HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

I primarily use the solution for data storage. In the future, we'll use it for VDI and user profiles. 

We came off of the Pure and moved to Alletra. We're in the migration process of that right now. I haven't spent a lot of time on it yet. 

The installation of the agent that you put on each one of the file servers or host or clients, simplifies the process versus having to go through a process of manually configuring like NPIO and stuff like that for an ISCSI connection.

HPE has been great with some of the questions and the concerns we had coming up. We had an issue where we weren't getting the data deduplication and compression that we thought we were going to have, especially when compared to the Pure. They stepped up and gave us more storage.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure.

The guarantee of data availability was an important factor in our decision-making when moving to Alletra. We want to ensure availability is always there. We were able to do an expansion the other day to add extra space, and it went flawlessly without any issues. The data stayed up, with no users complaining.

Alletra has helped reduce time spent with storage provisioning. I could just bring up a new volume and present and format it. It's probably very similar to Pure. 

Alletra improves our storage performance in terms of IOPS.

It has helped reduce the time spent solving storage-related support tickets. The only experience with that so far is during the upgrade to the expansion module, we had an issue where it wouldn't come back up. An automatic ticket was created. It was helpful to have a quick response from somebody higher up, a supervisor, checking in. 

We are a unique case when it comes to data compression. Mostly, everybody has VMware running on it. We're just using it for file storage. While our focus is dealing with compression algorithms, they just haven't focused that much time on that. They are putting their money where their mouth is, however, and helping us with more storage.

Due to their acquisition of Nimble, there are multiple portals. I'm hoping that that gets cleaned up. You still have InfoSight. That's just a traditional place for Nimble, and it was renamed and rebranded for HPE. There's been slow integrations into it, HPE Green Lake, and that web portal. Hopefully, that gets done quickly. It's confusing to know what portal to go to and for what.

There is a weird bug we're seeing. I always end up using the local on-site UI to do everything. As soon as that great one, it takes some time for it to show up in Green Lake or InfoSight. That said, I can see that it will help reduce time spent on storage provisioning.

I've used the solution for three months.

The solution has been rock-solid since we've had it. 

We just added 30TB onto it, and that went smoothly. It sounds like we could even add another if it happened, however, for now, that's enough for us. 

The setup was a little bit funny as we wanted to learn the system and they just wanted to program it. However, the people have been fine and we've been able to resolve issues. For the most part, technical support worked out well. When I get the right guy on the phone, it's great. There is some weird stuff going on with on-site support. They used to farm out on-site to third-party companies. 

Positive

We did previously use Pure. We switched when the contract came due. Everything we have is HPE. Pure was a one-off product. In the grand scheme of products and support, it just didn't make sense to renew.

We bought the solution outright. We aren't leasing the solution or anything. 

The deployment was pretty straightforward. We had scheduled it, and they showed up and helped us rack it. They could have been more clear on their process. They would say that we need a network discovery address, and we'd ask: "in what context?" They wanted an ISCSI discovery address. That probably should've been clarified beforehand and moments like that dragged on a bit. 

We have a TAM through HPE. 

I haven't seen anything faster. Now that we have 3/4 of the company on it, we'll need to start looking at performance metrics. 

I don't have any insights into pricing.

We've always had either Pure or HPE. There really was no other solution to look at.

We've only had the solution for a certain amount of time, and we are not 100% migrated over. I haven't had experience with many of the features just yet.

I'd rate Alletra eight out of ten. The compression may be an issue. I understand the theory of how it works (it compresses in deduplication as it's writing). The one thing I'm not a fan of is that you get compression at write-time, if, in six months, there's a firmware upgrade, and it helps the compression, the only way to get that added benefit of compression would be to write the data again. 

We use it for our primary production storage array as well as its DR capabilities, where we replicate our data over to another Nimble or Alletra.

The resiliency of its array capabilities and the data replication features they have available are the product's most valuable aspects. 

It provides a cloud-like operating model on-prem. It has positively affected operations. The management tools they have available make it easy to provision or add additional space. It's very easy to click through.

It's been a rock-solid system. We've had a couple of drives go down before we're even aware of it and they notify us and send us a replacement.  

It's important to have a data availability guarantee, being a hospital. We need to maintain that patient data. 

The workflows are very automated, for example, if we need something replaced.

We've been able to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning by 30%. It's so easy to provision a data store or a new chunk of disk.

We've improved storage performance. The all-flash system we have is incredibly fast. 

In the perfect world, it would be cheaper. 

I've been using the solution for about five years now. 

The solution is stable and rock-solid. It's been five years. A drive may be going out since it's been so long; however, beyond that, which is expected, we haven't had any issues. 

It's easily scalable. You can build up and out with this kind of storage. 

You can get around five additional shelves, and you're talking hundreds of terabytes of data that you can put on this solution.

Technical support is great. HPE provides some of the best support we've ever dealt with. We do pay for premium support. It's worth every penny. As soon as we have a problem, we open a ticket with them, and they immediately get back to us well within the four hour SLA that we have with them.

Positive

We have a 3PAR that's also an HPE storage array. We also have a Nimble. The 3PAR has been good. However, it's getting older, and it's in need of a change. 

We do use an Azure Cloud. However, it is a very small footprint. 

The experience deploying an Alletra was very good. It was nice and easy. 

We do go through a third party to order the solution; however, my colleague and I were the individuals who actually racked it. 

We have witnessed an ROI in terms of the IOPs. The speed at which we get the data from it is incredibly fast. 

If there was another solution that was evaluated, it would have been before my time at the company.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's rock solid with great support. It's just the price that is the sticking point.

We primarily use the solution for VMware. 

The ease of operation and ease of use are important aspects for us. The throughput of the units itself is really impressive. 

The solution provides cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data. You manage it through the cloud or on-prem as well. It wasn't a drastic change from what we used before, as we used HPE products. It's all NVMe-based. The IOs were through the roof compared to what we were using before. We'd see bursts of up to 17,000 IOPs, whereas before, we saw maybe 5,000.

I've logged into the analytics program, InfoSight, and it's good. With InfoSight, we can get on there and it can give us pointers about if we need more storage, for example, or insights into caching.

The guarantee of data availability was very important when we were deciding on a solution. With HPE's background and the support we knew we were making a smart decision.

We've been able to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. Compared to other HPE products that we've used, we have an ISCSI setup and we were able to build our storage setups very quickly. The simple UI made it so that it's just a few clicks to provision.

With what we've used the solution with right now, I haven't faced any issues. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't had an issue with it yet.

I'm assuming we can just add more drives if we need to. I haven't had to scale. We have two Alletras and they are sized for 100 TBs with current storage (with deduplication and compression) is maybe 50 TBs.

Support is good. I get all the answers I need. Some vendors were able to bring HPE people to answer support questions. I haven't had any issues when dealing with them. 

Of course, support always depends on who you talk to on the other end. Sometimes, with HP, there may be language barriers, and they seem to cycle through tech a lot more. That said, overall, I always get the answers I need. 

Positive

We've used HPE products previously. We also have Pure Storage.

It took nothing really to set it up. It was all online, and we were able to set it up and start using it within about three hours. We had experience with HP products that we used before.

We deployed the solution ourselves. 

We have not witnessed an ROI just yet. It has improved speed and performance overall. 

We did evaluate other options, and we have other storage that we have on-site as well. For what Alletras does, in terms of throughput, the cost is good. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for workloads in healthcare. 

The sizing is very good. We have new applications and new workloads and we have found the performance is very good.

The ability to use different workloads and different data is useful. It offers a good way to treat our data while guaranteeing high performance. We have 1 PB of data.

It offers a cloud-like operational model on-prem. Healthcare data is complicated, especially for data in the cloud. 

It's good at predicting and preventing problems. 

Guaranteed data availability is very important for us in health care. Having that guarantee of availability to us was integral to choosing this solution.

Alletra has helped us reduce time spent on storage. We've witnessed a 120X improvement in performance.

It's improved storage performance in terms of IOPS. It depends. If we compare it with other solutions, the performance is 2X better.

Alletra has helped us reduce storage-related tickets by 2X.

We have more than traditional use cases. If they could explore new configurations for data storage, it would be ideal. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability is very good. It's better than other solutions. 

We have just started a project to scale the solution as we need more capacity. For the moment, the scalability is good. What you need to do in order to expand is very clear. 

HPE support is very good. We have a decent relationship with them. All of our questions get answered in a short time and the communication is very good. 

Positive

We previously used some solutions from IBM. We needed to change solutions and we decided to go with Alletra. 

The deployment was very easy. All of the documentation and instructions are very clear. 

We did have the help of an integrator. 

We have witnessed an ROI. In healthcare, people use a lot of Alletra. For us, it's easy to share the application. 

Licensing is expensive at the moment. Maybe they will lower it as more and more people begin to use Alletra. 

We did evaluate other vendors, including Pure Storage. Alletra was good for integration. Also, people who have worked with applications in healthcare know Alletra and have confidence in the product.

We are customers and end users.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for high data reduction. We use it for compression and deduplication. 

The most valuable aspect is the data reduction and compression. Space is important for our company and more space can get very expensive. Compression of data helps cut costs. If we have 100 TB of data, it can compress this quite well. 

It's very secure and reliable. It offers good high-level storage.

We use the on-prem interface, not the cloud interface. We always use Alletra as a local management solution.

It's predictive and offers a good high level of prevention for problems. It will go ahead and open a case if there is a problem.

Storage provision is good. It's easy to use. 

The guarantee of data availability is important.

We've been able to improve our storage performance in terms of IOPS. I've checked it recently and saw that it's improved.

We've been able to reduce the time spent resolving storage-related tickets. Now, it takes a maximum of two hours. 

We haven't seen any negative issues. 

It can be less expensive. It's very expensive for us. 

I've been using Alletra for approximately four years. 

The stability is very good. 

The solution is highly scalable. 

Technical support is fast and responsive. At a maximum, we'll get a resolution in one day. However, it's usually one to two hours. 

We did use 3PAR and Primera among other solutions.

We liked Alletra's high-level storage. 

The deployment was really straightforward and easy to manage. It's very user-friendly. You simply click through.

We have yet to witness any ROI.

We have two Alletra models and have recently added another product.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's reliable. It has many features, and the data reduction and compression are great. 

We primarily use the solution for VM storage, file servers, and things like that. 

We've got around 75 VMs that run on the storage arrays. So the deduplication and features like that allow us to store a lot more on them than if we just did physical drives. 

They are extremely reliable. They just work. The cloud tie-ins alert us if there are any issues well in advance. The auto ticket generation is really useful for us as well.

Deduplication is a big one for us as it reduces our data costs. 

Their service has been really, really phenomenal. We've had drive failures. We had a whole system failure at one point, and within 24 hours they had us back online. 

The ability to duplicate data between systems has been really handy. We've got two data centers, and they handle the cloning of data between sites as well.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem. They call it One View. For us, it's more about active monitoring of our on-prem solution and letting us know if there are issues with communication to our VMware environment, hardware issues, drive degradation, and that kind of stuff. That has been how we've utilized it. 

It's been pretty good at predicting problems. Besides the controller failure, everything else we knew was coming before it was a problem.

The guarantee of data available to our organization is important. We're a manufacturing company. If our systems go down, we lose dollars every minute that system's offline. That's why having high availability has been very important for us. 

Alletra helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. We don't really have to manage it very much other than increasing the size of the data storage. We don't really have to manage the system at all. It's very hands-off. We really don't have to do much to manage storage. We may just have to increase the drive size, and we're done. It doesn't really change our workflow a whole lot.

We have improved storage performance. We were using spinning disks in the individual servers prior to Alletra. 

If we have a storage ticket, we usually get someone on the phone within fifteen minutes when we call in and we're able to get a solution going and have parts we need for replacement within two or three hours.

The solution could use more monitoring of their split-brain system controllers. That was the failure we had. One of our controllers failed, and it led to an error in the split-brain module.

If we could have had the failure we had to be handled in real-time and not have to be offline and have parts ordered, it would have been ideal.

I've been using the solution for five and a half years now. 

The solution is really stable. We've only had only one issue in five years, aside from intermittent drive failures. 

The solution is very scalable. We've added drawers to increase storage space, and they scale well beyond our needs. 

Technical support is very good. We have four-hour support, and 99% of our issues are resolved within that timeframe. It's been rock-solid. When we've called in for advanced issues, within ten minutes, they are kicking us up the line to get to the person we need. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution.

The deployment is pretty simple. We haven't had issues with the configuration side. It just works. 

We used a reseller for our deployment. Our experience with them was excellent. 

The pricing and licensing are pretty clear-cut. We have a vendor that we work with that gives us a plain layout. 

We evaluated Pure Storage. Pricing may have been a deciding factor when compared to Alletra. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. 

We primarily use the solution for our data warehouse. We had a latency problem with data warehouse services. We had 3PAR and we migrated everything to [HPE] Alletra [Storage]. The latency that Alletra gives us is much lower than that given by 3PAR and it has managed to support the number of IOPs generated by the service.

The execution response times of data warehouse tasks have improved, and the reports have been produced on time as required by the Bank.

The configuration capacity it has to create a cluster for replication is excellent. 

The latency it gives me is incredible.

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. In terms of administration, we can do stuff from anywhere; we do not need to be on the local management network. That is one of the best benefits. So is the whole subject of team status reports through "GreenLake.

The guarantee of data availability to our organization is important. I work in a financial area, so protecting data is the most valuable task the bank has and we feel safe with Alletra.

Alletra helped reduce the time in storage provisioning. We have reduced it by two hours. Before switching solutions, it used to take us two to three hours, and we have reduced it to about 15 minutes with Alletra.

Alletra improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs. It has been reduced, however, I couldn't say by how much right now. I do know that with the storage we had before, we were already saturated with 30,000 IOPs, whereas with Alletra we have put 50,000 IOPs in it and it has worked well.

I haven't found anything that could be improved. It's a good product overall. We didn't buy it for production purposes. We wanted to use it for development. That said, due to the efficiency it has, the company is already thinking about putting it into production.

Maybe they could just reduce the number of racks and the amount of rack space.

I've used the solution for two years. 

To date, we have not generated any cases for Alletra, which means it has given us 100% stability. In these past two years, Alletra has never generated any cases for us in terms of stability issues - which is a very good sign.

We have not had the opportunity to require more resources at the moment.

Support is excellent. It is easy to ask for help, and the response we receive is very specific. We do not give the situation much thought or go back and forth about it.

Positive

We used 3PAR. We changed to a new technology due to obsolescence more than any other reason.

The initial setup was relatively simple. After installation, there were not many configurations. We were quickly up and running. The support was very good. 

We used the help of a third-party vendor and received good attention.

The issue of price and cost is handled by another area; I am from the technical side.

We evaluated Dell and Pure Storage. With Pure Storage the difference was the price. With Dell, the difference was mostly in the number of IOPs supported by Alletra and the type of rack they used.

I give Alletra a ten out of ten. I have no complaints about Alletra at this time as it exceeded our expectations.

We primarily use Alletra for virtualization.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the 100% uptime guarantee. The guarantee of data availability to our organization was one of the top priorities. Our business is 24/7/365 high transaction rates and it was very important that the storage was always available

Its ease of administration is great. It's really simple to maintain.

The firmware updates on it are non-disruptive, which is amazing. Most people say they are nondisruptive; Alletra actually is not disruptive. 

The IO performance has met our expectations and exceeded them. 

Alletra provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managed data infrastructure. We rarely use it, but it does. We know that can do the infrastructure as code administration through the cloud APIs. We just haven't yet, so we haven't leveraged that much.

Alletra is helpful for predicting problems and preventing them before they occur - although we have had virtually zero problems with it. When we have, it has called support for us. That's been pretty good.

Alletra has helped us to reduce the time spent on storage provisioning by at least 50%. The use of application groups means that we just have to tell it how big we want our next provisioning slice to be, and the rest just happens. 

The solution has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs, probably by at least 300%. It's helped reduce the time spent resolving related support tickets as well. So far, we have opened two support tickets versus the approximately 40 tickets we had to open for the old storage. 

Long-distance, high-latency replication enhancements would be delightful to see in future versions.

I've used the solution for two and a half years now.

The stability is incredible. We haven't had a single storage event since we put it into production.

Scalability is great. The devices they sent us still have tons of room to grow. All we have to do is add a disk, and then the rest of it happens.

Overall, support is very good. We recently moved to GreenLake managed services. I only see tickets now when they've identified a problem and that comes with a list of how they're going to fix it. For the most part, it's hands-off for me right now, which is awesome. The only issue is they haven't quite figured out our internal structure yet, so sometimes they reach out to the wrong person. They just need to put their process documents in order. It's no big deal. 

Positive

We had an HPE solution previously, an older 3PAR storage array. It was old and not as good, which is why I switched.

In terms of deployment, we're an almost strictly private cloud, and it's all happening under the VMware Umbrella right now.

The deployment was actually a bit of a pain. It seems that we were running a slightly older version of VMware, and it didn't like talking to the Alletra models at first. We were having a lot of storage disconnects. Luckily, we hadn't put it into production before it got resolved. However, we couldn't get HPE and VMware on the same page about it. 

Eventually, we just upgraded our version of VMware and all the problems went away. That was probably a month's worth of engaging with both parties and trying to find a solution. We just gave up, upgraded, and the problem went away. 

We did have a reseller that was involved that we deal with fairly closely. They've been very good to us. They know their stuff pretty well, and they're always willing to throw down when we need them.

We don't have a lot of metrics in terms of ROI. The ROI to me is the amount of time I spend managing the device. It's very low compared to the old solution. 

The licensing and setup costs were very simple. We used the GreenLake purchasing model (the OpEx purchasing model). It all came as one bundle.

We evaluated HPE's Primera. We didn't really look outside of HPE. The Primary pro for Alletra was that it was an all-in NVMe storage array, and we were looking for maximum IOPS.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. Of all the storage platforms I've had over the years, this one has caused me the least amount of grief overall. The metrics coming out of it really do help me identify if we are having any IO problems. The only thing is we haven't had any, so I just look at a bunch of green bars that say, "you're good!"