HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

We use two 4530 shelves in a mirrored SAN configuration, and the ability of the system to virtualize the two shelves as a single storage system is very important to us.

On several occasions, we’ve had a complete power failure at one of our two SAN locations, yet all of our VMs continued to function because the VMs that were running on the downed SAN simply moved to the other SAN without the need for operator intervention. With most other mirrored SAN solutions, the VMs would need to have been manually moved to the other SAN location. With VSA, however, it’s automatic and transparent.

The management system, while OK, could be made a little more user-friendly.

It was installed in April 2015.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It’s been very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We haven’t outgrown it yet, but if we need additional storage capacity in the future, we can simply add another shelf.

We haven’t needed any technical support yet on this product, but our previous experience with HP SANs was pretty good.

We previously used an HP LeftHand P4500 SAN, the predecessor of the HP VSA. We used it for 5 years but switched to the new one because HP support was ending on the old one and we were out of capacity.

We used an HP partner for the initial setup and configuration. Overall, it was pretty straightforward, although it took a few weeks to get everything “tuned”. Initially, we were getting alarms when moving VMs from one volume to another but bonding the NICs increased the storage bandwidth and resolved the problem.

I definitely recommend purchasing from an HP channel partner as they will handle the licensing. HP licensing can be a very arcane and difficult process and it is best left to the experts. The pricing was comparable with most of the other vendors we looked at.

We looked at a number of products from EMC, Nimble, and Dell, but only the HP VSA could automatically run the VMs from the other SAN in the event of a SAN site failure.

For mission critical systems, I would only recommend this product when used in a mirrored configuration. Unlike other SAN systems where virtually everything in the device is redundant, the HP VSA is basically a server equipped with a bunch of hard disks and special software. Only the power supplies are redundant so there are many more single points of failure compared to other SANs. While other SAN vendors put the redundancy in the same device, the redundancy of the HP VSA is provided by virtue of the two independent devices. What is unique is that the two independent devices appear as a single storage system to the virtualization network and the switching between devices is done by the HP software.

We went with ConvergedSystem because it's a single bit of infrastructure where we can have compute and network storage in one place. Our support team can be skilled across all devices from top to bottom and manage all the virtualized workloads, which stands at 7800 VMs right now. We don't need to have a separate storage team, or multiple tickets, or requests between systems.

Another valuable feature is its integration with Eucalyptus which provides us analysis for ultra-light loads. It was ready in four weeks and started taking workloads.

It's saved us a huge amount of money on hardware and other data center costs. The next step for us is to integrate it with backbones. We're still doing traditional provisioning of VMs, but ConvergedSystems allow us to do things for our students. The data and analytics we get speeds up on multiple servers.

We're able to give students access to parts of the system and let them onto 30 servers. We didn't have that capability before. One day we'll allow classrooms to do their own self-servers to really speed things up.

I have concerns of whether the VM workload can be sustained in just a couple of racks.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We had a few legal issues at the start, but we got the issues ironed out and the systems now run themselves.

Technical support has been good. We have a support contract with HP and access to the right people when we need them. However, HP's presence in Australia is a little light.

It was pretty straightforward. It's built offsite to the configurations you want and shipped to you fully-racked. You just plug it into your data center and start it up.

We've implemented this solution for our customer, who is in the sales sector. It's clustered and mapped to one of the blades. We use the solution for a Hyper-V environment and all of our other virtual machines are deployed inside this solution.

There's less downtime.

All of the administrative tasks are easy and everything is centralized.

Deduplication, compression features, replication, global mirroring and all the basic features you would expect are there.

In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product.

A virtualization platform should be added to this platform.

It's not an active-active cluster. It's active-passive cluster. The customers are looking for active-active features in their storage solution. The solution should offer this.

I'm actually handling the pre-sales part. My experience is less than two years for this particular product.

The stability is okay. We haven't heard of clients having issues with crashes, bugs, or glitches.

The scalability of the solution is good. However, customers always want to know the cost per rack. There are other products that can give a client more capacity than StoreVirtual in terms of scalability.

Technical support is very good. Most of the time StoreVirtual is actually bundled with the Proactive Care. From HP's side, they offer some good support for their customers.

I'm in pre-sales, so I don't deal with the implementation process. I don't know if it's complex or not.

The StoreVirtual solution is a hardware product, so the customer only purchases licenses on a one-time basis. I have no idea of the exact pricing for that, however. Unless the customer wants to add specific features like replication, all other costs are associated with the software itself.

We're interested in evaluating other solutions such as Red Hat and IBM Spectrum.

StoreVirtual is mostly a mid-range to enterprise-level storage solution. In terms of performance, it's quite good. However, now we have some other products which are even better than HP itself. It's still a good solution. It's just a more competitive landscape.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had virtualizations and better scalability, I would rank it higher.

We primarily use the solution for our servers and storage servers.

The synchronous replication is the solution's most valuable feature for our organization.

All the features we need are available in this product. It's a well-rounded solution.

The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger.

We've been using the solution for four years now.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with glitches or bugs.

An organization, if they need to, will be able to scale the solution. It's possible to expand it.

We've never directly been in touch with technical support. Our integrator handles any issues, so if they run into problems, they would be the ones to reach out to get assistance.

We previously used a different HP solution. We switched because this solution was less expensive and much more scalable.

I didn't handle the implementation myself and neither did my team, so I don't know enough about it to really talk about what was involved and if it was straightforward or not.

It may take one person to handle the maintenance, but we have an integrator that handles that aspect of the solution for us. We typically buy five or six days a year from our integrator in order for them to handle maintenance for us.

We had an external team handle the implementation for us. They are integrators and they continuously assist with maintenance on an ongoing basis.

For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We use the solution on a daily basis. In general, we have about 350 individuals on it. They are largely a mix of engineers and architects.

The product we are currently using is at end-of-life, so it's not necessarily something I would recommend.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We run a small service provider platform so we need reliability. We need a much tighter level of system-management capability. In live support, we need corrective maintenance, and they provide us with the generic monitoring 24/7 capability around their ability to interface with IT service management tool sets.

HP really gives us that full spectrum of everything under one umbrella as well as the platform integration at the back, specifically with HP Virtual Connect on the Cloud system platform. It's absolutely revolutionary compared to anybody else in the market -- and we've worked with other vendors in the past. There's nothing that competes against what HP has to offer.

We're a private hybrid cloud service provider, so we're very focused on personal sales. We don't have large investments to trial and make mistakes. We have to get it right each and every single time. With the infrastructure capability, it gives us the confidence and peace of mind to get it right time and again. Dealing with vendors, there's always going to be ups and downs, but the key thing with HP is that they make sure that they test the issues.

Room to grow is always there because we're in the technology space and the day we get complacent with ourselves and we get self-satisfied, the game is over. I think the key for us is flexibility. We're growing as a company and we have to scale and we don't want to get caught up with a baseline infrastructure that doesn't scale and grow over time. So far, what we've seen in terms of HP's roadmaps, we're very satisfied that we're not going to find ourselves in a difficult situation. HP is there supporting us and making sure that they will be able to meet our future growth requirements. Everything in HP's roadmap really gives us that flexibility and a very good price point.

I wouldn't say that I'm not satisfied. Yes, there's always going to be challenges because there's people of varying levels of skills, capability, experiences, defects who all come to the floor. But the good thing about HP is that they they're happy to have their internal ecosystem cover all the gaps in support.

We had configuration and design changes through our journey of deploying our cloud infrastructure. HP was very understanding and very flexible. We started from some basic principles and we realized that we needed to make changes to be successful in the future. HP was very flexible in addressing some of the gaps that we came across through our deployment journey and took those on as challenges and addressed them. They made things happen.

Rather than say that it was too late, or that we've agreed and signed off on things, or that they're sorry but we'll have to go through a second round of investments, HP was very happy to reopen designs and to reconsider parameters and constraints. They gave us an evolutionary path through our deployment cycle to make sure that when we were up and running with our initial customers, we'd be able to meet all the requirements.

I don't want to name competitors because we have had excellent support from various vendors through our journey, but what we've found was that all of our requirements were met by HP. They gave us a good road map for the future and price-point wise, HP gives us more value.

I think the one piece of advice is that HP has an absolutely enormous, very broad, very conclusive, comprehensive infrastructure portfolio. Study that with the HP specialists. Make sure that you find the right insertion point and then be very clear about your notion of growth. Be absolutely precise about what you believe your 12-24 months will look like, how they play out, and keep that vision visible to your HP-partner team up front.

We do the implementation of the solution.

Our customers are using it for their backup and file storage.

Catalyst handling.

The software is perfect.

Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

It is stable. I am not getting many calls about the product, only about disk failure.

We are working on single node only. That is a limited edition for this solution.

We have several customers. There are 50 to 70 users connected.

We use the technical support. 

Documentation is all available on the HPE site for all the products.

The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure.

We always recommend this to our customers, but we only have one solution.

I would rate the solution as a seven (out of 10).

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.

Running a SAN without having to invest in additional expensive hardware so this means we have a cost saving. It also means that less support is needed as there is less hardware to maintain. Also, it has Adaptive Optimization which means it is using fast storage (SSD) only for active data.

In the past we didn’t have a shared storage solution in small offices; with StoreVirtual, we can benefit from the advantages of a SAN (vMotion, HA, DRS etc.) without investing big money.

Features like data deduplication would be great because in the end, this solution requires a lot of raw disk space because of the use of RAID5 on the hardware and RAID1 on the network.

We've been using it for six months. It's installed on a VMware vSphere instance (v12.6.00.01155.0) with two storages nodes that each have a 10TB license and a failover manager for quorum.

We had some stability issues in the beginning. They were easily resolved by dedicating a NIC for symmetric replication.

We haven't yet had to contact tech support.

It's very straightforward and the basic setup only took a couple of hours. The GUI is very user friendly and the documentation and white papers provided us all the required info.

We did it using an an in-house team. If you have already some storage knowledge, this install is very easy.

We also considered VMware VSAN because of its integration with the hypervisor/console. We decided to go for the HP solution because of the stability of the product as the OS, LeftHand, is already fairly old and well established, so HP have more experience there.

Before implementing it and using it you should read the best practice documents as well as white papers upfront.