HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

We are using HPE Alletra Storage primarily for backup projects. Two companies are backed up with HPE Alletra Storage, connected by SAN infrastructure with a Brocade switch and HP servers. We have Commvault implemented on it, making the backup in virtual environments like VMware. We are backing up both on-premise and to the cloud.

HPE Alletra Storage is 100% stable and is the best in the market, although slightly expensive. It is very easy to implement, with highly effective artificial intelligence and great software. We use HPE InfoSight for predictive analysis, generating reports to prevent issues. The combination with HPE support creates a perfect solution for sustaining customer environments. This solution simplifies storage operations and provides predictable performance and capacity for applications.

HPE Alletra Storage is considered expensive compared to competitors like Dell and Huawei. Many times, we lose deals due to price even though it is the best solution in the market.

HPE Alletra Storage is 100% stable, and no other solution offers such complete stability.

HPE support is considered the best department in the company, backed by HPE InfoSight solutions.

In the past, we used Nimble storage, but we did not implement it last year. Instead, we used HPE Alletra Storage.

The initial setup of HPE Alletra Storage was straightforward and easy to deploy. The infrastructure, including servers and storage, was completed in less than a week.

I am a manager, not an architect, but we have an architect who handled the setup process.

The product is known to be expensive. In many situations, we compare it with competitors like Dell and Huawei, and the pricing often makes us lose the competition.

Dell, Huawei

Overall, I rate HPE Alletra Storage a 10 out of 10. The only issue is the price because sometimes customers don't need all the available features and opt for cheaper solutions with fewer features from competitors.

Its use case primarily is VDI. We are working with models 6050 and 6070.

Price, performance, efficiency, and reliability are its benefits. Those customers who used to be on 3PAR and Primera and are now on [HPE] Alletra [Storage] probably have two times performance improvement. The most important benefit has been the increase in efficiency. The efficiency has improved at least three or four times. Its pricing per gigabyte is also lower than what they used to pay for the older solutions.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. Most of my customers who are on VDI are using VHCI and Private Cloud Business Edition or PCBE, and they love it.

It helps with day-to-day management. Especially when customers have multiple sites, they are able to view all their sites and manage all their sites from a single pane.

It can predict problems and prevent them before they occur. The main feature of Alletra is the inheritance of Nimble InfoSight. It is a big plus.

There is a guarantee of data availability, but that was not the only reason for going for this solution. They have availability of six nines on other platforms as well, but with Alletra, you have the whole package. There is efficiency, reliability, and proactive support with InfoSight. It is the whole package.

It has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs, but I do not have the metrics.

The performance is valuable. The NVMe performance with VDI plays a big role. There is efficiency of the array and replication between two sites. A lot of customers use Alletra for production and DR and do replication.

They are definitely going to start pushing more on MP for files. This was an area where HPE was not very strong, but now, with Alletra MP, it is going to be very strong. Most importantly, there is going to be the flexibility of moving compute and storage on Alletra MP. This flexibility will be very good.

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage for the past two to three years.

So far, so good.

On regular Alletra, you can only add two shelves. That may be a limitation because you need to plan ahead of time about how you are going to grow. You might want to conserve the type of disk. It is a little limiting in terms of capacity. This is why MP is better.

We do work with HPE support. It is a little slow sometimes, but in the case of Alletra, that has not been the case. With Alletra, the level 3 engineering support has been more than okay. For Alletra, I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have not done its deployment. We do help some customers with monitoring, managing, and patching the environment. It is fairly new. Alletra has been there for about two years.

Overall, it was a good ROI for customers.

Overall, it was good. It had a good price per gigabyte.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for VMware. 

The ease of operation and ease of use are important aspects for us. The throughput of the units itself is really impressive. 

The solution provides cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data. You manage it through the cloud or on-prem as well. It wasn't a drastic change from what we used before, as we used HPE products. It's all NVMe-based. The IOs were through the roof compared to what we were using before. We'd see bursts of up to 17,000 IOPs, whereas before, we saw maybe 5,000.

I've logged into the analytics program, InfoSight, and it's good. With InfoSight, we can get on there and it can give us pointers about if we need more storage, for example, or insights into caching.

The guarantee of data availability was very important when we were deciding on a solution. With HPE's background and the support we knew we were making a smart decision.

We've been able to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. Compared to other HPE products that we've used, we have an ISCSI setup and we were able to build our storage setups very quickly. The simple UI made it so that it's just a few clicks to provision.

With what we've used the solution with right now, I haven't faced any issues. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't had an issue with it yet.

I'm assuming we can just add more drives if we need to. I haven't had to scale. We have two Alletras and they are sized for 100 TBs with current storage (with deduplication and compression) is maybe 50 TBs.

Support is good. I get all the answers I need. Some vendors were able to bring HPE people to answer support questions. I haven't had any issues when dealing with them. 

Of course, support always depends on who you talk to on the other end. Sometimes, with HP, there may be language barriers, and they seem to cycle through tech a lot more. That said, overall, I always get the answers I need. 

Positive

We've used HPE products previously. We also have Pure Storage.

It took nothing really to set it up. It was all online, and we were able to set it up and start using it within about three hours. We had experience with HP products that we used before.

We deployed the solution ourselves. 

We have not witnessed an ROI just yet. It has improved speed and performance overall. 

We did evaluate other options, and we have other storage that we have on-site as well. For what Alletras does, in terms of throughput, the cost is good. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for VM storage, file servers, and things like that. 

We've got around 75 VMs that run on the storage arrays. So the deduplication and features like that allow us to store a lot more on them than if we just did physical drives. 

They are extremely reliable. They just work. The cloud tie-ins alert us if there are any issues well in advance. The auto ticket generation is really useful for us as well.

Deduplication is a big one for us as it reduces our data costs. 

Their service has been really, really phenomenal. We've had drive failures. We had a whole system failure at one point, and within 24 hours they had us back online. 

The ability to duplicate data between systems has been really handy. We've got two data centers, and they handle the cloning of data between sites as well.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. They call it One View. For us, it's more about active monitoring of our on-prem solution and letting us know if there are issues with communication to our VMware environment, hardware issues, drive degradation, and that kind of stuff. That has been how we've utilized it. 

It's been pretty good at predicting problems. Besides the controller failure, everything else we knew was coming before it was a problem.

The guarantee of data available to our organization is important. We're a manufacturing company. If our systems go down, we lose dollars every minute that system's offline. That's why having high availability has been very important for us. 

Alletra helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. We don't really have to manage it very much other than increasing the size of the data storage. We don't really have to manage the system at all. It's very hands-off. We really don't have to do much to manage storage. We may just have to increase the drive size, and we're done. It doesn't really change our workflow a whole lot.

We have improved storage performance. We were using spinning disks in the individual servers prior to Alletra. 

If we have a storage ticket, we usually get someone on the phone within fifteen minutes when we call in and we're able to get a solution going and have parts we need for replacement within two or three hours.

The solution could use more monitoring of their split-brain system controllers. That was the failure we had. One of our controllers failed, and it led to an error in the split-brain module.

If we could have had the failure we had to be handled in real-time and not have to be offline and have parts ordered, it would have been ideal.

I've been using the solution for five and a half years now. 

The solution is really stable. We've only had only one issue in five years, aside from intermittent drive failures. 

The solution is very scalable. We've added drawers to increase storage space, and they scale well beyond our needs. 

Technical support is very good. We have four-hour support, and 99% of our issues are resolved within that timeframe. It's been rock-solid. When we've called in for advanced issues, within ten minutes, they are kicking us up the line to get to the person we need. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution.

The deployment is pretty simple. We haven't had issues with the configuration side. It just works. 

We used a reseller for our deployment. Our experience with them was excellent. 

The pricing and licensing are pretty clear-cut. We have a vendor that we work with that gives us a plain layout. 

We evaluated Pure Storage. Pricing may have been a deciding factor when compared to Alletra. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. 

My main use cases for HPE Alletra Storage are for warehouses.

It benefits my organization by reducing management needs. 

The features of HPE Alletra Storage that I appreciate the most involve less management. The benefit of HPE Alletra Storage is that it doesn't need much management. 

HPE Alletra Storage is effective since it automatically has deduplication, requiring less management, and requires minimal effort; after purchase, it automatically provides deduplication, compression, and related functionality.

It helps reduce data management operation expenses. I manage 30 remotely and it's easy to manage now.

We can reduce time spent on capacity planning.

The capacity efficiency is pretty good. There's less management. You don't have to do anything. 

We get cloud-like management on-prem.

I'm not sure how the solution could be improved. I'm not looking for new features. It's doing the job.

The only challenge was having to register with GreenLake, even though we weren't using it. Some places didn't have access to the internet - and if you don't have access to the internet, how can you register? If you can't register, you can't create data storage. This was one of the big drawbacks.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for about three years.

HPE Alletra Storage has been stable and reliable. I've never had any issues or crashes; it continues doing its work.

We have more than we need. In a couple of places, we had to add another shelf and that was very plug-and-play.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Alletra Storage as excellent. 

HPE Alletra has much better service than 3PAR and others. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support at a ten. When you call, you don't have to go from person to person. With 3PAR and others, you call and they direct you to another person, then level one, level two, level three, which can be frustrating. With HPE Alletra or Nimble, the person who answers your call can handle level one, level two, and level three support; they can do anything.

Prior to adopting HPE Alletra Storage, I was using HPE MSA to address similar needs. We also used Nimble. We wanted better performance and scalability.

My experience with deploying HPE Alletra Storage is that it's really easy. It's a one-click process and not difficult to configure. 

There was a simple configuration process; there is not much to do as it's an easy setup. 

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

I didn't purchase the solution; I don't have pricing experience. 

I used to have EMC, however, then we used Nimble for smaller places, which was awesome. These were the other solutions I considered before selecting HPE Alletra Storage. 

The positive standout in my evaluation process when comparing these options was that HPE Alletra Storage requires very little work and is easily manageable remotely. I am not aware of any drawbacks of any of the solutions.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Alletra Storage would be to make it more efficient, make it easier to manage, make it more reliable, and have better service. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight.

We primarily use the solution for our data warehouse. We had a latency problem with data warehouse services. We had 3PAR and we migrated everything to [HPE] Alletra [Storage]. The latency that Alletra gives us is much lower than that given by 3PAR and it has managed to support the number of IOPs generated by the service.

The execution response times of data warehouse tasks have improved, and the reports have been produced on time as required by the Bank.

The configuration capacity it has to create a cluster for replication is excellent. 

The latency it gives me is incredible.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. In terms of administration, we can do stuff from anywhere; we do not need to be on the local management network. That is one of the best benefits. So is the whole subject of team status reports through "GreenLake.

The guarantee of data availability to our organization is important. I work in a financial area, so protecting data is the most valuable task the bank has and we feel safe with Alletra.

Alletra helped reduce the time in storage provisioning. We have reduced it by two hours. Before switching solutions, it used to take us two to three hours, and we have reduced it to about 15 minutes with Alletra.

Alletra improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs. It has been reduced, however, I couldn't say by how much right now. I do know that with the storage we had before, we were already saturated with 30,000 IOPs, whereas with Alletra we have put 50,000 IOPs in it and it has worked well.

I haven't found anything that could be improved. It's a good product overall. We didn't buy it for production purposes. We wanted to use it for development. That said, due to the efficiency it has, the company is already thinking about putting it into production.

Maybe they could just reduce the number of racks and the amount of rack space.

I've used the solution for two years. 

To date, we have not generated any cases for Alletra, which means it has given us 100% stability. In these past two years, Alletra has never generated any cases for us in terms of stability issues - which is a very good sign.

We have not had the opportunity to require more resources at the moment.

Support is excellent. It is easy to ask for help, and the response we receive is very specific. We do not give the situation much thought or go back and forth about it.

Positive

We used 3PAR. We changed to a new technology due to obsolescence more than any other reason.

The initial setup was relatively simple. After installation, there were not many configurations. We were quickly up and running. The support was very good. 

We used the help of a third-party vendor and received good attention.

The issue of price and cost is handled by another area; I am from the technical side.

We evaluated Dell and Pure Storage. With Pure Storage the difference was the price. With Dell, the difference was mostly in the number of IOPs supported by Alletra and the type of rack they used.

I give Alletra a ten out of ten. I have no complaints about Alletra at this time as it exceeded our expectations.

We primarily use the solution for workloads in healthcare. 

The sizing is very good. We have new applications and new workloads and we have found the performance is very good.

The ability to use different workloads and different data is useful. It offers a good way to treat our data while guaranteeing high performance. We have 1 PB of data.

It offers a cloud-like operational model on-prem. Healthcare data is complicated, especially for data in the cloud. 

It's good at predicting and preventing problems. 

Guaranteed data availability is very important for us in health care. Having that guarantee of availability to us was integral to choosing this solution.

Alletra has helped us reduce time spent on storage. We've witnessed a 120X improvement in performance.

It's improved storage performance in terms of IOPS. It depends. If we compare it with other solutions, the performance is 2X better.

Alletra has helped us reduce storage-related tickets by 2X.

We have more than traditional use cases. If they could explore new configurations for data storage, it would be ideal. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability is very good. It's better than other solutions. 

We have just started a project to scale the solution as we need more capacity. For the moment, the scalability is good. What you need to do in order to expand is very clear. 

HPE support is very good. We have a decent relationship with them. All of our questions get answered in a short time and the communication is very good. 

Positive

We previously used some solutions from IBM. We needed to change solutions and we decided to go with Alletra. 

The deployment was very easy. All of the documentation and instructions are very clear. 

We did have the help of an integrator. 

We have witnessed an ROI. In healthcare, people use a lot of Alletra. For us, it's easy to share the application. 

Licensing is expensive at the moment. Maybe they will lower it as more and more people begin to use Alletra. 

We did evaluate other vendors, including Pure Storage. Alletra was good for integration. Also, people who have worked with applications in healthcare know Alletra and have confidence in the product.

We are customers and end users.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use Alletra for virtualization.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the 100% uptime guarantee. The guarantee of data availability to our organization was one of the top priorities. Our business is 24/7/365 high transaction rates and it was very important that the storage was always available

Its ease of administration is great. It's really simple to maintain.

The firmware updates on it are non-disruptive, which is amazing. Most people say they are nondisruptive; Alletra actually is not disruptive. 

The IO performance has met our expectations and exceeded them. 

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managed data infrastructure. We rarely use it, but it does. We know that can do the infrastructure as code administration through the cloud APIs. We just haven't yet, so we haven't leveraged that much.

Alletra is helpful for predicting problems and preventing them before they occur - although we have had virtually zero problems with it. When we have, it has called support for us. That's been pretty good.

Alletra has helped us to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning by at least 50%. The use of application groups means that we just have to tell it how big we want our next provisioning slice to be, and the rest just happens. 

The solution has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs, probably by at least 300%. It's helped reduce the time spent resolving related support tickets as well. So far, we have opened two support tickets versus the approximately 40 tickets we had to open for the old storage. 

Long-distance, high-latency replication enhancements would be delightful to see in future versions.

I've used the solution for two and a half years now.

The stability is incredible. We haven't had a single storage event since we put it into production.

Scalability is great. The devices they sent us still have tons of room to grow. All we have to do is add a disk, and then the rest of it happens.

Overall, support is very good. We recently moved to GreenLake managed services. I only see tickets now when they've identified a problem and that comes with a list of how they're going to fix it. For the most part, it's hands-off for me right now, which is awesome. The only issue is they haven't quite figured out our internal structure yet, so sometimes they reach out to the wrong person. They just need to put their process documents in order. It's no big deal. 

Positive

We had an HPE solution previously, an older 3PAR storage array. It was old and not as good, which is why I switched.

In terms of deployment, we're an almost strictly private cloud, and it's all happening under the VMware Umbrella right now.

The deployment was actually a bit of a pain. It seems that we were running a slightly older version of VMware, and it didn't like talking to the Alletra models at first. We were having a lot of storage disconnects. Luckily, we hadn't put it into production before it got resolved. However, we couldn't get HPE and VMware on the same page about it. 

Eventually, we just upgraded our version of VMware and all the problems went away. That was probably a month's worth of engaging with both parties and trying to find a solution. We just gave up, upgraded, and the problem went away. 

We did have a reseller that was involved that we deal with fairly closely. They've been very good to us. They know their stuff pretty well, and they're always willing to throw down when we need them.

We don't have a lot of metrics in terms of ROI. The ROI to me is the amount of time I spend managing the device. It's very low compared to the old solution. 

The licensing and setup costs were very simple. We used the GreenLake purchasing model (the OpEx purchasing model). It all came as one bundle.

We evaluated HPE's Primera. We didn't really look outside of HPE. The Primary pro for Alletra was that it was an all-in NVMe storage array, and we were looking for maximum IOPS.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. Of all the storage platforms I've had over the years, this one has caused me the least amount of grief overall. The metrics coming out of it really do help me identify if we are having any IO problems. The only thing is we haven't had any, so I just look at a bunch of green bars that say, "you're good!"

We use the solution for infrastructure for one of our global financial customers to allow them to scale up and out.

The distributed hyper-converged infrastructure is great. Just having the ability to scale independently storage compute is useful. 

The extended capacity offers a small footprint that's still meeting a large customer demand. 

The cloud-like model will be helpful. I can see it will make things much more efficient once we get to that point.

For predicting and preventing problems, it looks like it will be a very useful feature. It will simplify operations and Day Zero and Day One operations.

Its guarantee of data availability is important. It will be one of the key aspects for the customer. 

It will help save time around storage provisioning once implemented fully.

The simplified provisioning of storage compared to other solutions in and of itself will make it more efficient.

Customers have an existing solution they can compare the performance of IOPs to. This product looks to be as good or even better. However, that's yet to be determined. 

Alletra should effectively reduce the time dealing with support tickets once it is fully implemented. It likely will improve by a factor of two to three, although we aren't at that point yet.

From what I've seen so far it's definitely checking the boxes of what the customer's looking for.

I'd like to see larger cluster sizes beyond four nodes. 

I've been using the solution for four months. 

It seems to be robust, and since it's based on the Nimbe product line, it will be mature. that stability will be fine. 

Going up to four nodes is not as scalable as I'd like for horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is huge. That said, the ability to go beyond four nodes would be of interest to customers in the future.

I haven't dealt with technical support yet. However, I'm sure it will be fine. I've seen a lot of focus on support. HPE will definitely bring its A-game. 

Positive

We use Dell. They are looking at the smaller footprint and simplicity as far as managing the product which is why Allertra is so attractive. 

We haven't deployed the solution yet. That said, just talking to the HPE deployment team and watching the demo, the process seems like it will be very simple. We'll be able to do it in hours instead of days or weeks. 

I'm an integrator. I'll help my clients handle the implementation. 

With a smaller footprint, there will be less power consumption. There will be more effective capacity as well, and less rack space used. 

I've heard the licensing is going to be much, much more streamlined than what they're used to currently. 

The customer is also looking at Hitachi, although it's more complex. Plus, the customer already has a significant HPE footprint. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. From an effective capacity, power, and footprint standpoint, it edges out the incumbent.

We primarily use the solution for high data reduction. We use it for compression and deduplication. 

The most valuable aspect is the data reduction and compression. Space is important for our company and more space can get very expensive. Compression of data helps cut costs. If we have 100 TB of data, it can compress this quite well. 

It's very secure and reliable. It offers good high-level storage.

We use the on-prem interface, not the cloud interface. We always use Alletra as a local management solution.

It's predictive and offers a good high level of prevention for problems. It will go ahead and open a case if there is a problem.

Storage provision is good. It's easy to use. 

The guarantee of data availability is important.

We've been able to improve our storage performance in terms of IOPS. I've checked it recently and saw that it's improved.

We've been able to reduce the time spent resolving storage-related tickets. Now, it takes a maximum of two hours. 

We haven't seen any negative issues. 

It can be less expensive. It's very expensive for us. 

I've been using Alletra for approximately four years. 

The stability is very good. 

The solution is highly scalable. 

Technical support is fast and responsive. At a maximum, we'll get a resolution in one day. However, it's usually one to two hours. 

We did use 3PAR and Primera among other solutions.

We liked Alletra's high-level storage. 

The deployment was really straightforward and easy to manage. It's very user-friendly. You simply click through.

We have yet to witness any ROI.

We have two Alletra models and have recently added another product.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's reliable. It has many features, and the data reduction and compression are great.