HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

Shared storage in the organization allowed for higher availability and simplified server maintenance.

Enables us to build highly available shared storage from a standard rack server, such as HPE Proliant DL. However, it is not limited to that. Thin provisioning lets us get the most value from the hard drives. I found the architecture to have less single point failure than a traditional SAN.

Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately.

In terms of stability, the optional MEM (Multipath Enhancement Module) was unstable in one installation with 1GB iSCSI network. Long running, intensive file copying tasks between VMs produced a storage latency "explosion". The issue disappeared immediately after removing the MEM drivers from the ESXi hosts and restoring the default vSphere Path Selection Policies. We did not have an opportunity to review the environment or test an updated MEM.

There were no scalability issues. The 3 x 4TB license is a very good start for two nodes. We can add a third node for additional storage and compute power. If the performance demands increase, we can simply install or replace the current iSCSI network adapters with 10GbE. The system also supports SSD and auto-tiering with higher licenses.

The HPE technical support for StoreVirtual VSA is very good, but it requires some time to contact them. To get a simple piece of software means registering StoreVirtual VSA. This is a complicated process. The SAR (Service Agreement ID) is associated to the VSA Licenses. It requires you to open a request on the HPE website and this is hard to obtain.

We did not use a different solution before this one.

There's an installation wizard which is quite simple. However, you need to have a clear image of the final scheme, especially for the network. At the time, I missed a reference blueprint, but a recent publication of "StoreVirtual VSA Ready Nodes" filled the gap.

Review the licensing options, because the smaller licenses are time limited. If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down. I wouldn't keep a traditional SAN in production without support anyway.

Spend some time reading StoreVirtual best practices and consider buying redundant solid switches, like HPE Aruba ProCurve 25xx, or better. Layer-3 is useful, but not mandatory thanks to split network support introduced in VSA 12.5.

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.

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.

It is an affordable alternative to hardware SAN and is seamlessly compatible with our vSphere 5.5 hosts which are sitting on HP Proliant hardware. The 'valuable' feature is in essence the product itself - virtual storage.

It has allowed us to expand our available ESX storage without replacing arrays or adding hardware. It also helps with vMotion and provides disk space for extra clients on hosts with under-allocated CPU/Memory.

The key element is whether virtual storage is the right choice, and what hardware you are going to use. I suppose I could wish for less latency, but that might be coming from configuration as opposed to actual product support – especially since I only see latency on one of the two VSAs that we have deployed.

The things that I wanted almost three years ago when we purchased, have already been improved. Those would have been limited licensing and minimal support documentation. A good alternative might have been to hire an integrator familiar with both HP and VMWare products.

We've had it for about three years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

The stability has been exceptional.

The limitations of two hosts and 10TB per VSA is acceptable for the cost savings.

We use a third-party vendor, so my excellent customer service experience is due to my local contact.

HP technical support has always been good when dealing with enterprise products.

The initial setup for the VSA was straightforward, it uses an OVF virtual appliance. I did have to refer to highly detailed instructions for the vSphere configuration for NICs and iSCSI software adapters. Since this is a virtual SAN, I use only software RAID 0 and no snapshots - those are better handled by the HP hardware arrays and vSphere, respectively.

Since we are a small enterprise shop and I have fairly sophisticated knowledge of both storage and virtualization, I did the implementation myself. I recommend that unless you have solid knowledge of designing and configuring your hypervisor environment that you use an experienced consultant.

Since our gain is roughly equivalent to having a small hardware SAN, and we purchased during a BOGO promotion, I would estimate our ROI somewhere around 900%.

It comes with three years software support, but I've never had to use it.

We compared VMWare VSA to HP StoreVirtual VSA. At that time, the VMWare solution was limited to a single VSA per datacenter, and we use two of the HP VSAs between four hosts, so that was our deciding factor.

It is an excellent alternative to small hardware SANs if you already have the disk space on other servers and adequate network bandwidth for your level of disk activity. I can only comment on use within a vSphere environment, but in my experience, it is simply awesome. I would like to warn that before implementing a VSA, you should thoroughly evaluate your storage and network requirements. Good design of a VSA implementation is just as critical as good design of a hardware SAN.

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 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.

StoreVirtual has been real good for us. We started with the original P4300 LeftHand SANs before they became StoreVirtual. What I love about those is the two nodes and the mirroring back and forth, and you can't lose anything. It's very solid, and we haven't really had any trouble with those either. We have a newer StoreVirtual that we've connected to one of the C3000 Blade Enclosures and it runs well. We lost a system board once and we lost a couple of servers, but we were able to bring everything back. Equipment-wise, it allows us to do all our work. We're real happy with that.

The things we like best about it is just that it's safe, it's reliable, it's easy to transfer data back and forth, it's easy to replicate elsewhere. We've been very happy with them.

Outside of the one incident on the StoreVirtual where we lost the system board which was a little tough. If the guy who came out to replace it knew what he was doing and put the right firmware on, then we wouldn't have lost any virtual servers. But beyond that, the other ones have been very good and we've been really happy there.

It's been hit and miss. I guess there's some guys in Texas or Houston that we've been able to get a hold of who know their stuff and it's like a different group, the LeftHand people. They know their things inside and out, and usually are able to steer us right to what we need, so we've been real happy there.

We'd seen a couple of lunch and learns and meetings and talked to some of the LeftHand people, and decided it made sense cost-wise and function-wise. We were using some Dell EqualLogics, actually we were using EqualLogic before Dell bought them. So we were still using those in conjunction with the LeftHands that then became StoreVirtuals. Then when we put in one of the C3000 BladeEnclosures, we bought an actual StoreVirtual and that gave us the space to run the servers that we need.

The setup has been really easy. I did it three or four times after the system board failed. It was easy to run through the system, but the tech support guys kind of walked me through what we needed to do, and actually I set it up in the first place, so that's been real good too.

I had a guy from EMC call me once and his whole sales pitch was, "Well, we've got the biggest marketshare." And I told him, "That's a load of crap." Our deal is, we can't afford that stuff, and we don't want it. Even if Dell's got them now, we still don't want it. One of the things that we really love about HPE in all phases is the ability to continue maintenance, to continue coverage. Where we got the word from Dell that five years after the day you bought your EquaLogic you're out of luck. We won't sell you anything, we won't sell you parts, we won't sell you ... and we're like, "Okay, we won't buy your stuff." And we haven't. We got real close on 3PARs, we may still do that again, but we went a different direction. But, you know, "Treat us fair and we'll buy." That's what we love about HP, we really have no complaints.

It was a recommendation from the vendor that we said, "This is solid." When we first bought them, we'd actually gone two or three HP events and listened to the whole talk of, "Here's how, what it's put together, here's how it works." So, that's kind of what lead to it, was that we pretty much just said, "Okay, we'll trust you. Let's go with it." And we've been happy.

I don't think we'd have any good reasons to go elsewhere. In fact we have done that. We were talking to a guy from city of Carson City, and he was having some server issues and so we hooked him up with our vendor, and they took him out of the Dells he had, and gave him some HPs and he's been very happy ever since.

It's HP's attempt to put everything into one box, which we've found to be a real blessing. Previously we didn't have a consolidated, unified solution for compute, storage, and networking. It's also simple to configure and to operate.

We operate in the healthcare sector, and there aren't a lot of solutions that allow us to make sure that our solutions are ready to go in our environment. We have a unique staging environment. We literally test the solution to death before it goes into the hospital environment with the 80/20 rule. If it's 80% configured, we'll run it step-wise before it gets over the doorstep. This helps us to mimic a real-life environment on a smaller scale.

For our use, it provides what we need. I don't think there's much else they can throw into the converged box. I don't think, however, it would be suitable for our actual production environments because we need something much more sophisticated and expandable. It would need more constituent parts for storage and compute to work faster.

We've had no deployment issues.

It's stable for how we use it.

One reason we chose this is because our test systems are not huge and, therefore, don't need to really scale. We have historically tried to reduce our compute needs to be simpler. So even the smallest ConvergedSystem has enabled us to grow. For our small-to-medium-sized customers, we don't need too many alterations. For our larger customers, we typically invest in higher specs. So it's a solution that works perfectly well for us for what we need it to do.

We have a solid second-line support for our hardware and we train our own staff to take up first-line support. This empowers us to triage anything and not have to worry about HP resolving minor hardware elements. We're still able to escalate something quickly if there's a catastrophe. By doing the initial triage, you could say we have 24/7/365 coverage.

As we move away from physical tech and look more into virtual solutions and sharing infrastructures in the medical world, we need to secure our data. Even our test data needs to be locked away and separate from other data for security reasons. So we were looking in particular for a small environment but yet big enough for our test environment. ConvergedSystem hits that sweet spot where we have just enough compute, storage, and networking capability.

We are moving more into the enterprise solutions now. The HP ConvergedSystem enabled us to take a step in that direction but not be overbearing in terms of the technology. The configuration and initial setup was a little bit of a challenge for us as we needed to train our staff. Now our staff that are trained up and it's fairly simple and straightforward.

Be sure to look at your requirements, not just short-terms but also medium-to-long term. Make sure you invest only to the typical three- or five-year window to give yourself the flexibility to move into something else if necessary.