HPE Primera Reviews

There was a bank that used HPE Primera. Earlier, the bank was one of the main users of Primera. Now, HPE 3PAR StoreServ is used primarily in Serbia's banking sector.

HPE Primera's good features include its quality, stability, scalability, and other features that are good for storage. The software is almost all software. Though HPE 3PAR StoreServ claims to use different software, I feel it is the same as HPE Primera. I think that owing to its software, HPE 3PAR StoreServ was sold for almost thirteen or fourteen years by my company. In general, HPE is a very great and stable product. I think that the tool provides stability, and they have service. I think HPE was the first company to use chunklets. HPE is a great solution because it works actively in the production stage for all the use cases where it is currently required. Now, almost every main storage vendor has tools, like IBM EMC.

HPE Primera is not good enough as a storage solution as it does not provide a good NAS storage. The solution's NAS system is a part that is only used during the product's marketing. I think the area revolving around unified storage needs to be a little better at work. To be honest, during the implementation stage of HPE Primera, my company never used NFS or CIFS to create file sharing.

I have been using HPE Primera for two years. My company is a reseller of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

HPE Primera is not meant for enterprise-sized businesses, as it offers only two controllers. I don't know what the definition of an enterprise-sized storage solution is. Ten years ago, an enterprise-sized storage solution was something that had more than two controllers. Nowadays, everybody talks about storage solutions offered by NVMe, which is a two-controller storage system like IBM. I only see a few storage systems in the market that sell enterprise-sized storage, among which the first storage system was Hitachi VSP 5000 series, after which Dell PowerMax Storage and Huawei Dorado were released as enterprise-sized storage with several controllers. Serbia is a small country where my company doesn't have many customers with billing systems or something like that, so they need enterprise storage systems like IBM FlashSystem, which is used in a big telco company as a server for billing purposes, and they are very, very satisfied with the solution.

Five years ago or so, my company was availing of the support services offered, but my company doesn't receive support from any local HPE support team. Now, my company receives support from HPE through a company called Selectium, which represents Huawei and HPE at my place. The support from Selectium is great, but if you want to extend the warranty or some equipment, you are made to wait for a month or more, which was not something that was done before, meaning that it is not a technical issue from HPE's support team that operates locally in my country. Selectium represents HPE locally in my country.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

My company has access to HPE's knowledge base for the product's setup phase. HPE provides training with the help of dummies, which is very good. Suppose you plan to work with the storage solution for more than ten years. In that case, receiving detailed training from scratch may turn out to be the main reason why users can use the storage tool easily and may not find it complex to install and configure for applications.

The time required for the installation of the product depends on the number of tasks my company has and, especially if it is a new storage service, the installation task may take up to a week. In the last version of the software, HPE Primera, my company alone upgraded the software because in HPE 3PAR, we had to schedule the upgrading part considering that the upgradation functionality is chargeable, but now we can opt for upgrade strategies without help from HPE's support.

Two years is more than enough to take care of the installation part of HPE Primera. If my company sells an application to a bank, and they have a disaster recovery site, then we need two people to take care of the deployment part. One person will configure the tool, and another person will create and configure replication. My company's main customers for HPE Primera type of storage tools have a good SRM product for disaster recovery.

Cloud providers don't sell cheaper storage like HPE Primera since they have to earn money, and if you price your product half a million for the storage part, I don't think cloud providers will make any money. The main thing with storage systems is that many don't use expensive storage systems with cloud services.

I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the solution. In Serbia, every storage system comes with a license, which comes if my company places an order with HPE, especially for scenarios where my company wants support for applications after they expire, and the warranty charges are something my company must pay for such functionality. If my company faces some problems with any of our applications, we cannot contact support since we didn't pay for extended licenses for applications.

Suppose a user opts for extended warranty and repair services offered by the product. In that case, I believe that there is a need to pay almost 20 percent more than the product's actual price, but I am not sure since I am not involved in the area related to the product's extended warranty. I know that the costs for the extended warranty of HPE 3PAR were not so much compared to the present time. Presently, the prices for HPE products have been so high for the last three years that you might buy a new storage with the same capacity from IBM at a lower price.

HPE Primera's maintenance is very easy. If the product's memory, cache, or something else goes down, my company follows the procedure to replace the whole container, as we don't mess with the memory part. In the product, there is no need to follow some procedure to replace the disk, and we only check it when the replacement is done. If we see that the disk is not supported, then it is not a problem related to HPE Primera but something related to HPE 3PAR, where some old codes are used. In our company, we have several situations when the current OS does not recognize the new disk, and in such cases, we must delete it from the configuration and then upgrade the storage before putting in the new disk again in the system, but this is mainly for HPE 3PAR since HPE Primera has another system for to manage upgrades.

At the beginning of the year, I was in Barcelona. I see that the primary HPE storage products consist of the primary storage types used in countries like Denmark and France, where users don't know the group of storage systems that are greatly used in their countries even though it was so high. I think that HPE in other countries doesn't care about money, so I think that in some countries, HPE is not a legacy product, especially the ones where users have good knowledge about installing and maintaining primary solutions. The banks and telco companies in Serbia spend more money on the hardware than some other rich companies. Serbia has six and a half million people, and we are not in the European Union. With the average facility in Serbia, I think there is a need to have 500 EUR, and because of that, we are not in a good position to have a storage solution.

My company has never had a data loss and has always had a high availability regarding HPE Primera. My company has never had any problems with the application, so I think it is a good but expensive product. If I must compare the price and the quality, then the ratings I provide for the solution will change.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.