HPE MSA Reviews

It's a fairly simple product to set up as well, but it's a little bit more entry level; for those customers that can't afford something larger or whatnot, but would still like to get that shared storage or that SAN functionality. It's a great product for that. They're actually adding a lot of new features to it. It's not as dumb as it used to be. As long as you have a basic knowledge of SANs and whatnot, you can get around it without a problem.

They've been adding some different things to it. Maybe if it was a year ago, I would have said yeah, it might be nice to see this, but they've started adding in some different SSD and caching to it that really has revitalized it or reinvigorated that system a little bit.

Rather than it being just dumb storage, they're adding some of the features of the higher-level SANs back into it. Customers can take advantage of some of those things that previously they wouldn't have been able to.

From my experience with it, I haven't really had issues with it. With installations that I've done, customers have been pretty happy with them.

They can scale; I don't think they're meant to, but you can add additional shelves and things, which we've done. That's fairly easy to do.

I haven't had to call tech support on those.

It's pretty easy to install.

They're pretty entry level but you need to be willing to spend some money. It's not going to be $1,000; it might be $10,000 or $15,000. It's all relative what a lot of money is, but they need to be willing to spend some money, invest in their infrastructure. They don't need the performance of a 3PAR or something like that. They're just maybe getting into the whole virtualization, EO mode, and the shared storage and they want the added security and performance of some disk that's not in the local server. I guess that's that type of person or customer.

Dell has an SCv2000, which is fairly similar. Really what it comes down to is they're going to be similar, but some people really align themselves with HPE or with Dell. When it comes down to it, a lot of them are going to just stick to it that way. They're going to say, "I buy Dell, so I'm going to buy theirs." "I buy HPE," so they're going to buy theirs. It can be a hard sell otherwise.

It's a great product for the price. It has a lot of capability for what you're paying for.

• Data progression!
• Volume draining.
• Dual controllers.

Was purchased as a DR solution but became our production SAN. Very fast and easy to use. A great SAN for SMB's with enterprise features.

• GUI can be improved
• Firmware updates need improvement
• Hardware could use a little refinement. (The fiber ports on one controller pushed through the case causing us to replace that controller under warranty.

3 months and going very well.

Old interface has no progression. New interface does. Nothing spells this out and needed to be discovered.

None. Very stable product.

None. Running 7k drives and 10K drives with SSD caching.

Very good.

Dell Compellent SAN. Shelves were going on 6 years old. Switching to 3PAR but needed a temporary space.

Very easy and straightforward.

In-house. Very easy to install.

The price point's really good for us. At our remote locations, we've been putting MSAs from 1st generation all the way up to the 2040's. We've been very happy with the product, and have had good luck with them as far as not having any issues.

Price is the biggest thing right now. The performance is fine. We use a SAS attached for the MSAs, and it's just been a good product for us.

Maybe a few more feature sets with snapshots and application, and things like that. That's been coming with the 2040's, so they're slowly adding that in. I understand for what I'm paying for, your not getting all the features, but I see they're coming down from there, maybe with some of those feature sets.

We had a few issues with some of the firmware codes, probably about five years ago. Other than that, it's been a rock-solid system for us.

Dell and EMC, as there's not a lot of smaller vendors. It's a niche that the MSA is in, as far as the price and performance, and there's not a lot of competitors out there on that.

As far as setup and stuff like that, it's very easy to set up. You've got the different RAID levels that you need to use. I'm sure the other products have that too, so it comes down to what feels right for you.

We use the MSA outside of our data center. It's a nice robust platform that we can use without buying a whole enterprise SAN, so it gives us the flexibility we need.

It's improved it dramatically. We can put a virtual infrastructure in each one of these sites and hook it to the MSA. Then we can build the servers as we go.

They fit our bill very well. We buy a lot of them, so I think they're just fine. However, we did have some issues at first but we worked through them and currently we have no issues.

We had some differences between the 10 GB and the 1 GB platform that we kind of didn't know about, so we had 1 GB where we needed 10 GB and the flexibility for changing out the hardware wasn't there when we needed it.

I think it's fantastic. That's the reason we buy them.

They're scalable for offsite and we love them.

We have used the technical support. They help us with all our firmware upgrades and things like that, so I would evaluate them at a high level.

The MSA gives us flexibility. We used a Dell product, but when we switched to HPE, we went to the HPE platform across our line, and we're very happy with it.

Very straightforward. We used an iSCSI platform which was pretty easy to set up. All of my technicians can take of it, and it's good to go.

It's a good platform for outside the data center. Even inside the data center for certain purposes, so I would rate them high and give them my approval.

Easy to manage, it’s reliable for us, and fits our environment. Also, support is available when we need it. It’s just been very solid for us.

We’re down to one vendor for most of our hardware and software, so using HP already helps us streamline our internal workings.

In the future we'd like to see more block-based storage. This is because more and more storage is moving in that direction.

Very stable.

For our environment, you can scale several times and that’s exactly what we need. You can’t go beyond four servers for the SaaS connected version, but for us that’s what we needed exactly.

Technical support on the phone is fine and storage has been very good overall.

We’re like an ASP. HP has been the standard we’ve been using for a while, so we continued. Their SaaS connected storage is what we’ve been using more recently because it fits our environment perfectly.

Very straightforward and we’ve got about eight of these setup. We had it delivered to the site and just plugged it in for the customer.

We also looked at Dell, but HP was a better fit and the pricing was better.

Look at reliability primarily. Pricing is also important.

Experience with the interface is very important. Make sure that technical support is available and good. Again, it's about performance and cost and it does a rock solid job for us.

I use this solution for a target backup object profile for a snapshot of my VMDK.

The most valuable features are data deduplication and snapshot replication.

It would be beneficial to have an add-on feature to improve analytics or insight capabilities inside the app.

I have been using HPE MSA for four years.

I rate the stability of HPE MSA as ten out of ten.

The scalability of HPE MSA is excellent. I would give it a ten out of ten for scalability.

The customer service and support are effective and reliable. I would give it a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have not used any other storage solutions before working with HPE MSA.

The initial setup is easy. I would rate it ten out of ten for ease of setup.

HPE MSA is expensive compared to other brands.

For those who want to use HPE MSA, the biggest benefits are data deduplication and snapshot replication.

I rate HPE MSA ten out of ten.