What is our primary use case?
We use it for general-purpose virtualization and workloads - everything from SQL servers to web servers and everything in between.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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%.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is rock-solid.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
We did not use any outside assistance.
What was our ROI?
The ROI has been good. It's increased operational efficiency. It's increased uptime and it's reduced operational overheads.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
