HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

Our primary use case is administration of archival records. I'm the group ICT manager and we're customers of HPE StoreVirtual.

The valuable features of the solution are its flexibility, application and scalability.

I think the user interface could be improved as well as the general ease of use. You're not looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars on these applications. What you're trying to do is simplify things. 

I've been using this solution for 15 months. 

The stability of the solution is fine.

We're just getting into the next phase, but it looks as if it could scale. 

The technical support is perfect. 

I believe the pricing of the solution is average. 

I wouldn't highly recommend the solution but I would recommend it. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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.

It allows the direct-attached storage of our existing servers to be used for clustered Virtual SAN.

We implemented it into a development environment, but we found that it was not reliable enough to put it into production.

Management of the system is tedious. Stability needs improvement. The system would work fine for weeks and then one of the VSA virtual machines would hang, taking down the clustered volume. This was very confusing, because I had four nodes, which should have allowed fault-tolerance.

I've been using it for six months.

I had no issues deploying it.

There were stability issues. See the Areas for Improvement section.

We didn't scale it beyond four nodes as it never went into production.

Support was not helpful, instead advising me to upgrade to a paid version which includes support.

I have tried StarWind’s VSAN solution, but decided to go with HP VSA because it was included in the purchase price of my HP DL360 G9, approximately $20,000.

The installation and creation of the ‘cluster’ was fairly straightforward. Volume creation and additional required configuration was a bit more complex.

I implemented it myself. I would suggest deploying in a dev environment first, to ensure thorough understanding. It is not exactly intuitive.

I stopped using the product when the VSA volume took itself offline for the second time.

I used the free 1TB license that is included with all newer HP servers.

Make sure you have more than enough VSA nodes (at least enough to handle a loss of one node and preferably two). Ensure the license supports distributed volumes, rather than single-host volumes.

We are running a training lab environment with ever changing setup and, therefore, iSCSI is the most flexible solution to provide storage to any point inside our datacenter. HP StoreVirtual is a scale-out, clustered iSCSI storage solution with High-Availability features packed into the base license.

The HP StoreVirtual VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) allows us to turn any storage supported by our ESX server (local, FC SAN, shared SAS) into a flexible and highly-available iSCI storage.

There are numerous features in the product, some not even used by us. The ones we like most are thin provisioning and network RAID (node-to-node replication of data to satisfy different availability needs). With the latest Lefthand OS releases, we also started to use the adaptive optimization feature (automated block-level tiering) to leverage capacity of traditional spindle-driven hard disks, and the speed and responsiveness of SSDs.

In the past, we were exclusively Fibre-Channel focused with all the associated disadvantages of running a separate FC SAN with particular array types. Every host we wanted to connect to shared storage had to have an HBA installed.

With iSCI and the clustered StoreVirtual approach, we can now use standard IP networking, standard ethernet NIC, and we can easily provide storage to any server anywhere in our datacenter.

If we need more capacity or performance we simply add additional VSA nodes, which my be backed by internal server disk storage as it's cheaper than the legacy array storage.

From my perspective, these things are missing:

• Homogeneous management of 3PAR, StoreVirtual and MSA
• Remote Copy (sync or at least async) to/from StoreVirtual (similar to online import from EVA, EMC, etc., just expanded to continuously copying)
• Integration of Priority Optimization with VMware vSphere and vVols on the VM level straight from the vSphere web client
• StoreServ iSCI VSA

We've used HP StoreVirtual for about 10 years now, but, honestly, I don't even remember anymore. We do not see any downtime due to the clustered approach, and migration and updates worked smoothly. Especially with the VSA, the hardware (server and storage backend) underneath simply get swapped without affecting availability.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

We rarely use technical support as the solution is software driven and very stable. We are very experienced with this solution, and if you have a support call, it is like gambling (as with every vendor). It depends if the level-one or level-two engineer is experienced or not, is located in your country or near-shored. Essentially, it's a mixed-skill experience, but we've had no bad experiences in general.

We used HP's Enterprise Virtual Array and EMC's CX3 and CX4 arrays (and still use some of this hardware as pure capacity behind HP StoreVirtual). We went for StoreVirtual at that time as StoreVirtual provided much more functionality (and based on an all-inclusive pricing) than our existing storage arrays.

The initial setup of both hardware-based StoreVirtual as well as the VSA are absolutely straightforward. OK, we were trained and experienced already, so there was no big challenge. However, there are still quite a lot of things you need to understand (especially in VMware environments) which can cause performance or availability issues if you don't follow certain (sometimes not clearly communicated) best practices.

But if you do everything right, you'll have a highly-stable, highly-available, and well-performing platform. We put all basics and learnings together and created our own two-day training (also available as video training) to teach admins and implementers how to do the important things right.

We implemented it ourselves as we are architects and consultants. This the best way to learn and gain experience.

We never calculated the ROI. For us, it was just about having a stable, modern, feature-rich platform for our use cases.

From a licensing perspective, the all-inclusive licensing was very appealing, as EVA and CX had lots of licensing options and add-ons, which was awful.

Specify the workloads (availability, size, and performance). Either use the StorageWorks sizing tool (not available to everyone) or the advice of an experienced consultant/reseller to select the model and size the cluster and follow the best practices on implementation.

The most valuable features are the stability and that it's robust. It's is one of the reasons that we have been dealing with HP for so many years.

One of the areas that need improvement is the consolidated management platform, to manage all of the nodes from one place and the licensing around that.

There is an issue that I have found with many hyper-converged solutions or systems that you build out into a hyper-converged platform, which is that the management interface is not always consolidated on-site.

I have been dealing with HPE for ten years.

It appears to be very stable and very robust.

The technical support in our country is quite good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Some of the main differences between Cisco and HPE are the single configuration point where you can control the entire system. Both the hardware and the converged infrastructure. Cisco's management interface seems to be a bit better.

We have trouble selling other partner's products because HPE is very well suited for our market, where we are located.

HPE is a very good contender. I work a lot with Cisco and HP but today the products are very much on par as far as availability and performance are concerned. HPE support in my area is better than that of Cisco.

We are technology providers to our clients. 

I recommend HPE to many of my clients.

We sell a lot of HP and it's probably one of our largest software platforms.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We originally had LeftHand which are morphing into StoreVirtual. We use it in our remote offices and don’t have many issues with it. We are currently collapsing everything down into a DL380.

The StoreVirtual is rather new for us. We're still in the process of making a homegrown hyper-convergence system with the StoreVirtual product.

The LeftHands themselves have been very stable. We're moving to the VSA on the DL380s.

We aren’t sure of the scalability yet but are aiming to find out soon.

HPE support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HPE stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

I would also advise that users follow best practices with the StoreVirtual.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set.

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.

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.