HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

We primarily use the solution for our servers and storage servers.

The synchronous replication is the solution's most valuable feature for our organization.

All the features we need are available in this product. It's a well-rounded solution.

The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger.

We've been using the solution for four years now.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with glitches or bugs.

An organization, if they need to, will be able to scale the solution. It's possible to expand it.

We've never directly been in touch with technical support. Our integrator handles any issues, so if they run into problems, they would be the ones to reach out to get assistance.

We previously used a different HP solution. We switched because this solution was less expensive and much more scalable.

I didn't handle the implementation myself and neither did my team, so I don't know enough about it to really talk about what was involved and if it was straightforward or not.

It may take one person to handle the maintenance, but we have an integrator that handles that aspect of the solution for us. We typically buy five or six days a year from our integrator in order for them to handle maintenance for us.

We had an external team handle the implementation for us. They are integrators and they continuously assist with maintenance on an ongoing basis.

For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We use the solution on a daily basis. In general, we have about 350 individuals on it. They are largely a mix of engineers and architects.

The product we are currently using is at end-of-life, so it's not necessarily something I would recommend.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Primary iSCSI-based storage using P4000 series nodes for HPE lefthand.

VMware compute on BL465G7s within a P4000 series chassis

StoreVirtual has proved to be a highly available, very stable and robust solution. It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime.

The most valuable feature is Network RAID 10.

We use SAN datastore replication for DR, along with VMware SRM.

There is no next release. The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Easy and cheap High Availability is most valuable for us. Also, the VSA (virtual appliance) version enables us to reuse already installed hardware. You do not need to worry about RAID and components anymore, because even a whole chassis loss does not stop this product.

We are able to build server clusters without external storage and still provide high availability. We are able to run the VSA version inside the actual servers, thus converging server and storage in same units.

The new Quorum Witness function is promising for easier deployment but needs better reliability.

We have been using StoreVirtual solutions since 2010 when it was known as LeftHand.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

Customer service is outstanding.

Technical support is excellent.

We have used many monolithic and traditional storage systems and all proved to not be highly available with single units. However, StoreVirtual can be split into two, providing you the benefit of redundant active data centers without doubling the cost.

Initial setup is easy, but the differences from traditional storage requires some learning curve. You need to know about managers concept of StoreVirtual. Fortunately newer versions of centralized management console (CMC) provides warnings when you have configurations that would result in reduced availability.

HPE Installation Services are recommended. Since we are an integrator, we provide this.

ROI usually takes about a year.

If you think about high availability the product is very cheap because it is an all inclusive offering. You need to buy licenses and two of traditional products compared to StoreVirtual.

The VSA version is free for every brand server up to 1TB/node up to three nodes. There is also a 60 day trial for more than 1TB storage. You just need the license key to continue managing the product without reinstalling if you purchase it.

It is the only product that provides High Availability without depending on OS multipath I/O. It looks like a single unit from the outside, thus there is no need for failover/failback because all nodes are active. It is like a metro train compared to a classic diesel train, meaning it has an engine in every car. Adding capacity means adding performance because you are adding controllers, too. We can’t say it is the fastest product on the planet, but it is definitely not slow. High Availability means synchronized replication over the network, adding a little latency but providing High Availability.

Since it is IP-based, it is important to make sure a network problem does not result in the collapse of storage network. It is best to have redundant switches that do not share the same network as applications. VLANS are definitely recommended.

Pay attention to the managers running and make sure your failover manager is not bound to any nodes. A failover manager needs to be alive for smaller clusters to survive complete hardware/network failures. Make sure there is no single point of failure that would result in multiple nodes going down.

We've implemented this solution for our customer, who is in the sales sector. It's clustered and mapped to one of the blades. We use the solution for a Hyper-V environment and all of our other virtual machines are deployed inside this solution.

There's less downtime.

All of the administrative tasks are easy and everything is centralized.

Deduplication, compression features, replication, global mirroring and all the basic features you would expect are there.

In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product.

A virtualization platform should be added to this platform.

It's not an active-active cluster. It's active-passive cluster. The customers are looking for active-active features in their storage solution. The solution should offer this.

I'm actually handling the pre-sales part. My experience is less than two years for this particular product.

The stability is okay. We haven't heard of clients having issues with crashes, bugs, or glitches.

The scalability of the solution is good. However, customers always want to know the cost per rack. There are other products that can give a client more capacity than StoreVirtual in terms of scalability.

Technical support is very good. Most of the time StoreVirtual is actually bundled with the Proactive Care. From HP's side, they offer some good support for their customers.

I'm in pre-sales, so I don't deal with the implementation process. I don't know if it's complex or not.

The StoreVirtual solution is a hardware product, so the customer only purchases licenses on a one-time basis. I have no idea of the exact pricing for that, however. Unless the customer wants to add specific features like replication, all other costs are associated with the software itself.

We're interested in evaluating other solutions such as Red Hat and IBM Spectrum.

StoreVirtual is mostly a mid-range to enterprise-level storage solution. In terms of performance, it's quite good. However, now we have some other products which are even better than HP itself. It's still a good solution. It's just a more competitive landscape.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had virtualizations and better scalability, I would rank it higher.

We run a small service provider platform so we need reliability. We need a much tighter level of system-management capability. In live support, we need corrective maintenance, and they provide us with the generic monitoring 24/7 capability around their ability to interface with IT service management tool sets.

HP really gives us that full spectrum of everything under one umbrella as well as the platform integration at the back, specifically with HP Virtual Connect on the Cloud system platform. It's absolutely revolutionary compared to anybody else in the market -- and we've worked with other vendors in the past. There's nothing that competes against what HP has to offer.

We're a private hybrid cloud service provider, so we're very focused on personal sales. We don't have large investments to trial and make mistakes. We have to get it right each and every single time. With the infrastructure capability, it gives us the confidence and peace of mind to get it right time and again. Dealing with vendors, there's always going to be ups and downs, but the key thing with HP is that they make sure that they test the issues.

Room to grow is always there because we're in the technology space and the day we get complacent with ourselves and we get self-satisfied, the game is over. I think the key for us is flexibility. We're growing as a company and we have to scale and we don't want to get caught up with a baseline infrastructure that doesn't scale and grow over time. So far, what we've seen in terms of HP's roadmaps, we're very satisfied that we're not going to find ourselves in a difficult situation. HP is there supporting us and making sure that they will be able to meet our future growth requirements. Everything in HP's roadmap really gives us that flexibility and a very good price point.

I wouldn't say that I'm not satisfied. Yes, there's always going to be challenges because there's people of varying levels of skills, capability, experiences, defects who all come to the floor. But the good thing about HP is that they they're happy to have their internal ecosystem cover all the gaps in support.

We had configuration and design changes through our journey of deploying our cloud infrastructure. HP was very understanding and very flexible. We started from some basic principles and we realized that we needed to make changes to be successful in the future. HP was very flexible in addressing some of the gaps that we came across through our deployment journey and took those on as challenges and addressed them. They made things happen.

Rather than say that it was too late, or that we've agreed and signed off on things, or that they're sorry but we'll have to go through a second round of investments, HP was very happy to reopen designs and to reconsider parameters and constraints. They gave us an evolutionary path through our deployment cycle to make sure that when we were up and running with our initial customers, we'd be able to meet all the requirements.

I don't want to name competitors because we have had excellent support from various vendors through our journey, but what we've found was that all of our requirements were met by HP. They gave us a good road map for the future and price-point wise, HP gives us more value.

I think the one piece of advice is that HP has an absolutely enormous, very broad, very conclusive, comprehensive infrastructure portfolio. Study that with the HP specialists. Make sure that you find the right insertion point and then be very clear about your notion of growth. Be absolutely precise about what you believe your 12-24 months will look like, how they play out, and keep that vision visible to your HP-partner team up front.

Shelf level-redundancy is one of the big things that StoreVirtual has had before some other SAN manufacturer or SAN model brands, which is pretty nice. It can be rather expensive because you are much less efficient when you have that redundancy, but it's definitely a benefit if you really need access to that data. You can't have it go down ever. That's definitely a benefit if you're willing to pay for it I guess.

It's fairly intuitive, and a fat client, so you install it on Windows. It works.

There's one thing that just drives me nuts. It's the fact that it doesn't have any dedicated management. I know that they've got 10 gig and they've got one gig. You can put those in there, but I'd really like to see dedicated management ports on the backsides of them.

I no longer work on those products as of a year ago. If something's changed within that time, I don't know.

I haven't had problems with it.

The systems that I've installed haven't been gigantic. I know that it's supposed to scale pretty large. With each additional node that you add, you're adding additional horsepower, different things. That's another nice benefit to it, rather than just adding a disc shelf that has one or two heads, you're adding additional CPU and memory to go along with each one.

There was only one time I did have to contact them, and they got the issue fixed.

It's pretty simple. It has a little bit of a learning curve. They're all the same; they all do very similar things. It's learning what they call them and exactly where to find the buttons. That's really what it comes down to.

Initially it can come out cheaper than 3PAR depending on how you grow it. You can add some redundancy in there that eventually, depending on which I guess type of 3PAR you're going with and whatnot, the StoreVirtual could do from what I've heard. I did mostly post-sales rather than pre-sale stuffs. It can become quite expensive and even become more expensive than some of the 3PARs. It's sixes now probably what you can get into it for price wise. It just depends once you get down the line performance wise.

We do 3PAR. That's another HP product that's really nice and solid. That's what we sell more of than even StoreVirtual.

The product's fine, but the fact it doesn't have dedicated management is a big thing to me.

Running a SAN without having to invest in additional expensive hardware so this means we have a cost saving. It also means that less support is needed as there is less hardware to maintain. Also, it has Adaptive Optimization which means it is using fast storage (SSD) only for active data.

In the past we didn’t have a shared storage solution in small offices; with StoreVirtual, we can benefit from the advantages of a SAN (vMotion, HA, DRS etc.) without investing big money.

Features like data deduplication would be great because in the end, this solution requires a lot of raw disk space because of the use of RAID5 on the hardware and RAID1 on the network.

We've been using it for six months. It's installed on a VMware vSphere instance (v12.6.00.01155.0) with two storages nodes that each have a 10TB license and a failover manager for quorum.

We had some stability issues in the beginning. They were easily resolved by dedicating a NIC for symmetric replication.

We haven't yet had to contact tech support.

It's very straightforward and the basic setup only took a couple of hours. The GUI is very user friendly and the documentation and white papers provided us all the required info.

We did it using an an in-house team. If you have already some storage knowledge, this install is very easy.

We also considered VMware VSAN because of its integration with the hypervisor/console. We decided to go for the HP solution because of the stability of the product as the OS, LeftHand, is already fairly old and well established, so HP have more experience there.

Before implementing it and using it you should read the best practice documents as well as white papers upfront.

• Multi-site SAN (near-real-time replication)
• Ability to assign Servers/LUNs to a physical/logical site for better access avoiding high-latency connections
• Space reclamation
• Thin/full provisioning
• Maintenance and support is easy to do.
• There are two 10GB ports present next to four GB ports, which makes it easy to upgrade the network .

Server provisioning and capacity expansion are much easier than before.

StoreVirtual should offer QoS per v-disk or ISCSi.

We've been using the 4500 for three years, and the 4730 for one year.

We had no deployment issues.

There were no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

9/10 From disk replacement to software support, the response from technical support is always excellent.

Initially, we used a HP entry level "SAN" HP P2000 G2. It was for our initial virtualization project.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward as HP did a good job providing excellent documentation and best practices.

We implemented it via an in-house service. Testing different workloads on your SAN is a good idea. This helps you to have a comparison point for later users. In case people encounter trouble in production, you can then easily compare performance with the different workloads.

Over a period of five years, we created 40-45 VMs. Previously, we had a physical server, storage, and backup solution, which was about $5,000 per server. We made a serious savings compared to the price of the SAN solution.