HPE Primera Reviews

I use the solution in my company as a cloud infrastructure where we run VMs. My company uses VMware ESXi and HPE Primera as storage. HPE Primera is also useful to run and allocate machines to VMs.

The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price. Though I work for a big enterprise-sized business where the cost shouldn't matter much, I feel that HPE Primera is a bit costly.

I have been using HPE Primera for a year. My company is an end user of HPE Primera.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Around 100 employees in our company use the solution.

The product has been only used in our company for a year. The application for which my company has purchased HPE Primera is still being developed, so we need to have more uses for the tool.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

My company uses HPE 3PAR.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process.

The product's initial setup phase is a bit complicated since it can only be done by someone who is experienced. The tool has certain delicate settings to deal with during the setup phase.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Considering the whole infrastructure, the solution can be deployed in a week's time.

A team must take care of the product's deployment process since there are many areas, like the storage, network, and server parts.

The tool is expensive. I can say that HPE Primera is one of the costliest tools in the market.

HPE Primera has improved our company's data-intensive application performance. In our company, HPE Primera provides me with centralized access to all the data while allowing me to manage the storage and allocate different machines to VMs, making it a reliable and good tool.

My company hasn't used the product in a way that allows me to describe a scenario where the tool's capability was beneficial for our business. My company has not tried to use the tool's scalability features, considering that it has only been a year since it was installed in our company. I believe that the need to use the scalability feature of the product will come into the picture in a few years. Right now, the product's size and capacity are enough for our company to continue with it in our environment.

HPE Primera's most beneficial features for storage management tasks stem from the fact that my company can have online access to the health and all the other parameters of the product through HPE's website, which helps a lot. My company can get critical information about the storage from any place, and it also generates alerts, making it a very good solution.

My company is satisfied with HPE Primera's data protection capabilities since we can take snapshots of the VMs, which helps us ensure that the VMs are always protected.

My company has integrated HPE Primera into a whole new infrastructure, so we have never tried integrating it with the old infrastructure in our organization.

Though we know about HPE Primera's AI-driven operations, my company has not used it extensively.

As the IT landscape has been changing lately, users need to think of software-defined storage because it gives flexibility for expansion and is cheaper than HPE Primera. If you have money, you can go for HPE Primera.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We deploy all our application services on the Primera Storages. In addition, we consolidate all of our environment on Primera Storage, a full flash system.

The interface is simplified and easy to integrate with other solutions.

The most important thing for us is the IOPS. It's produced because a full flash system is a requirement for us. Last year we used a three-part hybrid solution in our environment and needed some IOPS on our site. HPE Primera met this requirement for us entirely.

It seems sufficient for our environment, but if our requirement increases in two years, then we can plan. So there's no need to make any improvements right now.

Some application solutions can be more acceptable on the HPE Primera site because the size is important and costly.

We have been using this solution for approximately one year, deployed on private cloud. Our cloud provider is Turkcell in Turkey.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. I do not know the exact number of people using the solution, and only the Active Directory team has those details.

HPE Primera's support is right because we've worked with HPE for years. So, there's no problem with the support.

I don't have details about the initial setup.

The pricing is reasonable. It is GreenLake Services, and we pay monthly. Unfortunately, I cannot share details of our licensing costs.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I suggest full flash solutions in the environment to speed up the application process. Before Primera Storage, we also used some hyperconverged systems, but in the hyperconverged systems, we had to tackle IOPS requirements. Due to this, HPE Primera is the right solution for the IOPS requirement environment.

Primera is a storage system that lets you mix and match All-Flash drives plus NVM drives. Most of the servers are hosted on Primera, so about 100 users are using this.

Primera's main advantage is its support for NVM drives and normal flash drives. It has some sort of AI analysis that automatically tells us how to optimize the performance.

The IOPS and throughput could be better. That's the only drawback compared to other vendors.

I've been using Primera for about six months.

Primera has been highly reliable so far, and HPE is offering a 100 percent availability.

You can add enclosures to Primera, so it's really scalable to any extent.

We used EMC Unity and HPE 3PAR in the past. 

Setting up Primera was straightforward and took about two days. Once it's set up, you need only one storage specialist to manage the solution. 

You need support from a vendor or at least an HP reseller.

I rate HPE Primera eight out of 10. I would recommend Primera if price is an issue. However, if you have the budget, you might consider a new HPE storage product called Alletra. That has better IOPS, and it's entirely NVM, which performs better, especially for database loads.

HPE Primera is used for shared storage. We have two servers connected via fiber channel to primary storage. In these two servers, we are running three databases. These three databases are installed in the shared storage. So, the shared storage is into the HPE Primera storage or disks.

We have 80 volumes of one terabyte each, and we have a total of eight terabytes capacity on Primera storage with an extra capacity of four terabytes for the caps. The applications running on the HPE server mount all the mounting points in the shared storage, including the database.

HPE Primera is used for shared storage.

Recently, we had many issues with HPE Primera storage, mainly in the leveling process, which caused many problems for the customers. In this architecture, the full application running over this storage gets stuck when one disk fails. We noticed that one leveling process, ungrouping process, and grouping process took around 12 hours to conclude. It was not a good experience.

The main issue was that we dimensioned the solution to 1,300 IOPS. The solution has 10 + 2 spare disks, and when one disc fails, the application gets stuck because the IOPS moves to 5,000 IOPS when it happens.

We noticed some specific limitations with the solution's graphical interface, which was not rich. The solution's main problem was the grouping and ungrouping process. We confirmed that the problem was with HPE Primera by stopping the whole application while labeling.

No IOPS was consumed from the application to the storage, even though the IOPS was 5,000. This means that 5,000 was just for the leveling of one disk. If two disks had failed, the problem would have been bigger than we experienced.

We delivered the first Primera storage in 2022.

The solution's performance using SSD disks is fantastic, but its performance using HDD disks is not so good. I don't know if that is because of some problem with the controller. We have a lot of customers that use 3PAR with HDD disks, and they don't have any problems.

Unlike 3PAR, HPE Primera storage only supports rate six. Whenever you have a problem with rate six, you need to spread and make a lot of copies. That could be the reason you have problems when you need to do an ungrouping of one disk. That could be the reason the performance was not good.

The experience of HPE Primera storage with HDD disks using rate six was not good. However, the experience of HPE Primera storage using rate six with SSD disks was fantastic.

HPE Primera has good scalability. You have 24 slots for SSD disks, and you can expand them well. You can put more controllers. I rate the solution's scalability a nine or ten out of ten.

Technical support's first response was quick. They analyzed and acted on the problem very quickly. However, the responses in levels one and two were not proper enough. We expected to receive a response about why one disc going down consumed 5,000 IOPs just for the ungrouping process. When the disk failed, the other 11 disks tried to share the checklist of the disk, and it consumed 5,000 IOPs just for that.

Neutral

An HPE third party did the initial setup of the solution. We did not face any issues implementing the solution.

The pricing for HDD was good.

My customer required that the storage be 3PAR. However, we could not deliver 3PAR, so we presented HPE Primera to them as the new HPE storage. Our HPE partner who sold the solution to us mentioned that HPE Primera is a very robust solution that could replace 3PAR in terms of life cycle.

When the problem happened, we opened a critical ticket with HPE. HPE analyzed it, and everything was okay with the configuration. The response HPE gave was to replace the HDD with an SSD. When we did that, the solution's capacity moved from 1.3 terabytes to 30 terabytes. One application that was expecting 1,300 IOPs moved to 30,000 IOPs. Any problem you face that consumes around 5,000 IOPs will be unimpacted by the application itself.

We won the competition because we were the existing vendor except for the hardware. We won the deal three years ago because we sold the solution together with the hardware. The hardware was not a big problem at that time. Later, the customer had to replace all the HDDs with SSDs due to problems.

We are still arguing with the customer that the problem was not ours because we only use 900 IOPs for 1,300 IOPs with SSD. It's not a problem from our end when the disks fail during HPE Primera's ungrouping process. We knew nothing about that when we bought the hardware through the HPE partner. Our experience with HDD was not good, but it seems to be good enough with SSD.

I would recommend the solution to other users, warning them to be careful when dimensioning their solution over HPE Primera. If they use HDD or SSD, they should consider that the system will use 5,000 IOPs when one disk fails.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

We are HPE Primera’s customers. Our primary use case is to ensure quick and secure access to basic application data for online transactions.

HPE Primera provides me with system reliability and 100% data reliability. The storage is good and is consistently reliable and scalable, allowing me to use it whenever needed. The overall performance is great.

We would like to have more flash storage and its stability. This is an area of challenge for us.

I have been using this solution for four years.

The product is stable.

HPE Primera is good and scalable. We have 300 users for the solution, and two administrators manage it. The product also has online community engagement and patching management. It's a regular process.

The customer service and support is excellent.

We worked with something from Oracle, but it wasn't reliable. Therefore, we switched to HPE Primera.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us two days to deploy it.

The solution’s pricing is affordable and worth the money.

It's a commendable solution, especially suitable for online transactions. It is reliable in meeting data requirements. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the solution for critical applications. It's used for multiple telecom services. 

The data protection is great.

The compression capabilities are quite useful. 

It is pretty easy to set up the product.

It is stable and reliable.

The support and warranty on the hardware is very good.

It is scalable.

Everything is up to par. We are happy with the product and do not need extra features. 

The pricing is very high. There are other products at much lower pricing.

I've used the solution for the past two years.

The solution is stable. I'd rate it nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. It's up to 2 petabytes. Right now, we are using 300 to 400 terabytes. We have a lot of room. We also use a variety of other storage devices. We're able to handle all of the storage and what we use depends on the storage needs.

We have a few customers using the solution and how many users they have under them varies widely according to what is stored.  

The solution is under a good warranty. If we have any issues, we can contact them and get warranty support. If we have issues with the hardware, it would be covered under the warranty.

We only contact support if there is a hardware issue. They have been very good overall. 

We use various HP solutions as well. 

The initial setup is simple and straightforward. It is not complex.

The deployment process only takes an hour or two. The new servers came to the organization and we have a chain of management procedures in place and followed the policies to get everything up and running. 

We have 20 to 30 staff members handling any necessary maintenance. 

The OEM also provided support during setup. We had a standard engineer and the engineer came for setup. 

The solution is paid for at the time of procurement. There is no ongoing licensing. I can't speak to the exact pricing as I don't deal with that aspect.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate it nine out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities. 

We are using HPE Primera for a virtual environment. My virtual machine is residing on it.

HPE Primera is quite a stable storage system that provides good provisioning and allows for the changing of partition sizes.

The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved.

I am quite satisfied with the solution’s performance.

Currently, I don't find any difficulty expanding or scaling up the storage.

We have a tier-one support partner available to support HPE Primera storage, and we are satisfied with them.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is very straightforward. It takes around four to five days to deploy the solution.

The solution is quite cost-effective. HPE Primera is about a couple of thousand dollars cheaper than Dell NVMe.

Almost all storage has the same capabilities. HPE Primera has password protection and hybrid storage, and we can connect it to the fiber. It is not difficult to integrate HPE Primera with other third-party tools.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It serves as both the primary production area and the backup location. We have one at the primary site and another at the secondary site for applications. This involves a form of remote copying between the two arrays, allowing us to switch between them seamlessly during working hours.

The greatest advantage is the support when we encounter incidents, as HPE's support is highly responsive. Furthermore, it's worth reiterating that we've observed its exceptional speed compared to other solutions we've used in the past.

The distinction between Primera and Freeport becomes more apparent for us when we implement rollbacks, particularly on-site. In such situations, we've observed that the transition from one side to the other is significantly faster and simpler, whether it's done automatically or manually.

I would like to highlight the aspect of security, especially when compared to certain other vendors. We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted.

Some vendors have showcased the functionality of their arrays automatically transitioning to a read-only mode when they detect ransomware or suspicious activity, safeguarding data from corruption. Regrettably, we haven't seen both of these features in the HP ARAs we primarily use.

However, I can't state this with absolute certainty, but it's what we've observed so far. It would be beneficial if your organization could demonstrate any additional functionalities we may not be aware of.

I have been using this solution since 2019.

It is very stable.

It offers scalability. We have ample room for expansion through disk upgrades and the addition of new storage areas.

The process has been smooth for us, thanks to our local HPE partner's assistance. Their involvement has made the initialization process trouble-free, and we haven't encountered any difficulties.

We collaborated together as partners in the installation process.

We handle maintenance tasks ourselves when they're straightforward. However, if we ever have uncertainties or questions about certain actions, we reach out to our partners for assistance. Additionally, we benefit from online support provided by HP, which is readily available when required.

It’s a reasonable choice. When compared to other options, we've found it to be accessible and within our means.

Before we adopted HP, we lacked options, but various vendors visited our office to showcase their different solutions and the functionalities they offer.

For me, the primary concern today is ensuring data security in the face of ransomware and potential incidents. As I mentioned earlier, with the tenant's array, in the event of certain incident scenarios, it automatically switches to a read-only mode to protect the data. We find this feature highly advantageous given the prevalent threat landscape in today's IT environment. It's crucial to have self-controlled arrays that can prevent ransomware from spreading across the network.

This is the key benefit we've identified with the mechanics area, but the question that remains unanswered is whether HPE offers such a functionality on its own.

I can state that it's important to explore and enhance other security functionalities. If there are any available, we should be informed about them and consider implementing them to bolster our security further.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.