HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

My main use case for HPE Alletra Storage is VMware.

The fast performance has benefited our organization. 

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I prefer most are the copy of virtual volumes. These features benefit my organization by providing fast performance and low latency.

GreenLake AI Ops does not enable me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations.

The solution has reduced my data management operation expenses by around 40%. The solution has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by approximately 70%.

I assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity and efficiency positively as postive. It helped me reduce the volume data with high deduplication and compaction of data every day. HPE Alletra Storage could help my organization hire tiered storage to improve performance.

What stood out in my evaluation process was the payment by credit card. 

HPE Alletra Storage does not provide a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. In the next release, the diagnostic application for use on another storage provider should be included.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for three years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization; at the moment, the size is adequate as we have not increased yet.

Technical support is very helpful, especially during deployments. 

I selected HPE Alletra Storage since I was not using another solution to address similar needs.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as very easy, as the technician made the process simple to complete.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage. The data points of my return on investment include the protection for mission-critical operations and IT infrastructure, better performance, and the assurance of a good investment.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the cost was very high last year. That said, the HPE Alletra Storage product is very good.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered upgrading it with more memory, which I believe would be better.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to look at your personal requirements and ensure stability. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a six.

HPE Alletra Storage is being used for systems for online banking transactions. We have sold this to the main bank that connects with all other banks, and the transactions occur in real-time.

HPE Alletra Storage comes with zero downtime, which is its best feature. It has real-time replication available, so no additional features need to be bought when purchasing the system. It can be cost-effective in this sense, with no extra cost for the customer to own any services. 

HPE Alletra Storage supports up to five petabytes, which is enormous. It simplifies storage operations such as provisioning and day-to-day management. It is a one-window operation, making it easy to manage.

The user interface, configuration, and customization could be improved, though the configuration is currently very easy. Even the migration from one platform to HPE Alletra Storage is very smooth. 

Pricing could be optimized, as it is always a challenge. The competition offers some storage solutions at lower prices, making the cost a significant factor.

We have been working with HPE for approximately 25-26 years.

Some users of HPE Alletra Storage mention that they would prefer higher scalability, although it is generally good.

We have recently sold a lower model of HPE Alletra Storage, but its performance is good. We are in the process of selling them the top-of-the-line HPE Alletra Storage 10000 series, B10000. Once it is installed, we can gather customer feedback, but at the moment, they are satisfied with the lower model as their operational requirements are not as demanding. The next phase project is called a micro payment gateway. For this, they have to perform a tech refresh, and they are opting for a higher model of HPE Alletra Storage B10000. This choice was made because they are satisfied with the lower models they are currently using. They are comfortable with the software as a service that HPE Alletra Storage offers.

HPE technical support is very good, and the customer service is rated 10 out of 10.

Positive

HPE 3PAR is not upgradable anymore, so it is being replaced with the HPE Alletra Storage C40 model. Other solutions, such as Dell PowerStore and Data Domain, have also been sold.

Its price can be optimized. The cost before deployment is significant to customers, but post-deployment cost analysis is not common.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten out of ten.

It runs our corporate and restaurant data center.

It reduces the need for a specialized storage engineer. Uptime has been high, so it has reduced outages or downtime.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. It reduces the need for advanced engineers to do configurations and customization.

It routinely opens tickets on its behalf for support and hardware replacements without our intervention and downtime.

The guarantee of data availability is very important to our organization.

HPE Alletra Storage has significantly helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. We have always used it, but I know from dealing with other storage devices that it significantly reduces the complexity and the time to deploy.

The operating system works well for IOPS. It has got more overhead than we use, so performance has been good. 

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. There is auto ticket generation and auto hardware replacement with support.

There is ease of use for junior admins. We have VMware integrations for data stores, cloning operations of existing data stores, and InfoSight analytics.

I do not have any issues with it. It has been good for us. There are no cons that I see, and that is why we use it.

There are no additional features that I would want to see. 

I have been using this solution since HPE bought Nimble. It has been five years.

It is stable.

It scales fine. We have added shelves on an add-need basis in the past without any issues.

HPE provides good customer service for us. We have never had any issues with response time and resolving problems.

Deployment was very simple and straightforward, performed by junior administrators.

In my view, we have got our return with the ease of use and reduction of technical skill sets. 

It is fairly priced. It is in line with industry standard pricing and cost models.

I evaluated IBM, NetApp, and Dell solutions. I chose HPE in the end because Nimble was a very stable platform that I have used for a long time with great success.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for simplicity, uptime, cost, and InfoSight analytics.

We primarily use the solution for virtual machines and hypervisors. We use it mainly in data centers. 

The solution has provided us with a solution that is reliable and cost-effective. 

The reliability is very good. 

It's cost-efficient compared to other competitors. We noted the cost-benefit almost immediately. The reliability and consistency benefits that we appreciate took a few months to appear.

We've also used the solution InfoSight with this product.

The guarantee of data availability is very important to us, and this solution is very good in that regard. We store transactional data on it. 

The capacity efficiency is excellent. 

Its ledger helps us simplify storage operations such as provisioning and day-to-day management. 

The solution provides us with a cloud-like operation model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. We were planning on moving to the cloud. However, this has given us a good alternative. We get to own everything yet keep our data center. It helps mitigate security complications that come with the cloud and also helps with latency issues with networking.

It provides predictable performance and capacity for applications without sacrificing data integrity. It's helped us reduce the time we spend on capacity planning. It's also less complicated to manage than the alternatives. It's also been able to reduce our data management operation expenses by possibly around 10%.

The energy usage could be further improved. Generally speaking, if it uses less energy than the alternatives, it would be great.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is good; it's better than the industry standard.

While I can't say for sure if the solution provides modular, non-disruptive capabilities to scale up and scale out, my understanding is that it does. 

We've only talked to technical support once. They were very good. 

Positive

We have also used Pure, and offerings from Dell and NetApp. There were some features from Pure that are helpful.

The learning curve on the deployment is a bit high. That said, overall, it was relatively easy. We had three people involved in the setup on the storage side and then on the backroom side, we had about eight people, so we had 11 people in total working on the product. It took a couple of months to fully deploy. While it does require monitoring, there isn't much maintenance needed. 

We generally handled the solution in-house with some help from HP. 

We're a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

New users should first do their homework and lay out what their needs are before they jump in and make a purchasing choice. 

Our main use case for the HPE Alletra Storage is VMs.

The feature of the HPE Alletra Storage I appreciate most is the speed. These features have benefited our organization by providing general data for our customers.

The GreenLake AI Ops enables me to get assistance from the senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations.

The solution has reduced our data management operations expenses; however, I could not provide a specific number since we were offline for a few years.

The solution has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning by approximately 80%.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as oversizing everything, so we have never really hit any kind of limit.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-like operational model has affected my operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management by making it very easy to navigate and easy to get to everything I need.

There is nothing I can think of offhand to improve HPE Alletra Storage or for additional features that should be included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for probably eight months now, while we have had Nimbles for years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as something we do not want to experience downtime, crashes, or performance issues with.

HPE Alletra Storage scales very with the growing needs of my organization. I have expanded usage, and the process was smooth as we upgraded just to add size.

I would describe my customer service experience with technical support as good. On a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best, I would rate customer service/technical support as a ten. We have a good response time.

Before adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were replicated, which is what we considered to address similar needs.

My experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage was that it was an expansion, not a brand new hire, and it was pretty much the exact same.

I have not seen a tangible return on investment with HPE Alletra Storage.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that I see a price, but that is about it.

We have been an HPE shop, so I have not really seen the need to switch from that when considering other solutions before selecting HPE Alletra Storage.

My advice to another organization that would consider HPE Alletra Storage is that Zerto is probably one of the best, as we do SQL servers and everything. 

For using HPE Alletra Storage overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have two 9K arrays in two different data centers. We primarily use them for VMware and database backends. 

The ease of setup was huge for me, as I'm the only storage admin for our company. The ease of upgrading is great as well. We just recently did an upgrade to it and added a couple of more shelves. 

The simplicity and the ease of having everything in one solution are important for us. With the 9K we run pretty much 90% of our company's data on there. Outside of VDI, VDI, we're using Nimble. We've had the Nimbles for six years now. We're actually looking to replace those here in the next 18 months, and I'm looking at Alletra to do that with. 

With the tie-in through GreenLake, it offers a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. It's helped with deployment and provisioning. With ease of setup and provisioning, it's much simpler than even the 3PAR was. It's helped us speed up.

The guarantee of data availability is important. We have 100% uptime. It was a big deal for us - especially since I'm the only administrator. It seems to imply an ease when it comes to fixing issues, although we haven't had any.

We'd reduced the time spent on storage provisioning. It's 60% to 70% faster than what we're used to. Once we got the base set up, it's easier to go through the provisioning and upgrades. The usability from an administrator standpoint is just so much faster. 

Alletra itself seems really solid. We had a good base with 3PAR, which we're replacing Alletra right now. However, the integration with DCCS could still use some work. It's in its infancy and needs more features. 

I've been using the solution for about a year and half.

The stability, so far, has been good. I haven't had any issues or downtime. I've never needed to call support.

It's very user-friendly in terms of scaling. When we added shelves, the install took no time at all. Adding servers or storage to two servers is very easy. It's much easier than the 3PAR was. The interface has just been spectacular. 

Alletra customer support has been really good. They are speedy and really knowledgeable. HPE support overall is fair. I do a lot of calls for compute and storage. In some other areas, it is hit or miss. Alletra support is excellent. 

Neutral

We are replacing 3PAR with Alletra. We knew we wanted to stick with HPE. We also had some older Dells that we replaced with this. 

The deployment is very easy.

We have witnessed an ROI, however I do not have specific KPIs.

I have a great team at HPE that helped me out with sales and engineering. The pricing was very good, especially when we were figuring out bundles. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Our main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are strictly for block storage, with no SMB, no NFS, no SAN replication, snapshots, or anything; it's strictly block.

One example of how the features of HPE Alletra Storage benefited my organization is the Nimble reliability. We had a single hard drive failure with all the other units we had, and we got a notification saying, 'Hey, we've detected a hard drive failure. Parts coming out.' It arrived the next day, and it was good.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I most prefer are its speed, as we were having issues with some of our VMs running into wait time on the older all-flash unit, and moving to the new Alletra's fixed the issue with no tweaking, no tuning, and it's awesome—basically set and forget, as Nimble has always been.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization, eliminating the planning for growth since it tells me, 'You have this amount of capacity, this is your deduplication, we estimate you could throw on this many VMs or this amount of storage.' I just sign into the stats page and see what I can do.

Regarding capacity planning, HPE Alletra Storage has helped us. We used the calculator on the website to figure out what we would need, and when we started moving over the VMs, we were surprised with more caching and deduplication than we had on the other units, so now we don't have to think about capacity.

I would assess HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as good. It was only half-populated when we purchased it, allowing us to buy additional disks and slide them into place as we've done with the Nimble's in the past.

Our usage of HPE Alletra Storage is unique. We just use it as two standalone units for block storage, without replication or a metro cluster. I wouldn't say HPE Alletra Storage has reduced our data management operations expenses since we spec'd it out with the size we needed and with the projected growth.

HPE Alletra Storage offers a cloud-operational model on-premises for managing data infrastructure through GreenLake, as the web interface provides access to the GUI, which features the same interface as the rest of the HPE website.

To improve HPE Alletra Storage, a couple of things could be addressed. This is more on the support side, as the initial cost is for a very large company. Especially for smaller companies, it would be nice if there were more disk add-ons or incentives, such as 'If you buy our system with our forever warranty, you get new controllers every three years.'

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage since it was still Nimble before HPE bought them, and we went through the CS100, 300, the hybrid flash, the all-flash, and then the Alletra, which we got last year around March.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as good. It works just as the Nimble's have, and we haven't had any issues; it's basically set it and forget it.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as good. We ran into a small issue with some licenses that came through email not working for whatever reason, and we had to get a couple of different technical people involved who were confused and just regenerated new licenses, which fixed the issue.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using the Nimbles and we also had some older 3PAR equipment still floating around.

My experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage was pretty simple. I basically unboxed it, put the rails in, slid it in, and turned it on. It couldn't have been any easier, and I was happy, seeing no improvements needed.

I wouldn't say we have seen an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage as we purchased it knowing what we were going to get, so it's just there, and we use it.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Alletra Storage, we talked about the pricing earlier, so it would be nice if there were incentives to use. 

When we purchased everything, it came with the GreenLake support and add-ons, which seemed okay. It was around $1,000 on the bill, and while that doesn't account for much when you're buying something for $60,000, it could be better with credits or something for the support person running after it—even if it's not monetary, it could be 'Get one of our HPE shirts.'

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered Pure heavily. The only reason HPE won over Pure was that HPE had the GreenLake integration and was still rolling out the Gen11s and Gen12s, promising more features to come. Pure was substantially cheaper and significantly faster than HPE Alletra Storage.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to go with it if you have other HPE hardware as it integrates so seamlessly. If you don't, I would suggest Pure, as Pure is still faster when put up against the Nimble; they offer better incentives, but since we have HPE everything, it was just better to stay in the same ecosystem.

I rate HPE Alletra Storage eight out of ten.

The clients' use case for HPE Alletra Storage is mainly for banks and telco companies, which are mostly the sectors who use this solution.

HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations. One of the strong points of HPE is its friendly UI, which is super easy, and users can have a short tutorial and start working on it.

HPE Alletra Storage provides predictable performance and capacity for applications. This prediction may not be entirely accurate, as it's more about prediction, but it gives insights about the average compression and some statistics on the stored data.

The main benefits people receive from HPE Alletra Storage include saving money, as its price compared to other high-end storage is competitive, and it's easy to manage, with an uptime availability of almost 99.999. While all storage boxes must be available at that level, I haven't encountered any issues with it.

The most valuable features in HPE Alletra Storage that I have found are the compression and deduplication, along with the availability of the storage box. In the last two years, I haven't received any negative feedback about it from customers.

HPE can improve HPE Alletra Storage by adding some features to be available from the offline GUI, especially related to snapshots and taking a snapshot for the whole storage, as some customers need this feature. This feature is available in Dell storage but not in IBM storage and Alletra Storage, and it's available from the Data Lake for snapshotting the whole environment at once.

I have been working with HPE Alletra Storage for almost two years.

It's very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It's easy to scale. I have performed many scale-ups and scale-outs successfully. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage's technical support a nine out of ten. I don't give the full mark for any vendor or any product, as if you're the best, you don't need to improve. Before I joined HPE, I was a customer, and I raised tickets, which were solved easily, and the support representatives were very helpful. This was one of the reasons I joined this company.

Positive

I have worked with other vendors and products before I joined HPE, including IBM Storage, all-flash FS9000, and A9000, and the efficiency is almost the same. It holds up competitively.

The capacity and efficiency of HPE Alletra Storage are good. I am satisfied with HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as it performs deduplication and compression with a good ratio.

The initial setup for HPE Alletra Storage is very simple. If you do the prerequisites correctly, you can complete it in a few minutes. It all revolves around the prerequisites, such as ensuring the ports are opened and the account for the Data Lake is created correctly.

The main competitor in the market for HPE Alletra Storage is Dell Storage, as they are selling at a low price. Dell Storage PowerMax VMAX is a competitor, alongside Dell and IBM storage, though IBM storage might be more competitive.

It is helpful to integrate HPE Alletra Storage with HPE GreenLake, but not all customers have integrated it with HPE GreenLake, as there are some regulations here to connect the storage boxes to the cloud. However, a few customers have integrated it to get all the features available on HPE GreenLake and some statistics and insights. 

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a nine out of ten.

Our main use case for HPE Alletra Storage is that we are running Cumulo software on it.

The feature of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most is manageability. 

This solution has reduced our data management operation expenses, though I don't have exact numbers regarding how much it has reduced our data management and operation expenses. 

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time I spend on capacity planning; we are easily able to expand the storage whenever we want to. It has reduced the time I spend on capacity planning by about 50%.

I don't have any suggestions on how HPE Alletra Storage can be improved. I have no complaints. I don't have any additional features I want to see in future releases. I don't see anything that would be a perfect world kind of idea for improvement.

HPE Alletra does not really provide a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. The limitation is that we cannot really downscale HPE Alletra Storage, even if we are running on the GreenLake; that's the nature of the storage.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for two years already.

I have experienced no issues yet, so I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as 100%. So far, we have had no downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

We haven't scaled yet, but I suppose we will be by the end of this year.

I haven't used customer service and technical support yet since there was no issue. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as a ten; I hope it will be good.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we've been using ProLiant before, also running a Cumulo cluster, but it was not over the GreenLake; it was just classical financing.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as quite easy; the Cumulo cluster was deployed in a couple of hours.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, we've been quoting Quantum. They didn't meet our technical expectations. 

What stood out to me in my evaluation process, both positive and negative, when comparing these options was definitely the price, and we were looking for high throughput and variability of network services since we are a specific industry, the VFX industry. Scalability definitely led us to consider a change, as did cost and performance as we are running full-flash HPE Alletra Storage.

We are not really benefiting from the features of HPE Alletra Storage directly; we are benefiting mostly from the benefits of the Cumulo software we are running on it. 

We are not using GreenLake AI Ops, so it does not enable us to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations. 

I would definitely advise other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage to choose the GreenLake financing since the direct financing for us was not really effective. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a ten.

We use it for general-purpose virtualization and workloads - everything from SQL servers to web servers and everything in between.

The key part is reliability, and, by being simple to operate, uncomplicated, I don't have to have a massive team of people to support it. I've managed to reduce my headcounts or reallocate the headcount to other purposes.

The ease of use and ease of installation are great. It requires very little maintenance once it's up and running.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing the infrastructure. The easy-to-use makes day-to-day management easy. 

I don't need to send people to week-long training courses. They don't have to be specialists. I can put a generalist onto it, and they can pick it up within a few days with very little supervision. It's making my life easier.

It's always been very good at predicting problems and preventing them. It's based on the Nimble Storage technology, which I have had before. I've always been very happy with that. It logs cases to preempt issues when failures come along. And sometimes I've even been shipped to parts before I know parts have failed. I can't really ask so much more. 

The guarantee of data availability to our organization helped encourage the decision to go with Alletra. This aspect is crucial. We're a financial services company. Data is very important to us. If we lose a customer's record or it gets corrupted, we are potentially fined by the regulator for that loss of information. Reducing or removing liability is critical.

Alletra has helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning in a way. There used to be two teams dealing with it. It's moved into the general virtualization space. One team now looks at it rather than having a separate storage team looking after it. In that sense, it's saved us time.

Alletra has helped us reduce time spent on storage provisioning. It's not going from team to team. It's a single process, and it's baked in. Automation can be kicked into the whole process of provisioning a virtual machine. My workloads are all virtualized. It's now a simple click for me. The script runs and then it provisions the storage, allocates the virtual machine, and powers it on.

The solution has helped us with the storage performance in terms of IOPS. We've stopped having calls about peaks and workload stress. I just don't get those calls now. We no longer need to measure out IOPs now since we no longer get calls. 

Alletra has helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets by about 40%.

Apart from the obvious improvement of making it cheaper, I'm pretty happy with it. Some of the upgrades can take a while to come through. The release cadence of versions is a little bit slow. That said, it fits the build for my workload.

I'd like the pricing to be better for renewals. It would be ideal if they could co-term together. If I buy the base unit, then I upgrade something, and then I buy an additional shelf, they all have different life expectancies and warranties. Instead, when I upgrade, I'd like to co-term everything together at the time of upgrade so that everything aligns over time. This would be better than having multiple renewal points in the future. 

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The stability is rock-solid. 

The scalability has some limitations. You have to be careful that you get the right control ahead of time. Some of the lower mid-end do have a limited number of shells you can add on. It would be nice at that lower end to do the maximum number of shelves as well. That said, I understand it all comes down to economics at the end of the day. 

Technical support has always been brilliant. Thanks to the in-built reports, they get all the metrics. They get all the logs. Half the time, they are telling them what the problem is. It's always nice to have a more proactive experience on the support level.

I've only had a couple of problems in terms of having to spend, maybe, five minutes on hold once with technical support.

The support has slowed a little bit in terms of response times since HPE took over. However, they're selling many more units to a much wider variety of customers. It's still the same support experience. I don't have to send logs in. They've already got the logs. It's already been analyzed. Half the time, I rang up, and the person said, "I'm already looking at the logs. I found the problem." And I haven't even been able to start to explain who I am.

Positive

I've used Nimble in the past. Prior to that, it was EMC which had moved to Dell. EMC wasn't fit for purpose and was due for replacement, so we took the opportunity to move to a different platform. 

I've moved away from a complicated fiber channel network that required a storage team to do meta-LANs, LANs, worldwide zoning, and all that sort of thing to just being an ISCSI-based solution, which the virtualization team could work within their workload.

The setup was very easy. We did the initial array with the support and then after that, we installed every other array ourselves. We don't we don't use support services at all.

We will be moving to Green Lake, hopefully, sometime next year, and updating the existing units into Green Lake along. It's part of a much larger deal we're doing to try and transition from Capex to a more Opex model through Green Lake. We use Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Clouds. 

Deploying was very easy. The box gets shipped. It went to the racks very easily with no problems at all, and I was up and running within half an hour. So there's minimal cabling required, and minimal everything is required. You just need a direct connection to a laptop, and you can set it up. The setup installation is designed to be simple.

We did not use any outside assistance. 

The ROI has been good. It's increased operational efficiency. It's increased uptime and it's reduced operational overheads.

Pricing was more about deciding the solution and having the procurement team deal with costs. I don't have any visibility on pricing. 

Licensing is not an issue, as everything's been baked in. There are no separate licenses to add on. Unlike other providers, where you get the base model and then you add licenses on top, everything's included. I don't have to worry about licensing with Alletra.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It meets my operational workload in terms of internal support. Prices are always going be the tricky as, obviously, I'd always always like it cheaper. The support model is excellent and upgrades are available.