HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

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.

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.

Redundancy of the product, especially for remote locations, is the most valuable feature. Easy implementation and easy online upgrade process, which is very secure, are also great. If anything happens, the upgrade can be restarted or stopped without an impact on the production.

We and our customers did not have any downtime for their SAN, not because of an update or due to an expansion of the cluster with extra nodes. The support tool does not depend on one system. It just reads the status of the SAN and can be installed on more than one device.

You cannot easily mix SAS with SATA or SSD within a cluster. So tiering is not easy to implement at a reasonable cost.

I’ve done about 30 implementations in the last six years. Most of our implemented systems are clusters of P4500G2/P4530/P4300 G2/P4330.

The system is functional and always up, even if several nodes need rebooting when an upgrade takes place.

It has on the fly scalability.

Support for StoreVirtual is a separate team within HP. All the support-engineers are specialists which can always find a way to fix your issue.

A complete installation of a four-node cluster can be done within four hours to be ready to move your VMs to the new cluster. It's very easy.

Only the first implementation with a vendor team. After that it is straightforward.

There is not an easy way to build redundancy at this price. Only one license with all the features is needed as it has no additional costs. Every vendor should do that.

We use this product for easy redundancy over two locations. No other solution could make this happen as easily. We also resell EMC SAN and the business case of the customer is the most important to fit the best SAN.

Always follow best practice to be sure to connect in the best way to your VMware or Hyper-V-environment.

Enterprise data and health care. All our data was in a P4500 StoreVirtual, now it is gradually moving to a 4 Node VSA.

Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI. We also plan to build a Metro Cluster using VSA.

• Data replication (Network RAID 10) 
• Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage.

Product looks like it is in the end of development. HPE will be probably be merging with SimpliVity. I hope they will continue the product as we already have multiple HW servers besides HPE, and a software SDS means more flexibility for us.

The most valuable feature is that it allows me to have more servers in my data center. Also, the support I get from HP is tremendously valuable. We have VMware, Microsoft, and HP blades, enclosures, and 3PAR in the data center, but HP provides us with a single point-of-contact for any issue. I'm very happy with the support and I've actually seen them worry more about issues than I have been.

The biggest benefit is cost savings because I have to bring in a lot of new technology. For example, with servers, we need one for archiving, another for BI, and another for IT support. With the new virtual environment in ConvergedSystem, I don't need to purchase new servers because I can just create a new server and continue work.

HP needs to be more careful about the partners they select for implementation. With a virtual environment, HP cannot just provide hardware to the customer and expect the customer to complete the implementation themselves. With the virtual environment of ConvergedSystem, you have to do a lot of integrations and software installations. HP should have stricter mechanisms as to which implementation partners they provide their customers. I've had issues with implementation partners, but HP's support has been great and they eventually resolved my problems.

There are stability issues, but I'm happy with the support. No technology is error free, that's why HP has support.

It is highly scalable. We have four links that contain nine servers, and the enclosure itself can go up to 16 blades. The infrastructure has many things, such as FlexFabric, SAN switches, network switches, storage, and the enclosure. If I need to increase capacity, I only need to increase the number of blades and to put in new discs into my 3PAR servers. I believe that with this infrastructure, I can scale for the next seven years.

It fulfills all my requirements, the price is good, and it's scalable.

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.

We do the implementation of the solution.

Our customers are using it for their backup and file storage.

Catalyst handling.

The software is perfect.

Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

It is stable. I am not getting many calls about the product, only about disk failure.

We are working on single node only. That is a limited edition for this solution.

We have several customers. There are 50 to 70 users connected.

We use the technical support. 

Documentation is all available on the HPE site for all the products.

The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure.

We always recommend this to our customers, but we only have one solution.

I would rate the solution as a seven (out of 10).

It gives us what we want. It provides stability and availability. It is a very reliable solution.

The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second. We need our systems continuously up.

The next release is already out and I found that the many of the improvements that we were thinking about in the product such as the dual controller, are already implemented.

The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance. We chose availability, but it would have an impact in the performance.

Now, we're not afraid of anything that goes wrong.

We didn't have any problems. We scaled up a few years ago; the system was just fine.

We have used the technical support only for faulty replacements such as replacement of disks, for example. The contract was for the next business day. It was fine.

We were not using any other solution previously. Our partner suggested this product; we saw that it fits our needs and tried it out. We were quite pleased with the result and decided to invest in this solution.

I was involved in the setup process. It was easy.

If this solution fits your needs and also if your environment is similar to ours, then we would suggest this solution.

The factors that we look at while selecting a vendor are that they should be innovative, provide a good support option and have reliable products. I don't want my product to fail.