HPE Alletra Storage Reviews

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 [HPE] Alletra [Storage] 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.

We typically use Alletra NVMe drives for high-performance applications requiring more than 200,000 IOPS per second. We also have HPE's 3PAR, the most advanced version of the storage array. It can address most application issues and has less than 2 millisecond latency. 

We had faced issues with 3PAR because the drives slowed down, and we constantly had to change the capacity. There was too much incoming data, and the CTDs were always full. We needed some compression, deduplication, and provisioning. Even after applying all these techniques, we still faced some issues with space. 

But Alletra has high-capacity NVMe drives, so we no longer have a problem. There are no spikes, regardless of our incoming IOPS or my customer's application requirements. The solution immediately addresses the needs of any applications. 

Also, you need not worry about backend vulnerabilities. It is an awesome product. You deploy and run it without worrying about what's happening at the security level.  It's better than other storage classes like MSS. These NVMe models have played a significant role here.

We achieve storage availability by maximizing usable storage while minimizing hardware storage requirements. We have almost three petabytes of data space, and we're only using one petabyte, leaving two petabytes available.

We have the most advanced HPE products available that we can monitor with the HPE InfoSight feature, which enables us to check every metric, including bandwidth and latency, at a granular level. Alletra's mechanism is excellent and can handle multiple traffic sources. Anything is possible. Regarding your application, the IO behavior can be random, sequential, or a database. It serves web and e-commerce applications better. 

HPE InfoSight lets you see all the alerts from SSMC and proactively log cases. It will automatically raise a ticket to HPE when critical hardware fails. You get an idea about what will happen and be proactive. You can see when a node will restart so we can investigate and work with support. We can also see how nodes and ports are performing. 

DataCare helps you manage allocation mapping and firmware upgrades. We can also replace drives, troubleshoot, set up applications, update proxies, and take backups through DataCare. 

More training videos would help. We could learn some best practices. Sometimes, people may not follow the best practices and reach out to support, who will tell them that they need to follow these best practices to get this performance or result. 

I have used Alletra for nearly two years.

The batteries, BIOS configuration, and power supply are much more stable than the previous models.

I rate HPE support eight out of 10. Their support is kind, and they respond quickly.

Positive

We have IBM's flash array. We face too many problems with IBM's flash array because the code is unstable and nodes must be restarted. We haven't seen these issues with Alletra. We also use Oracle Cloud and plan to use AWS, but the cost is too high. 

Alletra is straightforward if you connect it properly. Once it's plugged in, you assign IP addresses and start configuring the security

I rate HPE Alletra nine out of 10. 

We use it in our customer environment that has more than two or three hosts. We don't have to worry about meeting any of the network vendor requirements for storage.

It's made everything faster.  On the array that we use internally, it has eliminated all of our storage bottlenecks, which has really quieted down all of our alarm systems, so it just made our days quieter.

It's easy to deploy and maintain, and it's made everything faster. 

It does offer a cloud-like infrastructure. However, it depends on what you are trying to do. The cloud-like perception is mostly seen during the deployment of HP GreenLake. While it is multi-tenant, that's not how we use it day to day.

While it's good for predicting problems, we don't have many. I don't know how many tens of thousands of sensors are on the Alletra arrays. Whenever there has ever been a problem, there has been a sensor, an email, et cetera. If it's a problem with the hardware or a failure that's even pending, something gets shipped out, and a case is auto-created and auto-closed for us. So it pretty much just does all of it.

The data availability guarantee is crucial. While it doesn't reduce the time spend on storage provisioning, it's fixed and has made the management easier. That's where its time savings comes into play.

It's improved our storage performance in terms of IOPs. I don't know what our figure was before, but it's at least double, and we upgraded from a Dell EMC Unity.

It's reduced the time spent resolving storage-related support tickets. It's not that we have so many storage-related support tickets. It's that when we have storage issues, latency issues, or alarms, someone has to look into them. I'm not sure if it's the product itself that's made this better or if it's been the upgrade and support that we get from HPE. 

Our main array that we upgraded from was a Dell EMC Unity. We also had Nimble and MSA storage in the network. The reason we switched is we just needed the performance and the networking.

I'm not sure if I've gone through all the features. There's always room for improvement. 

I'd like an easier way to tune the alerts that email us. If we have a remote site that has issues, we have alerts that queue up and then once that gets resolved everyone gets flooded with alerts. 

I've used the solution for the last three years. 

The stability is very good. I've never had an issue with one dying. 

While it may be possible that the solution is infinitely scalable, I don't have the network need to continuously scale up. I don't know where the ceiling is.

HPE Nimble support is world-class. I'd rate it ten out of ten. Non-Nimble storage support is horrific. I'd rate it two out of ten since it takes so much longer to get to the correct team. Once you get to someone, the support is pretty good. It's just getting there that is hard. 

We previously used a Dell EMC Unity. We also had Nimble and ASA storage in the network.

Deploying the Alletra iSCSI platform was easy peasy. I could do it in my sleep. The Alletra dHCI platform was more of a headache. It requires a lot more planning and is more unforgiving during the initial setup. Once it's up and running, it's excellent.

We used a consultant to assist with the implementation. 

We've witnessed ROI in terms of smoothing out the bottlenecks and discovering the root problems. I don't have specific KPIs or metrics for ROI.

The pricing is very good. That said, every vendor is a spiderweb to navigate. It's a pain, everywhere.

We evaluated five different vendor solutions and this one, based on its performance and cost, was a win-win. We had hands-on experience and were more comfortable with HPE products. That said, the main driving factor was the cost.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's my personal favorite piece of storage. That said, there's always a new product and feature coming up in tech. 

We use it for our backend Tier 0 storage.

It is the core foundation for our disaster recovery plan and high availability plan. We use Peer Persistence in conjunction with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster to fail over critical workloads between data centers on a quarterly basis.

HPE Alletra Storage tries to provide a cloud-like operational model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. The cloud-like operational model has not affected operations such as deployment, provisioning, and day-to-day management. It is not enterprise-ready.

We have not seen much evidence of the fact that HPE Alletra Storage can predict problems and prevent them before they occur.

It is important that they guarantee data availability. They have had to pay up multiple times because they were not able to provide the availability, and so far, they have kept their word.

HPE Alletra Storage has helped reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. It has saved about 20% of the time. With each iteration, they are getting better at their user interface.

HPE Alletra Storage has improved our storage performance in terms of IOPS. There is about 50% improvement.

Multi-node or the four controllers and the port persistence are valuable. The overall redundancy and performance of the system is valuable.

They can continue developing their V vaults and peer persistence. They can implement active-active peer persistence so that our organization can use it.

In the next release, we would like more V vault support with metro clustering or peer persistence.

I have been using HPE Alletra Storage for two and a half years.

We were early adopters, so we got to see some of the worst of Alletra. Since then, it has become much more stable. It is definitely a much more stable product now.

It is very scalable.

Their support is pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

HPE has dedicated a lot of resources to our organization to ensure that we are successful. There is definitely a lot of collaboration between our organizations to support Alletra.

Positive

We were using 3PAR and Primera. We switched because it was a refresh into the newer technologies.

We are mostly on-prem, but we do use Azure as we have started to do a hybrid model. 

Its deployment was very smooth and simple.

We did it ourselves. It was very straightforward.

We have seen an ROI. As data continues to grow in our environment, driving down the price per terabyte is essential for us to be able to continue to afford the performance they give us.

HPE was a clear winner on price per terabyte. It was very smooth.

We evaluated Pure, and we evaluated EMC. The main difference was the price per terabyte.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage an eight out of ten. If they can improve some of the things, that would take it to ten.

We use the solution for our data center compute. We have three HP ProLiant servers that use it for storage and 40 virtual servers. 

We now have much more storage and the uptime is very good.

The performance is very good. We expanded our storage four-fold over the previous product and managed it within a reasonable price range. 

It's increased performance and uptime. 

Uptime, to us, is very important.

It's helped us reduce the time spent on storage provisioning. There's less management that's necessary overall.

We have lessened the number of storage-related tickets. We don't really have any since we implemented Alletra.

They could be a little more intuitive and user-friendly in terms of management, and it could be easier to find technical documentation. 

I'd like the solution to offer more free training.

I've used the solution for two years.

I've had no issues with stability. It's very good. 

I'm not sure if we'll need to scale. I'm not an expert on scaling; however, we do have the ability to upgrade our system should there be a need. 

Support is good. I had to get a password reset and they were very quick about it. It's better than general HP support. I've had a bad support experience, for example, with Aruba. There were language barriers, and I needed to redo tasks. Alletra's support, however, is very good.

Positive

We used to use Pure Storage. I didn't have to spend too much time managing storage availability. However, I did have to manage it more. With Alletra, I barely have to manage it at all. We switched to Alletra based on cost. The cost to replace Pure Storage would have been similarly-priced to the Alletra 6000-series. It made sense to go with a newer, better product if the price was the same. 

It was very easy, especially with the help of a third-party party. They did most of the setup and some on-site training, which was helpful. We had everything set up with minimal to no downtime. 

We had a third party help set it up. The experience was good. The main problem we had was getting a long time to get the product after purchase based on post-COVID supply chain issues. 

We have witnessed an ROI. It's a cost we have to have regardless of our data center. However, we have additional ROI since we could reuse our Pure Storage as a sandbox/DR solution. 

The pricing is decent. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The only improvements would have been more on training and getting more out of my existing system.

The tool's notable feature is that we don't need to log a case directly with the vendor. The tool has access to all the logs on-premises. This is an on-premises solution. Additionally, we can provision data as thick or thin provisioned. Moreover, it includes data grid duplication and compression features.

We allocate volumes to various clients based on their requirements and requests. This has resolved the problem of bottlenecks for applications requiring a high number of I/O operations, as the storage was previously unable to deliver the necessary throughput due to SAS, NL-SAS, and SATA drives. However, with NVMe drives, a single drive can provide up to thirty thousand IOPS. We can configure rate levels and disk drives according to the client's needs, ensuring no bottlenecks in IOPS.

The cloud-integrated feature allows users to HPE Alletra access from any location, eliminating the need for VPN connections or on-premises access.
It offers high-intensity IOPS for data operations and delivers extremely low latency for disk operations, often within sub-millisecond response times. This ensures minimal latency experienced by databases or applications, resulting in significantly faster read and write operations than other solutions. This is particularly beneficial for scenarios with many users accessing applications simultaneously. For instance, for many users checking results concurrently, the tool ensures optimal performance without latency or slowdown in the application portal.

The cloud-native connectivity feature allows you to deploy your private cloud infrastructure. However, it's important to note that integration with public cloud services is unsupported due to its hybrid channel-based solution, primarily designed for on-premises deployment. It will not give you any bottlenecks and offers the best performance on storage. 

It would be better if there were an option to incorporate the NVMe feature alongside other storage tiers. Currently, the system operates on Autotier but can manually peer and mix different types of drives, such as SAS and SATA drives. 

I have been using the product for 12 years. 

The tool's stability is excellent, providing a hundred percent uptime.

The product is scalable. Approximately 10-15 major customers are utilizing the product, with almost 400 plus servers.

The product's support is good. It is better than Dell EMC. 

The tool is very easy to deploy. It's like a plug-and-play system. You need to plug it in, and it's ready to go. There's no need for extensive configuration or setup. When the engineers from the HPE vendors arrive, they connect the HPE Alletra system, which requires Internet connectivity. After that, the person who registers will receive a signing code. This code must be input during the installation process, along with configuring the management IP.

The solution is expensive and can cost around five lakhs. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.I advise those considering implementing HPE Alletra to thoroughly evaluate your requirements and workload. It is a top choice in the market if you primarily need block-level database storage. However, it's worth considering other options if you have a mix of workloads and require unified storage.

We use the solution for infrastructure for one of our global financial customers to allow them to scale up and out.

The distributed hyper-converged infrastructure is great. Just having the ability to scale independently storage compute is useful. 

The extended capacity offers a small footprint that's still meeting a large customer demand. 

The cloud-like model will be helpful. I can see it will make things much more efficient once we get to that point.

For predicting and preventing problems, it looks like it will be a very useful feature. It will simplify operations and Day Zero and Day One operations.

Its guarantee of data availability is important. It will be one of the key aspects for the customer. 

It will help save time around storage provisioning once implemented fully.

The simplified provisioning of storage compared to other solutions in and of itself will make it more efficient.

Customers have an existing solution they can compare the performance of IOPs to. This product looks to be as good or even better. However, that's yet to be determined. 

Alletra should effectively reduce the time dealing with support tickets once it is fully implemented. It likely will improve by a factor of two to three, although we aren't at that point yet.

From what I've seen so far it's definitely checking the boxes of what the customer's looking for.

I'd like to see larger cluster sizes beyond four nodes. 

I've been using the solution for four months. 

It seems to be robust, and since it's based on the Nimbe product line, it will be mature. that stability will be fine. 

Going up to four nodes is not as scalable as I'd like for horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is huge. That said, the ability to go beyond four nodes would be of interest to customers in the future.

I haven't dealt with technical support yet. However, I'm sure it will be fine. I've seen a lot of focus on support. HPE will definitely bring its A-game. 

Positive

We use Dell. They are looking at the smaller footprint and simplicity as far as managing the product which is why Allertra is so attractive. 

We haven't deployed the solution yet. That said, just talking to the HPE deployment team and watching the demo, the process seems like it will be very simple. We'll be able to do it in hours instead of days or weeks. 

I'm an integrator. I'll help my clients handle the implementation. 

With a smaller footprint, there will be less power consumption. There will be more effective capacity as well, and less rack space used. 

I've heard the licensing is going to be much, much more streamlined than what they're used to currently. 

The customer is also looking at Hitachi, although it's more complex. Plus, the customer already has a significant HPE footprint. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. From an effective capacity, power, and footprint standpoint, it edges out the incumbent.

It is for dHCI, which is the hyper-converged infrastructure for HPE. It is replacing the tradition where when you have node storage, you have to purchase a model of switches. It combines the compute and storage.

Its benefits vary because I have used many models. I see it now handling VDI. Previously, when I had VDI and I put HPE for it, I would always go for Simplivity, whereas now, with the new model and GreenLake, they have attached Alletra to the cloud. It is serving people working from home a lot. They do not need to log in to do VPN anymore, create volumes, and manage their backups. If they have a full system for virtual storage, and they have Zerto for application replication, they can manage everything on the cloud. Zerto can also be managed on the cloud. If you have a stack, it does not matter how many systems you have. They all are going to show up in one interface. This is a huge benefit. Anything living in the storage can be monitored through the cloud.

HPE Alletra Storage has different models to cover SMBs, midsize companies, and enterprises. Enterprise companies with modern compute, CPU, and memory can have more virtual machines. It is easy for Alletra to grow and expand with the shelves. Customers are happy with it. Only one time I upgraded Alletra from 6010 to 6030 to add more storage and change the controllers. Customers are happy with Alletra. They do not complain. I never see them complain.

It is the simplicity of the deployment. They have unified all the features they have. For example, the creation and management of the storage was previously done through the plugins but with limited features. It was slow and had some challenges, whereas now, they have modern plug-ins that have more features and simulate the interface for the storage. Customers love it. The thing that they love the most about the plug-in is the one-click upgrade. They do not need to go to each device.

There can be more visibility and statistics for the customers to see. The customers would love to see AI. Even if it is not AI, there can be more visibility and real-time statistics that IT people can monitor and show to their bosses and impress them. To monitor things, they have reports, but the report system is old. Reports are by email. If they can show monthly growth and advise on the usage, it will make the lives of customers and IT people easy. They are going to love it. They would like to have one tool that can take them everywhere. There should be a single pane of glass. If they sit in a meeting, they should be able to answer questions related to whether they need more storage. They should not have had to go to different portals to get results, which creates confusion. If they have one place where they can see everything in graphics, it will be great.

We have been using HPE Alletra Storage for three years.

I have been working with HPE for six years. When I do an upgrade, I can see the Nimble that I installed for the customer five years ago as it is. No one touched it.

They continue to do a good job. I did not reach the max for anything. Every time I add a shelf for the customer, it takes 15 minutes. You just add a shelf, put the SaaS, and you are good to go.

Their support works very well. You can just grab the phone and reach out to their support. Their support answers you immediately. This is a big deal for the customers. 

I do deployment as well. Every time I get stuck at something or something goes wrong because something is missing or the customers do not have a proper configuration, I can reach out to their support immediately. I just pick up the phone, and they answer. We talk for ten minutes, and their support engineer understands the case. I open a secure channel for him to access or I give him a CLI with remote access. He applies his magic and reset the things.

I would rate them a ten out of ten because they get my issues solved. If the support engineer can not resolve an issue, he just escalates it. Being a technical person, I understand that the response can take longer. There could be some bugs, and their support team cannot give you the answer immediately.

Positive

I am HPE ASE certified. I do not bring any other customers to the game. I always present HPE. It has been six years since I have been doing this work for my company. We are beating Cisco. We are beating anyone with Dell PowerVault. We beat all of those models.

All the other companies have the same solution, but it comes down to knowing the expectations of the customer and putting things together for them from the switch to the compute to the storage. When you present them together, the result is going to be a yes. The price also plays a role, but HPE is what customers like to go for most of the time. About 70% of customers decide in advance where they will go, but some customers are surprised with the combination that we bring. We put Zerto, and we put the cloud for them. We provide them visibility and make the deployment easy for them. We give them administrator training. All these things that we add on top make customers comfortable to go with HPE even if they do not know HPE.

About 60% to 70% of customers go with the cheapest price, but they also need to see the performance and other things. We have a lot of customers. We took them to HPE Headquarters in Houston. We bring customers to events like HPE Discover. Last year, we brought a customer here and sold four sites to him with dHCI. We finished the Dallas one or the last one three months ago.

Our clients mostly use it on-prem, but they also use it for the DR site and HQ. 

The deployment is simple.

I would rate HPE Alletra Storage a nine out of ten. There should be 99% uptime. There are no issues with dHCI when it comes to upgrades, but with Alletra, they need to have the ESXi upgraded to the latest version. They need to use the correct or compatible plug-ins for it. Every time you go up with the storage, you need to look at your environment. Customers are probably not aware of all this because they do not create volumes every year or every day. There are certain things they need to keep in mind to upgrade. I do not blame the device. They need to initiate a call with the support for compatibility to ensure that everything will work.