20 percent more than the product's actual price, but I am not sure since I am not involved in the area related to the product's extended warranty. I know that the costs for the extended warranty of HPE 3PAR were not so much compared to the present time. Presently, the prices for HPE products have been so high for the last three years that you might buy a new storage with the same capacity from IBM at a lower price.

HPE Primera's maintenance is very easy. If the product's memory, cache, or something else goes down, my company follows the procedure to replace the whole container, as we don't mess with the memory part. In the product, there is no need to follow some procedure to replace the disk, and we only check it when the replacement is done. If we see that the disk is not supported, then it is not a problem related to HPE Primera but something related to HPE 3PAR, where some old codes are used. In our company, we have several situations when the current OS does not recognize the new disk, and in such cases, we must delete it from the configuration and then upgrade the storage before putting in the new disk again in the system, but this is mainly for HPE 3PAR since HPE Primera has another system for to manage upgrades.

At the beginning of the year, I was in Barcelona. I see that the primary HPE storage products consist of the primary storage types used in countries like Denmark and France, where users don't know the group of storage systems that are greatly used in their countries even though it was so high. I think that HPE in other countries doesn't care about money, so I think that in some countries, HPE is not a legacy product, especially the ones where users have good knowledge about installing and maintaining primary solutions. The banks and telco companies in Serbia spend more money on the hardware than some other rich companies. Serbia has six and a half million people, and we are not in the European Union. With the average facility in Serbia, I think there is a need to have 500 EUR, and because of that, we are not in a good position to have a storage solution.

My company has never had a data loss and has always had a high availability regarding HPE Primera. My company has never had any problems with the application, so I think it is a good but expensive product. If I must compare the price and the quality, then the ratings I provide for the solution will change.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

We use the product for its flash storage. We use flash storage whenever we have mission-critical applications because it has low latency.

The product has better replication features than the previous products. It is easy for me to migrate VM from one Primera to another. Earlier, we had a lot of challenges. Now we can just do block load storage migration. This process is better. In the past, when we were using traditional hard disks, we always had latency issues, and people would complain about it. It doesn’t happen anymore. Disk failure has been reduced. We do not have any issues since we moved to the flash disk. The product is easy to configure and easy to manage.

Only HPE can manage the product. There is a single interface to manage multiple servers. The product should allow other low-cost management software to manage HPE Primera. If we have many HPE servers and storage, we must have HPE OneView to avail of all those features. If we don't have HPE OneView, we cannot manage them completely. HPE OneView’s license is expensive. There are other applications available in the market which are cheaper than HPE OneView and can also manage our infrastructure. When we add HPE devices to other applications, it doesn’t give us all the options to manage the infrastructure. The product should allow integration with other solutions.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is very stable. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a seven out of ten. In our organization, 1000 people are using the product. If we move to the cloud, we will not need the product.

It is not easy to reach the support team. We are based in Africa now. Sometimes, due to the time difference, they are not available. HPE does the delivery eventually, but it is not very quick.

Neutral

Previously we were using HPE 3PAR. HPE ended support for 3PAR and asked us to use Primera.

The initial setup is easy. It is all one click. The implementation is really easy.

The deployment takes around two days. The green field took two days, but the migration took two weeks because I needed time to prepare. Three people can deploy the solution.

The product is expensive. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

The product is worth using. It is worth investing in the product if you have an unreliable power supply. We don't need to have many people to manage the solution. It has less operational overhead. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We are using HPE Primera for a virtual environment. My virtual machine is residing on it.

HPE Primera is quite a stable storage system that provides good provisioning and allows for the changing of partition sizes.

The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved.

I am quite satisfied with the solution’s performance.

Currently, I don't find any difficulty expanding or scaling up the storage.

We have a tier-one support partner available to support HPE Primera storage, and we are satisfied with them.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is very straightforward. It takes around four to five days to deploy the solution.

The solution is quite cost-effective. HPE Primera is about a couple of thousand dollars cheaper than Dell NVMe.

Almost all storage has the same capabilities. HPE Primera has password protection and hybrid storage, and we can connect it to the fiber. It is not difficult to integrate HPE Primera with other third-party tools.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I use the solution in my company as a cloud infrastructure where we run VMs. My company uses VMware ESXi and HPE Primera as storage. HPE Primera is also useful to run and allocate machines to VMs.

The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price. Though I work for a big enterprise-sized business where the cost shouldn't matter much, I feel that HPE Primera is a bit costly.

I have been using HPE Primera for a year. My company is an end user of HPE Primera.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Around 100 employees in our company use the solution.

The product has been only used in our company for a year. The application for which my company has purchased HPE Primera is still being developed, so we need to have more uses for the tool.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

My company uses HPE 3PAR.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process.

The product's initial setup phase is a bit complicated since it can only be done by someone who is experienced. The tool has certain delicate settings to deal with during the setup phase.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Considering the whole infrastructure, the solution can be deployed in a week's time.

A team must take care of the product's deployment process since there are many areas, like the storage, network, and server parts.

The tool is expensive. I can say that HPE Primera is one of the costliest tools in the market.

HPE Primera has improved our company's data-intensive application performance. In our company, HPE Primera provides me with centralized access to all the data while allowing me to manage the storage and allocate different machines to VMs, making it a reliable and good tool.

My company hasn't used the product in a way that allows me to describe a scenario where the tool's capability was beneficial for our business. My company has not tried to use the tool's scalability features, considering that it has only been a year since it was installed in our company. I believe that the need to use the scalability feature of the product will come into the picture in a few years. Right now, the product's size and capacity are enough for our company to continue with it in our environment.

HPE Primera's most beneficial features for storage management tasks stem from the fact that my company can have online access to the health and all the other parameters of the product through HPE's website, which helps a lot. My company can get critical information about the storage from any place, and it also generates alerts, making it a very good solution.

My company is satisfied with HPE Primera's data protection capabilities since we can take snapshots of the VMs, which helps us ensure that the VMs are always protected.

My company has integrated HPE Primera into a whole new infrastructure, so we have never tried integrating it with the old infrastructure in our organization.

Though we know about HPE Primera's AI-driven operations, my company has not used it extensively.

As the IT landscape has been changing lately, users need to think of software-defined storage because it gives flexibility for expansion and is cheaper than HPE Primera. If you have money, you can go for HPE Primera.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We are HPE Primera’s customers. Our primary use case is to ensure quick and secure access to basic application data for online transactions.

HPE Primera provides me with system reliability and 100% data reliability. The storage is good and is consistently reliable and scalable, allowing me to use it whenever needed. The overall performance is great.

We would like to have more flash storage and its stability. This is an area of challenge for us.

I have been using this solution for four years.

The product is stable.

HPE Primera is good and scalable. We have 300 users for the solution, and two administrators manage it. The product also has online community engagement and patching management. It's a regular process.

The customer service and support is excellent.

We worked with something from Oracle, but it wasn't reliable. Therefore, we switched to HPE Primera.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us two days to deploy it.

The solution’s pricing is affordable and worth the money.

It's a commendable solution, especially suitable for online transactions. It is reliable in meeting data requirements. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.