HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

I give the replication feature a 10 out of 10. The GUI for snapshot replication gives you a lot of flexibility to schedule asynchronous replication, bandwidth control, and disk-rebuild resource allotment.

High Availability is a 10 out of 10, too, for having redundant RAID controllers per tray and the ability to build an HA Multi-Site.

I also like the easy setup of these units. We get project bids with zero lead time and when you have to build out a facility and you have a deficit of time to do so, it helps to have a quick and easy install and intuitive GUI. Running updates on these systems is nice and easy. The support staff are also very good.

When we bid on projects and scope out the work, we usually will have three design iterations that we follow -- a Multi-Site, Single-Site P4500, or Single-Site P4300 class setup -- depending on what is needed. All three build-outs use the same CMC and basic setup helps to standardize and help get a handle on costs and budgeting for these projects. We’ve built a multi-tiered storage solution for our customers using one product.

The HPE StoreVirtual Network RAID-10 (mirroring between nodes) is the most valuable feature. This allows for multi-node redundancy. If one node fails, the other in the cluster picks up the entire load. I have had nodes fail due to upgrade and other issues with no loss of data. Resync is automatic as is failover. For a 3 node system you do need an independent failover manager, but that is normal for clusters.

I administer a 100% virtual environment. To use the HPE StoreVirtual VSA edition, I did not have to buy an expensive external array. I was able to create two 3.27TB usable HPE VSAs from all the older disks I had laying around. Granted, eventually, I did purchase two storage blades to be used by the VSA, but that is not how usage started. Recently, I have been using HPE StoreVirtual on KVM as well.

We have several customers and we have StoreVirtual on several StoreVirtual deployments.

The replication is great. It has wonderful mirroring. 

The stability is quite notable. 

A company can scale it easily. The licensing just needs to be expanded. 

• Multi-site capability for disaster recovery
• Application aware snapshots
• Enterprise solution for virtualisation
• Centralised and easy to use management
• Easy to support whether it is four or 40 storage nodes

Business continuity and disaster recovery. The storage environment is spread between two geographical locations – bi-annually BCP/DR tests are conducted proving the validity of the architecture. Each site in turn simulates power loss – both the compute and storage that supports the vSphere estate are affected. In all cases, these tests have been 100% successful.

The StoreVirtual software provides us with a highly resilient storage platform for virtual machines.

Prior to the introduction of the StoreVirtual VSA, our four domain controllers resided on local disks in each data center (two in each site). There was no functionality for cross site migration and in the event of a data center failure, we were left without 2 DC’s for the duration of the outage. The implementation of StoreVirtual has allowed us to create cross site storage volumes, allowing VM’s to migrate freely between data centers. In the event of a data center outage, potentially all 4 domain controllers could be running from one site.

The solution is deployed with two nodes and then users have a network ride. The storage solution synchronizes, and it's quite like the StarWind solution. We installed two storage virtual machines and they synchronize with each other. That way, if one goes down, the other one will have the same data.

The management is very easy.

The solution is very stable.

The solution offers good patching.

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.

• Hardware stability
• Support
• Four-hour response support
• Performance

Using this platform, we were able to provide virtual desktops (VDI) to our end users across WAN, to help alleviate some of the problems that we’ve had with bandwidth.