HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

Primary iSCSI-based storage using P4000 series nodes for HPE lefthand.

VMware compute on BL465G7s within a P4000 series chassis

StoreVirtual has proved to be a highly available, very stable and robust solution. It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime.

The most valuable feature is Network RAID 10.

We use SAN datastore replication for DR, along with VMware SRM.

There is no next release. The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Enterprise data and health care. All our data was in a P4500 StoreVirtual, now it is gradually moving to a 4 Node VSA.

Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI. We also plan to build a Metro Cluster using VSA.

• Data replication (Network RAID 10) 
• Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage.

Product looks like it is in the end of development. HPE will be probably be merging with SimpliVity. I hope they will continue the product as we already have multiple HW servers besides HPE, and a software SDS means more flexibility for us.

Primary usage is just to operate our daily business.

Performance, so far so good. No problems at all yet.

The stability and flexibility are the greatest improvements to our organization.

• Stability
• Flexibility

I can't say at the moment. I'm happy with it right now. There is always room to improve.

Using our current license we have just a 5TB limit. If we acquire a new license we can upgrade to the bigger storage. It can definitely scale to our needs.

Technical support comes from our partner. We have never had any issues with them. We haven't had any large-scale issues.

Before this we were just using a physical service and then moved to the virtual environment using VSA.

Our partner recommended this solution. We took a deep look, analyzed, and decided we can go with this solution.

It was straightforward, I would say. We did it with our partner.

We had a few options like Lenovo, Fugitsu. We went with HPE because it had the best price to performance ratio, and service as well. 

It's been a good experience, so far.

When deciding on a vendor to go with we look at 

• service
• stability
• performance.

Explore it yourself. Talk to your colleagues, talk to the technicians, the experts.

• Input/Output (I/O) has greatly improved.
• Easy updates without taking down storage and virtual machines (VMs).
• HA is now a real possibility which I could not fully achieve with normal NAS datastores.

• Ease of carving out storage.
• The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management.

I just let it do its thing. I don't worry too much about it.

Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen.  

Shared storage in the organization allowed for higher availability and simplified server maintenance.

Enables us to build highly available shared storage from a standard rack server, such as HPE Proliant DL. However, it is not limited to that. Thin provisioning lets us get the most value from the hard drives. I found the architecture to have less single point failure than a traditional SAN.

Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately.

In terms of stability, the optional MEM (Multipath Enhancement Module) was unstable in one installation with 1GB iSCSI network. Long running, intensive file copying tasks between VMs produced a storage latency "explosion". The issue disappeared immediately after removing the MEM drivers from the ESXi hosts and restoring the default vSphere Path Selection Policies. We did not have an opportunity to review the environment or test an updated MEM.

There were no scalability issues. The 3 x 4TB license is a very good start for two nodes. We can add a third node for additional storage and compute power. If the performance demands increase, we can simply install or replace the current iSCSI network adapters with 10GbE. The system also supports SSD and auto-tiering with higher licenses.

The HPE technical support for StoreVirtual VSA is very good, but it requires some time to contact them. To get a simple piece of software means registering StoreVirtual VSA. This is a complicated process. The SAR (Service Agreement ID) is associated to the VSA Licenses. It requires you to open a request on the HPE website and this is hard to obtain.

We did not use a different solution before this one.

There's an installation wizard which is quite simple. However, you need to have a clear image of the final scheme, especially for the network. At the time, I missed a reference blueprint, but a recent publication of "StoreVirtual VSA Ready Nodes" filled the gap.

Review the licensing options, because the smaller licenses are time limited. If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down. I wouldn't keep a traditional SAN in production without support anyway.

Spend some time reading StoreVirtual best practices and consider buying redundant solid switches, like HPE Aruba ProCurve 25xx, or better. Layer-3 is useful, but not mandatory thanks to split network support introduced in VSA 12.5.

It offers, while still affordable, a really high end storage solution that I can present to my customers.

I guess on the top of the list is certainly ease of use. We're a smaller company, and we don't have a lot of engineers who can dedicate their time to a single product. I guess I'd also say reliability. I need something that just kind of works all the time. I don't have the time to be dedicating resources to fixing things.

For this particular product, I was talking to one of their storage people about it. They already added the few things that I needed. So I don't have anything major. But it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products.

Stability is excellent.

Scalability is good, as well. We are certainly going to push the upper bounds of what it can do.

We have used technical support and it has been great. It is quick to get access to their support engineers, but also they solve every problem.

This is actually what we selected when we started this search. When selecting a vendor, cost is there, of course, but more than that, some of the other things I've mentioned: Ease of use, reliability, and support. The relationship goes a long way, too. Having access to people directly, whether that's sales engineers, or the sales team themselves. We are a small company, so getting attention from a big company like HPE is great. We probably wouldn't get that from other companies.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very simple.

We started using this before HPE purchased it. It was LeftHand Network before. It was them versus HPE's SAN, so technically HPE was the other vendor. Now HPE owns it. We chose this solution because it was cluster storage, so for us and our size, it was a better product line.

I would say with this particular solution, you're getting a lot when it comes in price point. You're getting a lot of features compared to some of the other products out there.

The biggest thing about it is the LeftHand OS. One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included. You're not adding parts and pieces. Again, you can expand the hyper-converged storage, which actually used VSA in it for the storage part of it, by just adding, so that increases your capacity and your performance. The other thing about StoreVirtual is that it is our software-defined solution and it's everywhere. It's in Synergy. It's in our StoreOnce. It's in our hyper-converged solutions and again now, it's by itself.

It comes down to the information that you get. If you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear. Depending on if you go DAK or optical, it could be like, $600-$1,000 a pop, which is not insignificant. You know what, just spell it out somewhere. Put it in the ordering tool somewhere, so people know. Apart from that, I don't have anything. I think they're still on gen 8. They should move up to gen 9.

LeftHand OS has been around forever, and it's a proven product, and it's easy to use.

We use a lot of StoreVirtual to replicate the customer's environment, two or three different sites, and it's quick and easy to use. The interface and the installation makes it easy as it's all in one piece of hardware and it doesn't need to be connected to anything else.

It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker.

It's very stable and I don't remember the last time that it was unavailable. We have the occasional disk failure, but that doesn't stop it from working.

I don't know the limits, but we can support all our customers with StoreVirtual.

In Brazil, the response time is a little slow. Our contract says six hours, but sometimes the response has been 10 hours, or even 12, so, that's not good. Once you get hold of them, they're good.

It just goes in, and you don't really need any help.

The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil.

We perform an analysis of the customer scenario and needs, and then we suggest a product, but we only sell HPE. The decision is which HPE product they need.

We originally had LeftHand which are morphing into StoreVirtual. We use it in our remote offices and don’t have many issues with it. We are currently collapsing everything down into a DL380.

The StoreVirtual is rather new for us. We're still in the process of making a homegrown hyper-convergence system with the StoreVirtual product.

The LeftHands themselves have been very stable. We're moving to the VSA on the DL380s.

We aren’t sure of the scalability yet but are aiming to find out soon.

HPE support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HPE stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

I would also advise that users follow best practices with the StoreVirtual.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set.

It gives us what we want. It provides stability and availability. It is a very reliable solution.

The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second. We need our systems continuously up.

The next release is already out and I found that the many of the improvements that we were thinking about in the product such as the dual controller, are already implemented.

The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance. We chose availability, but it would have an impact in the performance.

Now, we're not afraid of anything that goes wrong.

We didn't have any problems. We scaled up a few years ago; the system was just fine.

We have used the technical support only for faulty replacements such as replacement of disks, for example. The contract was for the next business day. It was fine.

We were not using any other solution previously. Our partner suggested this product; we saw that it fits our needs and tried it out. We were quite pleased with the result and decided to invest in this solution.

I was involved in the setup process. It was easy.

If this solution fits your needs and also if your environment is similar to ours, then we would suggest this solution.

The factors that we look at while selecting a vendor are that they should be innovative, provide a good support option and have reliable products. I don't want my product to fail.