HPE Primera Reviews

HPE Primera is used for hosting databases and applications.

I have been using HPE Primera for two years.

HPE Primera is stable.

The scalability of HPE Primera is good.

We have approximately 20 people using the solution in my company. We have plans to increase the usage in the future.

We have not had a good experience with support from HPE Primera. They can improve.

The installation of HPE Primera is straightforward and it took one day to complete.

We used help from the vendor to do the implementation of HPE Primera.

The license for HPE Primera is all-inclusive.

I rate HPE Primera a six out of ten.

The Primary use case for HPE Primera is moving and storing high performance databases and core infrastructure, virtual machines, SQL databases, et cetera...

This is an on-premises solution because right now it is not popular among customers to use hybrid or cloud solutions in the Georgian Republic. Today, it is not common to move compute and storage sources onto the cloud. I don't know what happens in other regions like Europe, but in the Georgia Republic it is not popular.

The features that I have found most valuable are the artificial intelligence for the storage inside of the software and firmware because customers do not like functionalities that require manual interruption. This feature is very good for the technical work required to move from manual interactive to automatic, because when solutions provide suggestions, improvements, or notifications, and you can click them automatically, this is a good solution.

There really isn't any aspect of the solution that needs improvement for the customer other than its price.

It is a very good solution, but the Georgia Republic is a very small country and customers in both the government public sector and in the private sector do not have money to purchase enterprise or high performance solutions. They are looking at mid-range or mid-class solutions.

I can say that they need to simplify the solution. In SimpliVity, they need a lot of integration with virtualization technologies. For example, putting some add-ons or plugins in vCenter. vCenter is a management software of VMware virtualization. 

Secondly, it would be better if they cold simplify the deployment of Primera. Thirdly, if you have already purchased Primera and you need to scale your infrastructure and you are thinking of buying more hardware disks, you will need to purchase the Rebalance Service from HP Enterprise. They need to improve that methodology.

The customers need solutions that do not require a lot of administrative tasks.

I have been selling HPE Primera for approximately one year.

In terms of stability, it works without any issue. Primera is a new generation of HP Enterprise 3PAR version, whereas 10 years ago it was HANA. 3PAR generation works very, very well without any issues, without any problems.

Regarding HPE Primera's scalability, if we are talking about the high-end versions, we can scale it up without any issue. It depends on the scalability of the customer.

First of all, it depends which support model the customer purchases. If they are buying a foundation care with its low level of support, then you need to create a case manually and you need to write and contact customer service. If you are buying the Proactive Care Service, the guys from the customer service and support are very, very good. With Proactive Care Service, they contact you when you need to upgrade your firmware, etc... At all time HP Enterprise support works very, very well with Dell.

The initial installation, setup, and deployment were simple for Primera, versus other hyper-converged infrastructure.

HP Enterprise, simply with your Dell Technologies VxRail and HCI solutions, has done its job very well job, because you can deploy and start up your services and your new infrastructure in one or two days. One day for checking the specs and one day for deploying the whole infrastructure. This is because the solution is inside of the solution. Meaning the virtualization is already pre-installed, and they have already done the job.

Each customer is looking for high-end solutions. They may decide to purchase the Primera solution partly because of its installation and deployment. If it takes two days as is the case for HCI and three days in the case of Primera, there is no problem for the customer. It depends on the customer and their mindset.

We sell the products and we are doing the installation, deployment, integrations, and all the servicing.

We are also responsible for the maintenance of the product.

With HPE Primera there is no additional cost, but it depends what configuration we are talking about. If we are excluding support, it is very expensive. There is no showstopper for prices, just support or service. We are a Platinum Partner of HP Enterprise so we give quotes and configure HP Enterprise solutions. I don't know what happens in the US market, but in Georgia it is very expensive.

It is expensive if compared with Dell Technology.

In the Georgian Republic there was an opportunity to sell Primera, but there was a battle between Dell Technologies and HPE Primera. Dell Technologies Unity Series won because of their low prices. Although their were no problems regarding their technical requirements,  Dell won it with prices. This is because Primera is very expensive, but it's a very good solution for customers.

In terms of HP Primera versus, for example, Dell Technologies' Unity, the advantage of Primera is that inside their operating system, inside its firmware, they have already deployed a network storage cluster functionality and application functionality. In Dell Technologies, if we are talking about their Unity solutions, they only have a replication functionality and you must buy additional hardware. Only then can you deploy the storage cluster configuration. So this is an advantage for Primera.

The Primera product line has small and mid-size versions for mid-range customers, and they also have a high-end version. It depends on the customer.

In the Georgia Republic customers do have very critical data, and they must store that very critical information in a storage solution that has high availability. By availability, I mean that the hardware works very well and there are no issues with the software or the hardware. That is the reason why we are selling Primera.

Overall, Primera gives high performance.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE Primera a 10.

The primary use case for my team is expandability. I am using Primera for production. It serves as the primary storage in my production environment.

With Primera in my data center, I feel comfortable. I also use deduplication and compression for all data, and it usually makes things easier.

Data replication and deduplication are the most valuable features. 

Primera should be more user-friendly. It's currently a bit disconnected. Moreover, there should be more availability in Brazil.

I have been using HPE Primera for six months. I use the latest version.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support were perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

I might see an ROI in another year.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. It is okay pricing; it could be cheaper. 

I would recommend using the solution. It is a good solution for storage. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and all-flash storage is one of the products that we sell to our customers. Primera is one of the ones that we recommend for data centers.

Our customers have given very positive feedback about InfoSign, which is the management software for this solution.

Primera has good performance and the compression is also good.

It integrates well with other software including Docker and Kubernetes.

It is easy to expand.

This solution would be expensive for small business and it could be priced more competitively for that market.

We have been working with Primera for six months.

This is a stable solution and none of our customers have reported a problem with it.

Scaling the capacity is easy with Primera. This is for medium-sized businesses, as the larger businesses usually choose Nimble, and in smaller businesses, they use cloud-based solutions to save on operating expenses.

The support from HPE for this solution is really good.

I work with a variety of vendors for all-flash storage solutions including Nimble, Primera, NetApp, Pure Storage Evergreen, E8 storage, and Huawei. A lot of the products from different vendors have the same features. This suitability of one vendor over another depends on their budget, as well as their plans for growing the business in the future.

Pure Storage Evergreen has the number-one compression and deduplication capability.

When a customer wants good performance for their database, we suggest Primera, Pure Storage, and perhaps Huawei. At this time, we also discuss other features with the customer so that they understand them.

NetApp is another vendor that is a popular choice in our market for medium and large businesses. Similarly, our customers have had good experience with Dell Storage. When it comes to Big Data and a lot of capacity, Dell is the solution that we recommend. Huawei has good solutions and they are more competitively priced than others, and the performance is not bad.

I have not set up this solution personally but with the feedback that I have heard from the engineers, I know that it is very easy.

The price of this solution is good for medium-sized and large businesses.

Overall, Primera is a good product and if it is suitable for the requirements then it is one that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the product for databases and virtual machines.

The product's most valuable feature is the active controller.

The product's stale snapshots feature needs improvement.

We have been using HPE Primera for three years.

The product is stable.

We have 4,000 HPE Primera users in our organization. It is a scalable product. We plan to increase the number of users.

The initial setup is straightforward. It involves starting the active controller, running the tool to discover the product, and configuring the VPN. It is easy to maintain as well due to good documentation.

The product requires the help of an integrator for implementation.

I rate HPE Primera a ten out of ten.

The use cases of our company's clients have been good enough to help us remove the competition of HPE Primera from the market.

My company takes care of the installation phase of the product for our customers, and we also manage the systems for our customers. With HPE Primera, I can say that it is great to have a tool that provides or serves as a single point of visibility for everything.

I haven't encountered any areas that need improvement since I consider HPE Primera a great solution.

HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement.

I have been using HPE Primera for ten years. My company is a reseller of the solution. I deal with the latest version of the solution.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company mostly provides solutions to our clients that are stable. Redundancies in a two-node system make the solution very stable.

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

HPE Primera is a tool that just one user mostly uses. My company's clients who use HPE Primera are mostly enterprise-sized businesses.

My company provides support to our clients who use HPE Primera. My company directly gets help or support from the engineers in our company, which I feel is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I was never involved in the setup phase since it is a process taken care of by the experienced engineers in our company, who I believe wouldn't have faced a problem at all. I rate the setup phase a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The setup phase is fairly straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. There are no licensing or additional costs attached to the solution since everything is built in when it comes to HPE Primera.

HPE Primera provides proactive monitoring and a fantastic AI that helps find problems.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

We not only use HPE storage, we use their hardware as well. We use it for our incubated environment because we have some applications which are running on these journeys, applications, and APA . That storage actually helps us because there are multiple transactions and queries. Our applications are running and that's why we require fast storage.

HPE Primera is mostly integrated with our compute infrastructure and because of that, the particular storage is very much compatible with that compute. It's efficient.

Reporting can be improved.  The reporting console should be better and there should be some out of the box reports. That's the only thing.

I have been using it for two and a half years.

It's very stable. We didn't face any issue with stability.  

As per HPE, they said that it's pretty easy to add more storage in HPE Primera. With the existing controllers, I think it's pretty easy to add more storage. Right now we are using around 600 TB, not more than that, but it can support up to four petabytes.

Their support is fine although it can be slow. It's mostly regional so we can't comment on it, because for it to change regions, it'll take some time for them to know about our whole setup, and then get used to it. Eventually we'll have to get used to it. If they were to change regions and a new engineer is assigned, then we could face some issues. There could be some kind of delay, so that's the only thing. Other than a lack of communication, the support is not that bad. The engineers are capable enough.

We previously used Dell EMC PowerMax, which is a five to six year-old setup.  Primera is a two year-old setup. With Dell EMC, the discs crashed, which needed to be replaced. In the two years we've used Primera, we haven't faced this kind of issue. 

PowerMax has very powerful storage. The number of IOPS and the control stability are the things I liked very much, but it's more expensive than other solutions. They are top of the line, but on a higher price range. 

Setup was a straightforward. We didn't face any hurdles in that because it was a new deployment during that time. It was a new setup when we were going for this new journeys and application service. The deployment was straightforward.

Deployment was done by HPE's partner.  I would rate it a four out of five.

I you compare it with some other storage, then the HPE licenses are much cheaper.  If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 3 out of five in terms of pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Until now, I haven't given any thought to Primera and how it's going to work for us because we are moving towards cloud transformation. In a year, we may not require any on-premise solution, since our whole idea is to take all the workers to the cloud.

For advice, it all depends on what the requirements are. There are other solutions to consider. In all-flash, there are many other vendors, so it all depends on what kind of solution is being deployed and what kind of compute infrastructure they have which can work with that storage. If you're using HPE, then I would recommend HPE Primera because its performance is very good.

We use this product as our SAN solution. It hosts non-critical applications and related data.

This product has improved the speed of our on-premises storage. The IO is now very fast.

The performance is very good.

We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data.

We have been using HPE Primera for several months.

The warranty guarantees 100% stability.

We have space for perhaps 15 administrators, who manage between 600 and 800 end-users.

The HPE GreenLake support is great.

We only use HPE products.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment process was easy and it took between three and four months to complete.

We implemented this product in-house.

Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included. I don't mind these fees because the service is good.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.