HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

I added two shelves to the two Cisco systems and it's running well.

The management costs are very low. That's a big benefit for us.

They've been great. I have no issues with them.

Provisioning works and is very simple. It's easy to use. 

Setting up snapshots is very easy, and replication between the two systems is easy as well.

The solution provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. I just use it for day-to-day management tasks. Other than that, I don't do provisioning or anything like that. I use the native interface for that.

I keep it pretty up-to-date so I don't have to really worry about any issues. I had a couple of failed drives and they went as planned. It was no big deal.

The solution helped to reduce the time spent on storage for messaging. That said, I don't have too much to compare it to.

Its performance is very good - especially when I added a second shelf to the system. It spreads the data out over more spindles and also more solid-state drives.

They have a new update coming out that I'm going to be using as far as lack of snapshots. I'm going to put that into place as soon as I upgrade to the new version.

I've been using the solution for probably 12 months now. 

It's stable. I've had no issues so far.

It's easy to scale. I just added two new shelves to the systems, and it was straightforward. 

I've never had to call technical support. I've had two failed drives, and they had automated tickets set up with the driver arriving four hours later. 

I've been an HP customer for a long time. I've been happy with their support and reliability.

I've previously used Trinti. However, it is no longer a company.

The deployment was pretty simple. I figured out how to provide or provision the storage and set up replication, and I was done quickly.

The pricing and licensing are streamlined. I didn't have any issues. 

I did look at NetApp, among other solutions. I decided on Alletra based on its interface, ease of use, and the time I didn't need to spend worrying about it.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's simple to use and we haven't had any technical issues.

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.

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage include SAN storage.

The integration with VMware assists my organizations.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most are the UI. It functions as a black box. 

HPE Alletra Storage enables me to get assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations.

There is a one-click upgrade, which works well.

It's reduced our operational expenses.

We've been able to reduce time spent on capacity planning by 30%.

The capacity efficiency is very good. As a local government organization, we're barely filling it up.

The cloud-like operational model is great. 

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved by making the units lighter. This could be implemented in the next release.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for just about two years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as great; it's fantastic. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues because of HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE Alletra Storage scales with the growing needs of my organization effectively. We have not expanded usage or added anything to the HPE Alletra Storage.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as great. On a scale of one to ten, I rate customer support and technical support as ten.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using another solution to address similar needs. The other solution was Nimble, and the factors that led me to consider the change included signing up for GreenLake.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage as fantastic. We didn't face any challenges. 

I enjoy using HPE Alletra Storage as an engineer, however, I cannot say I have seen a definitive ROI with it.

I really don't deal with the financial side. That said, my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very good.

I don't know what other solutions I considered before selecting HPE Alletra Storage.

My advice for other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to consider its ease of use, integration with other HP products, and the helpful GreenLake portal. There are very up-to-date and valid plugins inside of vSphere, and I use it in VMware. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Alletra Storage overall as eight.

My main use case is that I'm on the technology stack for a rehabilitation company.

The feature of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most is the GreenLake suite one-stop shop. 

It has benefited my organization by allowing us to reduce our licensing costs from VMware from about 170,000 to about 70,000. Our footprint has reduced from 14 hosts to 6 hosts.

HPE Alletra Storage could be improved with greater compatibility of the HPE KVM or VM hypervisor with our other products, which would allow us to migrate off of VMware.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for three months.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as very good; we've had it for three months and we haven't had any downtime yet.

It should scale with the growing needs of my organization; we haven't had to grow it yet.

My evaluation of customer service and technical support has been good just on the initial setup; we haven't had to call for support for any reason.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, we were using Dell vSAN, and the biggest reason for changing was that the hardware was getting older and we wanted to reduce licensing costs.

I would describe my experience deploying HPE Alletra Storage as super easy.

Everything worked well during the deployment. The engineer from HPE provided great white-glove service and was able to deploy it easily for us.

We will see an ROI with HPE Alletra Storage. It was just implemented three months ago, so it will take time, but just on licensing costs we expect returns.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of HPE Alletra Storage was good—the whole gamut was impressive pricing.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I considered mostly Nutanix. HPE just had a greater growth opportunity than Nutanix.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to make the move. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

My main use case for the HPE Alletra Storage is storage for VMware.

The features of the HPE Alletra Storage benefit my organization by providing space saving through dedupe.

As it's a storage solution, I appreciate many features. The dedupe is amazing. 

I assess the HPE Alletra Storage's capacity efficiency as solid; it's working.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem around managing data infrastructure, and it's very effective because of cost savings and ease of finding information. Since I am using on-premise, there isn't a public or hybrid cloud provider involved.

I have no improvements or suggestions for additional features for the next release of the HPE Alletra Storage at the moment.

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

I assess the stability of the HPE Alletra Storage as excellent; I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

The HPE Alletra Storage scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization.

I evaluate my customer service and technical support experience as very good.

Prior to adopting the HPE Alletra Storage, I was using HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR to address similar needs.

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

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the HPE Alletra Storage is that it's competitive.

Before selecting the HPE Alletra Storage, we considered other solutions, including HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR, but as we are an HPE shop, we consolidated both solutions.

My advice to another organization considering the HPE Alletra Storage is to just buy it. It's hard to tell if the solution has reduced my data management operations expenses. 

It hasn't been discussed yet regarding capacity planning; we haven't used it for that, as it's just two years old. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the HPE Alletra Storage a ten.

We typically use Alletra NVMe drives for high-performance applications requiring more than 200,000 IOPS per second. We also have HPE's 3PAR, the most advanced version of the storage array. It can address most application issues and has less than 2 millisecond latency. 

We had faced issues with 3PAR because the drives slowed down, and we constantly had to change the capacity. There was too much incoming data, and the CTDs were always full. We needed some compression, deduplication, and provisioning. Even after applying all these techniques, we still faced some issues with space. 

But Alletra has high-capacity NVMe drives, so we no longer have a problem. There are no spikes, regardless of our incoming IOPS or my customer's application requirements. The solution immediately addresses the needs of any applications. 

Also, you need not worry about backend vulnerabilities. It is an awesome product. You deploy and run it without worrying about what's happening at the security level.  It's better than other storage classes like MSS. These NVMe models have played a significant role here.

We achieve storage availability by maximizing usable storage while minimizing hardware storage requirements. We have almost three petabytes of data space, and we're only using one petabyte, leaving two petabytes available.

We have the most advanced HPE products available that we can monitor with the HPE InfoSight feature, which enables us to check every metric, including bandwidth and latency, at a granular level. Alletra's mechanism is excellent and can handle multiple traffic sources. Anything is possible. Regarding your application, the IO behavior can be random, sequential, or a database. It serves web and e-commerce applications better. 

HPE InfoSight lets you see all the alerts from SSMC and proactively log cases. It will automatically raise a ticket to HPE when critical hardware fails. You get an idea about what will happen and be proactive. You can see when a node will restart so we can investigate and work with support. We can also see how nodes and ports are performing. 

DataCare helps you manage allocation mapping and firmware upgrades. We can also replace drives, troubleshoot, set up applications, update proxies, and take backups through DataCare. 

More training videos would help. We could learn some best practices. Sometimes, people may not follow the best practices and reach out to support, who will tell them that they need to follow these best practices to get this performance or result. 

I have used Alletra for nearly two years.

The batteries, BIOS configuration, and power supply are much more stable than the previous models.

I rate HPE support eight out of 10. Their support is kind, and they respond quickly.

Positive

We have IBM's flash array. We face too many problems with IBM's flash array because the code is unstable and nodes must be restarted. We haven't seen these issues with Alletra. We also use Oracle Cloud and plan to use AWS, but the cost is too high. 

Alletra is straightforward if you connect it properly. Once it's plugged in, you assign IP addresses and start configuring the security

I rate HPE Alletra nine out of 10. 

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are that it houses our data center and all of our VMs.

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I prefer most are that it's fast and reliable. The reliability of HPE Alletra Storage provides us with uptime, and speed allows us to get things done quicker, which is the biggest impact for us.

In terms of how HPE Alletra Storage can be improved, I can't think of anything right now because it's providing everything we need at this moment.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for six months.

There have been no crashes or performance issues with HPE Alletra Storage. I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Alletra Storage as excellent, with 100% uptime over six months.

I believe that HPE Alletra Storage would scale with the growing needs of our organization if we need it, but we haven't had to scale it yet. We haven't expanded usage of HPE Alletra Storage yet.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as excellent. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give customer service and technical support a 10 because when we need them, they're there, and they helped us set it up.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using the HPE Nimble for similar needs. The factors that led me to consider changing from the HPE Nimble to HPE Alletra Storage were performance, which was number one, and the fact that the Nimble was five years old.

I would say that HPE Alletra Storage has not reduced my data management operation expenses at this time, because we aren't probably leveraging it as much as we could.

I wasn't involved in the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of HPE Alletra Storage, but I was involved in the setup.

With an ROI from HPE Alletra Storage based on uptime, I can't give dollar-wise specifics, but for the six months so far, it's been available 100% of the time.

I wasn't involved in the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of HPE Alletra Storage.

Before selecting HPE Alletra Storage, I was involved with Nimble. I don't think we really looked at much else. 

In the evaluation process between HPE Alletra Storage and Nimble, the positives are that HPE Alletra is faster and more reliable, while the only con might be the price, but it's not priced that badly compared to everything else.

I haven't had any support issues with HPE Alletra Storage, so I don't know whether GreenLake enables assistance from senior support engineers without having to go through support escalations. 

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage is to buy it. 

I rate HPE Alletra Storage 10 out of 10.

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.