HPE Primera Reviews

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 use HPE Primera for all our storage requirements.

What we like most about HPE Primera is that it's an all-flash storage solution, and it's a new generation of storage.

I'm very satisfied with HPE Primera, so I can't think of an area for improvement, but if they could increase the value of the IOPS and the throughput, that would be good.

I've been using HPE Primera for two years.

HPE Primera is a very stable product. We don't have any issues with it.

HPE Primera is scalable, it covers our needs, but if our needs are too big, the support or expansion is limited. Its scalability could still be improved.

On a scale of one to five, with one being the worst and five being the best, I would rate the technical support for HPE Primera a five. I'm very happy with their support.

We previously used NetApp. We switched to HPE Primera because it's a new generation of storage, so we preferred it over NetApp.

The initial setup for HPE Primera was easy for me, because an HPE engineer installed and configured it, but I'm not sure if setting it up was easy for the engineer.

We used a third-party to deploy the product, an HPE engineer.

The ROI for HPE Primera is good. I'm happy with it because it's an all-flash array solution, and there's this huge capacity of SSD all-flash disks. Electricity expenses for HPE Primera are lower, and its storage capacity is higher. Its ROI is better than the ROI we got from NetApp.

I don't know the licensing cost of the product because we ordered all bundled licenses, so I don't have pricing information for them.

I evaluated Pure Storage Flash Array and NetApp.

I used Pure Storage Flash Array in the past, but our current customer uses HPE Primera for storage.

The maintenance of HPE Primera doesn't require staff, but we had one engineer who took care of its installation and configuration.

I'm rating HPE Primera nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for customers, for their hosted virtualized infrastructure storage.

HPE Primera had helped us achieve very low latency performance, hence enhancing the customer experience of higher IOPS demanding applications. 

We really like the HPE infosight. it is an AI driven interface for hybrid cloud. it gives some more insights into any virtualized infrastructure such as performance issues, proactive recommendations etc. for example, get alerts and items of that nature It's been quite helpful so far. 

The performance of the solution is excellent. It performs far better than you would expect.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

It outperforms on latency. It's very fast. We're talking about 0.4 milliseconds. The faster, the fast data works, the faster you'll get the response. This is really low latency; it's a great performance.

The dashboards are very good.  It has a very user-friendly kind of dashboard that is easy to understand. There isn't any complex stuff or too much information. That said, it has deep integration in to HPE Infosight. It gives you so much information, even more than you want.

The customization capabilities are excellent.

We haven't come across any issues with the solution. I don't recall missing any features.

They could work to make scalability easier.

It's quite expensive to upgrade right now maybe just now as its a new model.

Their latency is good, however, if they can continue to push their capabilities, that would be ideal.

I've only been using the solution for just over one month. It hasn't been an extremely long amount of time just yet.

The stability and performance are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable.

We haven't attempted to scale the solution just yet. It's still very early on in the process, as we have just had the solution for about a month or so. Therefore, I can't speak very well about its scalability. However, it's my understanding that scaling it not that hard. 

Primera supports all flash additional enclosures, where you can expand SSD

Good support from HPE and local suppliers as well. 

The solution is quite straightforward. It's not complex. We had already done the sizing and we had already done the planning. The HP engineers were well aware of our needs. In the end, we just plugged in and gave them access, and they themselves did the configuration as per the initial requirements.

HP engineers did all of the heavy lifting on the implementation. We simply provided them with our exact requirements.

We are under a perpetual license in terms of software. 

Evaluated Huawei OcenStore Dorado storage and DELL Unify 380. As per the sizing and cost, HPE Primera A630 was better and most cost-effective.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this point. the model number is HPE Primera A630

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. It's fast and the performance is very good. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for all of the backend, the core storage infrastructure at this point.

It's the migration from spinning disk, it has all types of workloads. 80% are virtual machines, file services, and database workloads.

The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment. 

The integration with the compute capacity because this is just the storage side.

The orchestrations and management, and the performance and cost per capacity.

Another advantage is that HPE sells everything. All of the capabilities of the hardware such as replication, snapshot, and the specific features are all included from the start as opposed to being on another license.

When you buy it, you can do whatever you have to, to be able to do with it out of the box.

On the software end, in regards to the integration, everything gets aligned with the software-defined data center concept. Which means that everything needs to be done for software and programmatically. 

This is an area that needs improvement as well as on the hardware end, the ability to expand capacity to larger numbers.

In the next release, I would like the ability to do direct file services. This is a block-based solution, if you need to do file servers, you have to put servers around it.

On the controller side, I would like to see NAS capabilities. That would be helpful.

There are two lines, and they are evolving into one another. Primera is just a word, it was called 3PAR before that. I have worked with both.

Between the two lines, I have worked with these solutions for five years.

There are multiple components, there are many different versions. The software has versions and the hardware has versions. We are using the latest version, the latest incarnation.

It's a stable solution, it's rock solid.

This is running the data centers for the shop. Everybody in the organization will be affected one way or another by what is there. We have 6000 people in our organization.

Tell us about your experience with customer service/technical support.

Technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home. The hardware calls their NOC center and reports any alerts or events. Then they have a standard ideal protocol to call back. They are quite insistent, they send you emails if you don't acknowledge and they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Professional services are embedded. It can be done by the customer but it's a pretty sophisticated solution. We need to use vendor professional services.

It was not a third-party in addition to the cost, it was included.

The hardware came with installation services. We decided to go with it.

Stability is one of the reasons we chose this solution, and that we could buy storage and computer from the same vendor to optimize everything. It's designed to work with one another.

I will definitely recommend this solution. For anyone who is interested in implementing it, they should do their cost analysis very carefully. There's a multitude of solutions, but some of them are more software-oriented.

The math can become fuzzy but once they figure out the financial aspect of it, I think from a purely technical perspective, I would highly recommend it.

In terms of quality for block storage, it's one of the best on the planet, if not the best, in my view. 

If they had, block, NAS, and iSCSI out of the box, I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I would rate HPE Primera a nine 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. 

HPE Primera is a multipurpose process. 

We have one customer in the banking environment using the solution at one of their locations. 

We use it for configuration and perspective, and for data storage. 

Our customer is happy with HPE Primera. They said they are getting good information and performance from the product. 

The solution is good and has 100 percent availability.

I would like to see improved training offered with HPE Primera. Being the front-end facing the customer, it would be beneficial to understand better how to support the customer with their questions. Currently, the customer reaches out to me with their questions and I take the questions to customer service. It would be better if I had the knowledge to be able to resolve the concerns myself.

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

HPE Primera is stable.

The product is scalable. 

Our customer has employees that are using HPE Primera, and also their end users using the product through the mobile application and mobile banking. 

HPE provides good support through their customer service.

Neutral

The initial setup of HPE Primera is easy.

HPE Primera is less expensive than HPE Alletra.

We did not evaluate other options. I had experience with HPE Primera and recommended it to our customer because it had a good impact, 100 percent availability, and has all-flash devices with the best performance.

Overall, I would rate HPE Primera an eight out of ten.

My primary use of Primera is as a storage solution for a huge conglomerate with multiple critical businesses including banks, airlines, and retail chains.

The most valuable feature is an all-flash system, which means the data access speed is amazing while the latency is almost nothing, and it can deliver IOPS up to 16,000.

An area for improvement is how the product gets integrated with the technical support and how cases are raised. There are also certain features that require engineering-level access, which should be accessible to storage admins as well. In the next release, I'd like to see support for external KMS (key management system) because some organizations want encryption based on their encryption appliances or methodology.

Primera is quite stable.

The technical support is very good and very effective in resolving any problems.

The initial setup was quite straightforward - everything went very smoothly, it took a few hours, and I didn't face a single issue with implementation.

Our implementation was done by HPE consultants.

I would give this solution a rating of nine out of ten.

We use it for databases and application VMs. We are using the latest version of this solution.

The most important thing that we had found when we purchased this product around six months back was its 100% availability and uptime.

One of the drawbacks of the model we purchased is that it is not running NVMe drives. Even though they say that it is NVMe-ready, it is still on the SSD drives. The model that we purchased has only eight hard drives, and only the ones on the top could work on NVMe. The rest of them are still on the SSD. Its competitors, such as EMC and Pure Storage, are moving or have already moved to NVMe. HPE should improve this solution for NVMe.

HPE should also improve IOs in this solution. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage.

I have been using this solution for almost six months.

It is stable.

It is scalable, but we haven't scaled it. We purchased it with the required capacity, and it will suffice for our needs for the next couple of years. We have 2,000 plus users who access this Primera storage through applications.

We haven't contacted their technical support. We didn't have any issues since we purchased it.

We used Hitachi G200 and HPE 3PAR for two or three years. Both these models are a minimum of six or seven years old. The main difference is that HPE Primera is on SSD. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage.

It wasn't simple, but it also wasn't so complex.

It was implemented by HPE. Even though we have got the Proactive Care warranty, it currently doesn't require any maintenance. We have just two admins.

It is basically in the mid-range of the price. It is not cheaper than Hitachi, but it is cheaper than Pure Storage. There are no additional costs. Everything was taken care of in the price.

I would recommend this solution, but it depends on the use cases for which you want to use the storage device.

I would rate HPE Primera an eight out of ten.