HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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.

HPE Alletra 6000 that we are using used to be Nimble. We have warehouses. We have 100 employees or something like that. We have 3 servers and about 50 VMs. For that, it is a perfect fit.

They are stable systems. HPE Alletra 6000 is reasonably priced. It is a perfect fit for our organization.

There is a Call Home feature. If there are any issues, it connects directly to the remote support. That is helpful for me. I get alerted by HPE before I connect and get my alerts.

The guarantee of data availability is very important for any organization. If your storage system dies, the whole company shuts down.

It has helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. You plug it in, and with a few clicks, it is all configured within a few minutes. I do not have the metrics, but it does not take that long to configure.

It is very simple. It does not take much time to troubleshoot.

It has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs. I cannot really compare it, but I do not have to worry about IOPs anymore.

It has not helped reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. It is the same as Nimble. 

Ease of utilization and ease of backup are valuable. You just plug it in, run a few commands, and set it up. It is done.

Lately, I had trouble with the configuration. They have GreenLake, and you have to have the serial number connected to GreenLake. You have to connect to the cloud. When you configure it, the system has to be connected to the Internet. Otherwise, you cannot configure it. That is the most difficult part. They need to have something that does not require a connection to the Internet. Once you have configured it, then it should connect to the Internet or GreenLake, and that is fine. The problem for me is that I configure at a remote location where I do not have access to the Internet, but this requires the Internet.

I used HPE Alletra 9000 about two and a half years ago, and I have been using HPE Alletra 6000 for about a year or so.

It is very stable. I do not have any issues at all.

It is pretty scalable. I have added more disks.

It is hit-and-miss. Most of the time, I get good service, but sometimes, I get stuck. Occasionally, you run into a situation where people do not know what they are doing, and then you are stuck. When that happens, I get my reps, and they help me out. Overall, the service is great. It has improved.

Positive

I was using HPE. It was Nimble, and now it is Alletra, so we migrated from Nimble to Alletra.

We have 5000 series. We are using a private cloud.

Its deployment is very simple. You just plug it in, click a few times, give an IP address, and you are all set up. It is no trouble at all.

I deployed it myself.

It is reasonably priced.

HPE Alletra Storage provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. I have seen that, but it is not at all useful for me because my applications are very simple.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a ten out of ten. It is perfect for me in terms of the price range and utilization. It is easy to set up and easy to manage, and it gets the job done. There is only one issue. It requires GreenLake for configuration. They need to change that because sometimes, the end user is at a remote location without Internet access. It should not have anything to do with configuring the storage, but unfortunately, they are linked, and you are stuck.

Its use case primarily is VDI. We are working with models 6050 and 6070.

Price, performance, efficiency, and reliability are its benefits. Those customers who used to be on 3PAR and Primera and are now on Alletra probably have two times performance improvement. The most important benefit has been the increase in efficiency. The efficiency has improved at least three or four times. Its pricing per gigabyte is also lower than what they used to pay for the older solutions.

It provides a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. Most of my customers who are on VDI are using VHCI and Private Cloud Business Edition or PCBE, and they love it.

It helps with day-to-day management. Especially when customers have multiple sites, they are able to view all their sites and manage all their sites from a single pane.

It can predict problems and prevent them before they occur. The main feature of Alletra is the inheritance of Nimble InfoSight. It is a big plus.

There is a guarantee of data availability, but that was not the only reason for going for this solution. They have availability of six nines on other platforms as well, but with Alletra, you have the whole package. There is efficiency, reliability, and proactive support with InfoSight. It is the whole package.

It has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs, but I do not have the metrics.

The performance is valuable. The NVMe performance with VDI plays a big role. There is efficiency of the array and replication between two sites. A lot of customers use Alletra for production and DR and do replication.

They are definitely going to start pushing more on MP for files. This was an area where HPE was not very strong, but now, with Alletra MP, it is going to be very strong. Most importantly, there is going to be the flexibility of moving compute and storage on Alletra MP. This flexibility will be very good.

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage for the past two to three years.

So far, so good.

On regular Alletra, you can only add two shelves. That may be a limitation because you need to plan ahead of time about how you are going to grow. You might want to conserve the type of disk. It is a little limiting in terms of capacity. This is why MP is better.

We do work with HPE support. It is a little slow sometimes, but in the case of Alletra, that has not been the case. With Alletra, the level 3 engineering support has been more than okay. For Alletra, I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have not done its deployment. We do help some customers with monitoring, managing, and patching the environment. It is fairly new. Alletra has been there for about two years.

Overall, it was a good ROI for customers.

Overall, it was good. It had a good price per gigabyte.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten.

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. 

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

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 run our VDI systems off of it as well as a lot of VMs, SQL databases, and things like that. We use it for a little bit of file storage as well. 

Moving on to the platform is fairly simple. Upgrades are easy. We just put it in a new shelf, and that didn't cause any downtime. We really appreciate that. We're running 1,000 DDIs on a single Alletra. I don't know if we could have done that on any of our last storage systems.

The deduplication feature is great. It's a pretty standard feature at this point. However, it's really important for the workloads we run to keep the storage cost down. The speed and reliability are excellent. 

It has all of the technologies in place to make sure our data is still there when things go bad. 

Predicting and preventing issues before they happen seems great on Alletra. All of our failures have been very predictive. We haven't had any downtime. We had some controllers throwing early warnings, and Alletra caught that before anything went bad. We know the stuff goes bad; however, the way that Alletra treats it, we've never had any downtime from hardware issues. It always disables itself and pulls a bad drive out of the pool before any data corruption occurs. 

Alletra has improved the storage performance in terms of IOPS. We don't have any issues. Our infrastructure is a little bit different on the back end, so some of our stuff has a little trouble getting to it. That said, we already know that that's a back-end issue for us and we are going to be resolving that by the end of the year. 

It's helped reduce time spent resolving storage-related tickets. We don't have a lot since it's so reliable, and setting it up is fairly easy and hassle-free. If you need something new, you get it, attach it to the storage, it hooks up and sets up the VMware using the connector software really easily. I don't have to think about it anymore after that. 

Moving from Nimble to Alletra was a little difficult. The process involved adding new cards - which was quite a bit more of a headache for us. Having to console in and turn off the controllers to add the new card for the storage shelf itself was a hassle compared to a Nimble, which was almost plug-and-play. They're very similar, the downtime was zero, and the instructions were great. It was just a lot more work than we were used to with Nimble.

I've been using Alletra for three years.

The support is great. It's easy to just call them and have somebody pick up the phone and easily talk to them about issues. Support is amazing - and that's one of the primary reasons that we use it. 

I previously used Nimble. 

The deployment and installation are generally fairly easy. It's technical so it takes a bit of time. The last time we put in a fresh Alletra, after we racked it, it only took a few hours to get it up and running. More often than that we've done shelf deployments. The new Alletras are a bit more difficult, however, it doesn't take long. 

The ROI is in the reliability and ease of use. The uptime is ROI. We're in the public sector, and uptime is of primary importance. We have a hard time getting a Windows update downtime. Having uptime from our storage, when we never have to worry about it at all is ideal.  

It's expensive. That said, we know what we're buying and we're okay with it. We're generally okay with what we're paying.

I'd rate Alletra nine out of ten. We really enjoy the product. We don't have a lot of issues. And the support keeps us there. We wouldn't consider anything else due to the phenomenal Alletra support that migrated along with Nimble. They are proactive and that's why we love it.  

We’re using Alletra as our primary data center for critical servers, including web and e-commerce services. It also handles our data and storage servers.

The solution offers faster resolution. The developers have noted how quickly it performs when they configure the application. The snapshots have been helpful as well. In the past, we experienced data corruption and were able to restore the entire volume using the snapshot feature without any data loss.

The solution is five to seven times faster than Nimble Storage and responds quickly to data requests.

The user interface is user-friendly and easy to manage.

The snapshot feature is very similar to that of Nimble Storage.

The solution offers easy management and scalability.

Alletra provides a cloud-like model for managing on-premises storage. I am already using GreenLake, and it has been good. The cloud-like model is decent, although we are not fully on the cloud yet. We have high bandwidth, so we haven't noticed much difference between on-premises and cloud.

It is good for preventing problems before they occur. Everything goes to the cloud, so we receive notifications if there is an issue. If there is a link disconnection or a system issue, I get notified.

The 100% data availability has been important for us. We knew that Alletra was scalable and more stable in terms of storage. We depend on Alletra 100% for our data and need to ensure its availability.

It has helped us reduce time spent on storage provisioning by 25%. For example, if I am creating a new volume, it takes just a few seconds and replicates quickly to the vCenter. The entire process is much faster than other solutions.

Alletra ensures that the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets remains consistent. It is always fast and scalable.

The solution is already quite effective, and I haven’t identified any shortcomings. In the future, it would be helpful to receive text notifications for alerts in addition to the current email notifications.

I've been using the solution for five months.

The stability is great.

The scalability is excellent. 

The customer and tech support are excellent. The technicians are quick to respond, and the overall support has been good. However, there can be a slight delay on weekends compared to business days, usually around five to ten minutes. Despite this, the response remains fairly prompt.

Positive

I've used Storwize by IBM. We also used Nimble. Alletra is a faster application.

The integration was straightforward and easy with vCenter and Nimble Storage's connection management tools. We also utilized the deployment tools from Alletra. We started with a hybrid setup with the goal of transitioning to the cloud. Currently, we are using GreenLake.

The deployment process was excellent. The shipment was prompt, and we had a technician on-site who assisted with the storage racks. Another technician handled the management setup, while I took care of the configurations. The entire process was smooth and hassle-free, with no complications.

We handled the initial setup ourselves. 

We made the right Invesment by choosing Alletra. 

The pricing is reasonable. We got Alletra at a great price, almost the same as Nimble. However, we doubled our storage for nearly the same cost.

Yes, we did. However, we found that Alletra is the best fit for our business.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten. I’ve never experienced a hard disk or hardware failure, which is great.

Hybrid Cloud

We primarily use the solution for virtualization storage.

We have different use cases and 30 locations around the country. We use it to either replicate back from site to site or keep our footprint small at the edge.

The deduplication is very good. The array replication and V-wall storage are also really useful. 

We've been able to reduce our footprint. We get 4X on each array times 30.

The cost savings are pretty good. It does allow us to store more than we normally would. 

One of the best benefits I can think of is that the support team is top-tier. We've had a lot of good experiences with support, which I can't say for some other vendors.

It's pretty good at predicting and preventing problems. We can receive notifications on most of our problems, and, if not before, very soon after. Most of our problems are just failures such as power failures. We tend to receive notifications just before or right on time. If we didn't get those notifications our environment would be down.

The guarantee of data availability is very important to us. Data runs everything.

It's helped reduce the time spent on provisioning by over 50%. The way that we use it is mainly through the plugin into vCenter. It makes the provisioning of new data storage infinitely faster.

The solution has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPS. When I started, we had some other vendor arrays that were not as great, moving to Alletra, it's improved. We're a big SQL shop, so we're  running all their secret reports and all that faster. That's always a plus for the business.

Alletra helps reduce the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets.

I'd like to see a smaller chassis in the hybrid arrays. The one they have is a legacy chassis and is a lot bigger than it should be.

I've been using the solution for five years. We were originally Nimble customers. We've used a variety of versions, from the C1000s up to the Alletra 530s.

It's a very stable system. We have no complaints. 

The solution is fully scalable. There's no issue adding additional shelving, and we've had zero downtime. 

Alletra suport is excellent. They are always responsive and knowledgeable, and our issues are resolved in a few hours. I don't dread opening support tickets with them. 

Positive

We have used EMC and NetApp. We moved all storage over to Alletra. We wanted continuity. We have a small team and Alletra has made it easier to train people when using one platform.

We deployed the solution ourselves. It's really easy to set up and the documentation is step by step. Getting it from out of the box to up and functional we can do in 30 minutes or less. 

I don't know what the pricing is.

We haven't recently evaluated other solutions. The transition was already in motion when I took things over. We don't have plans to change.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. It's reliable, has good uptime, and nice features. It doesn't cause me problems.