HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

• The ability to scale out if/when additional capacity is required.
• The ability to migrate data between clusters within the same management group.

It hasn't helped as the HP provided software for the host server systems has become a continuous nightmare when it comes to HP LH OS upgrade process with our 260+ systems in multiple management groups/clusters.

• Inability to customize alerting thresholds.
• Un-usability of the HP CMC for HP LH OS upgrade when a newer version is released but not upgraded although the to-be-upgraded version is an older one.
• Failure to report on lower-level hardware issue via HP CMC and/or SANMON UI unless checking iLO GUI.
• Inability to re-configure/modify iLO settings via HP LH OS.
• Multiple HP SANIQ / LH OS upgrade issues, e.g. upgrade resource partition unavailable, especially if the systems have been running for close to or more than a year.
• Bug(s) in the HP-provided software for the host server systems not detected/identified by HP QA/QE and caused multiple post software-upgrade outages.
• Difficulty on even opening a case due to poor record-keeping of/by HP.

~6 years.

There have been no issue with the deployment.

We have had numerous issues with the stability that have been enumerated above.

We have had no issues scaling it although upgrading a management group with more than 10 nodes can turn into a reboot nightmare...if the reboot even resolves the bug(s)/issue(s).

Just OK...especially if you should be unlucky enough to have a set of P4800 (blade-based)

It's 8/10 once we escalate past Tier One, and sometimes even Tier Two.

We were previously using NetApp for block-based storage requirements. HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) was selected due to the lower initial purchase (CapEx) and subsequent support (OpEx) costs.

It was reasonably straightforward.

All our HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) systems are implemented via the vendor teams that handle most of our on-site work followed by in-house Storage Administration team member(s) for additional storage-level configuration.

We have not officially calculated the exact ROI.

There's no advice about pricing/licensing as we handle it via an HP VAR, with a contract established with YP, that provides very good pricing/licensing numbers.

NetApp.

My advice is to only use HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) for small-scale and/or per-project deployments via iSCSI (IPSAN) preferably on dedicated network between the host server and the storage systems.

HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console. The interface is very good.

This solution is very easy to deploy.

The performance is very good.

I would like to have this solution easily integrate with VMware.

I have been using HPE StoreVirtual for the past four to five years.

This solution is very stable.

This solution scales well and it maintains very good performance as the storage increases.

I have not contacted technical support for this product because it is very easy to use.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when compared to other products, automatic tiering, availability, and disaster recovery are very good.

This solution also integrates well with the Recovery Management Center. We have a backup solution for VMware and Hyper-V, and it is simple to use with HPE StoreVirtaul.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It offers, while still affordable, a really high end storage solution that I can present to my customers.

I guess on the top of the list is certainly ease of use. We're a smaller company, and we don't have a lot of engineers who can dedicate their time to a single product. I guess I'd also say reliability. I need something that just kind of works all the time. I don't have the time to be dedicating resources to fixing things.

For this particular product, I was talking to one of their storage people about it. They already added the few things that I needed. So I don't have anything major. But it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products.

Stability is excellent.

Scalability is good, as well. We are certainly going to push the upper bounds of what it can do.

We have used technical support and it has been great. It is quick to get access to their support engineers, but also they solve every problem.

This is actually what we selected when we started this search. When selecting a vendor, cost is there, of course, but more than that, some of the other things I've mentioned: Ease of use, reliability, and support. The relationship goes a long way, too. Having access to people directly, whether that's sales engineers, or the sales team themselves. We are a small company, so getting attention from a big company like HPE is great. We probably wouldn't get that from other companies.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very simple.

We started using this before HPE purchased it. It was LeftHand Network before. It was them versus HPE's SAN, so technically HPE was the other vendor. Now HPE owns it. We chose this solution because it was cluster storage, so for us and our size, it was a better product line.

I would say with this particular solution, you're getting a lot when it comes in price point. You're getting a lot of features compared to some of the other products out there.

• Multi-site capability for disaster recovery
• Application aware snapshots
• Enterprise solution for virtualisation
• Centralised and easy to use management
• Easy to support whether it is four or 40 storage nodes

Business continuity and disaster recovery. The storage environment is spread between two geographical locations – bi-annually BCP/DR tests are conducted proving the validity of the architecture. Each site in turn simulates power loss – both the compute and storage that supports the vSphere estate are affected. In all cases, these tests have been 100% successful.

It needs further improvements in terms of reporting from the CMC, specifically more detailed alerting from the CMC.

We've been using it for five years. We're currently running SANi/Q versions 10.5 and LeftHand OS version 12.5.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been issues with adding further nodes to existing management groups and clusters. The volume re-syncing and re-striping caused some performance issues. With version 9.5 of the OS there were high numbers of disk failures – these appear to have been resolved as we progressed through versions 11.5 to 12.5.

Technical support is excellent. I have great experiences in dealing with technical support. Generally, the product is so intuitive (to people appropriately skilled to manage storage) that HP support is only really required when low-level shell-type access is required or when a major bug has been detected.

EMC CLARiiON, IBM DS 4000 series – HP LeftHand presented a more rounded and mature storage solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The CMC logically guides you through the setup and configuration process. This does negate the requirement to plan the implementation, but even if you choose not to use the wizard and manually configure management groups, cluster groups, FOM instances, etc., the CMC lets you know what needs to be completed first.

The implementation was all completed in-house with some limited input from the vendor partner group.

My advice – plan your installation, think about your geography, consider what the technology can do for you, think about the networking, consider that like any storage, it works well plugged into the high end backbone and not just available ports on some local access switch.

If you fail to think about the connectivity correctly, performance can be affected. Finally, latency is king, so keep your eye on the performance monitor within the CMC.

The HP product is end-of-life, and the cost for licensing is considerable but necessary. HP support for breaks as fixes are required. Low-level and shell access requires an HP engineer because passwords required are not given out to customers. If you don’t procure the HP care packs for your P4000 estate, you cannot download or gain access to updates, i.e. OS updates, BIOS, firmware, etc.

I am currently considering Tintri VAS and Nimble as well as reviewing certain hyper-converged technologies such as SimpliVity and Nutanix.

Ensure you have the right skills – general administration is straight forward but Virtual Connect configuration requires knowledge.

The StoreVirtual software provides us with a highly resilient storage platform for virtual machines.

Prior to the introduction of the StoreVirtual VSA, our four domain controllers resided on local disks in each data center (two in each site). There was no functionality for cross site migration and in the event of a data center failure, we were left without 2 DC’s for the duration of the outage. The implementation of StoreVirtual has allowed us to create cross site storage volumes, allowing VM’s to migrate freely between data centers. In the event of a data center outage, potentially all 4 domain controllers could be running from one site.

I find it rather tedious to manage. To give an example, I was upgrading one of our very first management groups from 10.5.00 to 11.5.00. The VSA VM’s were deployed from an older OVF template (which is running out of, but still in support). I contacted HP support prior to upgrading seeking advice and best practice guidance. I upgraded the LeftHand OS version to 11.5.00.

A month or so down the line, the partition OS drive on both VSA VM’s was full – causing the cluster to go into an operational, not unmanageable state (cluster was not writing any logs, was unable to do root cause analysis of issue that had occurred). The only way to clear this partition was to log a call with HP support and have a remote session to allow them to do so (they have to provide a password to access the support shell of the VM’s). The partition of these VM’s cannot be increased as it may corrupt the OS. I now have to plan upgrading both nodes in the cluster.

This solution has been implemented in our data centers for approximately four years, and I have had personal experience with this solution for two years.

Deployment is reasonably simple.

Stability can become an issue if you are planning on deploying a multi-site cluster – you need to ensure you have the appropriate links between each data center to allow the storage to replicate.

I have deployed StoreVirtual in single data centers and have not encountered any stability issues. Scalability is also reasonably simple.

On a whole HP Technical Support is very good. Staff have great knowledge of the product which you would expect. However, as I said previously, they failed to warn me about upgrading older versions of the VM’s.

StoreVirtual was chosen by our Head of Infrastructure as he wanted a product that provided highly resilient storage replication with our IBM hardware. StoreVirtual is a good product if you are a non-HP customer, however if you use HP hardware I would recommend using Peer-Persistence, essentially a hardware VSA rather than the software based product – it is much more reliable. We are moving to two new data center 4th quarter of 2016 and we will be using HP hardware (3PAR) and Peer-Persistence and StoreVirtual will be decommissioned.

The initial setup is reasonably straightforward, I have deployed it in a number of remote sites. I was not involved in the initial setup in our data centers as I had not joined the organization at the time.

StoreVirtual was already in place before I joined, but it was implemented in house with the assistance of an HP engineer who provided best practice guidelines.

Our return is a highly resilient storage platform that allows us to place all our tier one services on, i.e. domain controllers, DNS, exchange hubs, etc.

Your licensing will depend on your scalability, licenses are available in 4TB, 10TB, 20TB and 50TB. Licenses are assigned by MAC address of the NICs on the VSA VM’s

It would depend on who your hardware vendor is. As I stated, if you are an HP customer I would recommend using their hardware VSA Peer-Persistence, but if you are a non-HP customer then StoreVirtual is a reasonably good product.

The biggest thing about it is the LeftHand OS. One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included. You're not adding parts and pieces. Again, you can expand the hyper-converged storage, which actually used VSA in it for the storage part of it, by just adding, so that increases your capacity and your performance. The other thing about StoreVirtual is that it is our software-defined solution and it's everywhere. It's in Synergy. It's in our StoreOnce. It's in our hyper-converged solutions and again now, it's by itself.

It comes down to the information that you get. If you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear. Depending on if you go DAK or optical, it could be like, $600-$1,000 a pop, which is not insignificant. You know what, just spell it out somewhere. Put it in the ordering tool somewhere, so people know. Apart from that, I don't have anything. I think they're still on gen 8. They should move up to gen 9.

LeftHand OS has been around forever, and it's a proven product, and it's easy to use.

We use two 4530 shelves in a mirrored SAN configuration, and the ability of the system to virtualize the two shelves as a single storage system is very important to us.

On several occasions, we’ve had a complete power failure at one of our two SAN locations, yet all of our VMs continued to function because the VMs that were running on the downed SAN simply moved to the other SAN without the need for operator intervention. With most other mirrored SAN solutions, the VMs would need to have been manually moved to the other SAN location. With VSA, however, it’s automatic and transparent.

The management system, while OK, could be made a little more user-friendly.

It was installed in April 2015.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It’s been very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We haven’t outgrown it yet, but if we need additional storage capacity in the future, we can simply add another shelf.

We haven’t needed any technical support yet on this product, but our previous experience with HP SANs was pretty good.

We previously used an HP LeftHand P4500 SAN, the predecessor of the HP VSA. We used it for 5 years but switched to the new one because HP support was ending on the old one and we were out of capacity.

We used an HP partner for the initial setup and configuration. Overall, it was pretty straightforward, although it took a few weeks to get everything “tuned”. Initially, we were getting alarms when moving VMs from one volume to another but bonding the NICs increased the storage bandwidth and resolved the problem.

I definitely recommend purchasing from an HP channel partner as they will handle the licensing. HP licensing can be a very arcane and difficult process and it is best left to the experts. The pricing was comparable with most of the other vendors we looked at.

We looked at a number of products from EMC, Nimble, and Dell, but only the HP VSA could automatically run the VMs from the other SAN in the event of a SAN site failure.

For mission critical systems, I would only recommend this product when used in a mirrored configuration. Unlike other SAN systems where virtually everything in the device is redundant, the HP VSA is basically a server equipped with a bunch of hard disks and special software. Only the power supplies are redundant so there are many more single points of failure compared to other SANs. While other SAN vendors put the redundancy in the same device, the redundancy of the HP VSA is provided by virtue of the two independent devices. What is unique is that the two independent devices appear as a single storage system to the virtualization network and the switching between devices is done by the HP software.

I give the replication feature a 10 out of 10. The GUI for snapshot replication gives you a lot of flexibility to schedule asynchronous replication, bandwidth control, and disk-rebuild resource allotment.

High Availability is a 10 out of 10, too, for having redundant RAID controllers per tray and the ability to build an HA Multi-Site.

I also like the easy setup of these units. We get project bids with zero lead time and when you have to build out a facility and you have a deficit of time to do so, it helps to have a quick and easy install and intuitive GUI. Running updates on these systems is nice and easy. The support staff are also very good.

When we bid on projects and scope out the work, we usually will have three design iterations that we follow -- a Multi-Site, Single-Site P4500, or Single-Site P4300 class setup -- depending on what is needed. All three build-outs use the same CMC and basic setup helps to standardize and help get a handle on costs and budgeting for these projects. We’ve built a multi-tiered storage solution for our customers using one product.

For disk utilization I give it a 7 out of 10. In the typical network RAID 10 coupled with horizontal shelf RAID 5, you lose over 55% of your disk. But this is a price I am willing to pay to have highly-available storage.

I would look into using some of the technologies used in the 3PAR line. The loss of disk space due to traditional RAIDing methods is wasteful, and when you buy 14TB of disk and have 6TB usable, you sometimes whimper a little.

They need to create a separate management port to allow for sending email alerts via non-iSCSI network. As it stands, you have to allow routing from your iSCS network and open relay on your mail server to get alerts. Other storage system models use separate management ports to allow for event notifications.

I have used the product for over six years. We previously used it in our main datacenter for four years, but then opted to go with a more enterprise solution and now use it in smaller remote site build-outs, and it's usually two or three nodes per cluster.

Deployment of these devices is easy and very stable. I have added on many different trays with no problems.

Stability has been good except in one scenario. We had a vSphere Metro-Cluster with HP P4000 Multisite setup, and the coordinating node (VIP holder) completely crashed in a bad way. It seems that the coordinating node was not able to transfer the VIP to a new node in time and when vSphere recognized it as a PDL event (Permanent Device Loss), we were operational within eight minutes after vSphere rescanned for storage, although the storage node motherboard and controller had to be replaced.

For scalability, I give it a 9 out of 10. It is very easy to deploy a new shelf of disk and add a pair of controllers to your environment for increased IO “Pay as you Grow”. You just plug in the network info and add it to the existing cluster. I can just throw another tray of disk into the mix and within a couple hours allocate disk space.

Tech support is good. I have always had good experience with both phone support and on-site support staff. On-site staff went above and beyond to help in problem tickets I had open.

We previously had MSA units, and we chose P4000 class as it was the next step solution for us. We will be evaluating HP StoreServ 8000 series for these remote site setups. We currently use HP StoreServ 7000 series for our main datacenter and may potentially move to this solution if we determine cost savings and ease of setup.

It was easy. Single-sites and multi-sites both had a similar setup. From a cabling perspective, you just plug in your 10gb or 1gb connection to the switch and off you go. Once you install the CMC and you plug in the network information on the nodes, the units are found in the CMC and you can build out the site and cluster.

We built ours in-house. Depending to what degree you will be engaged in the setup will depend on whether you will need other expertise. Working hand-in-hand with your network team and VMware\server team will help. You basically need the network in place before you configure the nodes. Then after configuration of nodes and build-out of clusters\volumes, you need to engage with the members of your team who will help present the volumes to VMware or Windows servers.

When we sign five year contracts to build a facility, we expect the storage units to last that time, and they do.

The price paid for a highly-available solution weighs in here. If one of our facilities is down for an hour, we stand to lose a lot of money (Automotive Assembly), so up-time and life of a unit is, let's assume five years, then demoting this storage to a second-tier storage for other aspects of our company’s needs (backups, file retention, etc.) really are the only ways I feel I can determine ROI, and in this regard I feel we our ROI is good.

It’s a solid product and you can roll these out like nothing. We have standardized our deployments to use these models. We will be re-evaluating soon and if we do I will miss the easy setup and GUI.