HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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 are running different types of workloads on HPE Alletra Storage, and it provides us with good performance.

We purpose-built it for a specific requirement, consuming features like encryption and deduplication between sites. It offers good deduplication ratios, comparing well with Pure Storage. HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations, integrating with vCenter. Many modern storages provide a unified view, which we utilize. Overall, it has streamlined our analysis process, thanks to automation and reporting features.

We recently started consuming HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE Alletra Storage provides predictable performance and capacity.

We have not faced any scalability issues with HPE Alletra Storage.

HPE technical support is good, with no complaints so far.

We already had Pure Storage and replaced Nimble Storage, leading us to adopt HPE Alletra Storage for the upgrade.

The initial setup was straightforward, taking about two and a half weeks from data center configuration to full provisioning and testing.

Our internal team handled the deployment. The backend physical setup was simpler, while the process took time for completion.

I will know more about ROI in a couple of months as we recently commissioned the storage. So far, it is breaking even with our investment plans.

I cannot quantify the cost reduction yet, but modern storages come with many features that benefit customers.

The consideration was an upgrade from Nimble, and so we evaluated HPE Alletra Storage.

I rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight or nine. I would like to see further support for features like ransomware protection. Exploring Alletra MP in the future could be beneficial. The current interface is satisfactory.

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 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 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.