What needs improvement with HPE Primera?

The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved.

Recently, we had many issues with HPE Primera storage, mainly in the leveling process, which caused many problems for the customers. In this architecture, the full application running over this storage gets stuck when one disk fails. We noticed that one leveling process, ungrouping process, and grouping process took around 12 hours to conclude. It was not a good experience. The main issue was that we dimensioned the solution to 1,300 IOPS. The solution has 10 + 2 spare disks, and when one disc fails, the application gets stuck because the IOPS moves to 5,000 IOPS when it happens. We noticed some specific limitations with the solution's graphical interface, which was not rich. The solution's main problem was the grouping and ungrouping process. We confirmed that the problem was with HPE Primera by stopping the whole application while labeling. No IOPS was consumed from the application to the storage, even though the IOPS was 5,000. This means that 5,000 was just for the leveling of one disk. If two disks had failed, the problem would have been bigger than we experienced.

HPE Primera's deduplication area is not as good as the one offered by Dell PowerStore, making it an area where improvements are required.

The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price. Though I work for a big enterprise-sized business where the cost shouldn't matter much, I feel that HPE Primera is a bit costly.

We would like to have more flash storage and its stability. This is an area of challenge for us.

We face challenges with false alarms, particularly daily alerts related to replication link breaks, indicating link code downtimes. However, upon checking, the link is consistently up. We have even carried out load testing. Despite escalating the issue to the highest level at HP, the response is attributed to a bug. We have also upgraded to the next version, yet the problem remains unresolved. These daily false alarms about application link breaks generate around five to six tickets. The other aspect is that the alerts occur at different times throughout the day. It becomes challenging to justify to senior management, who may lack the technical understanding to grasp the reasons behind the high ticket count.

HPE Primera needs to improve its command-line interface so that all its users or administrators can work on CLI Command Modes. HPE needs to improve its NAS solutions because it doesn't offer any NAS products. There are certain shortcomings in the technical support offered by HPE where improvements are required. There is a lot of lag or delay from the end of technical support. In general, HPE's support team should improve on response time as it can be better. HPE Primera needs to offer NAS solutions because it doesn't offer them currently. The CLI Command Modes need to be improved.

I would like to highlight the aspect of security, especially when compared to certain other vendors. We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted. Some vendors have showcased the functionality of their arrays automatically transitioning to a read-only mode when they detect ransomware or suspicious activity, safeguarding data from corruption. Regrettably, we haven't seen both of these features in the HP ARAs we primarily use. However, I can't state this with absolute certainty, but it's what we've observed so far. It would be beneficial if your organization could demonstrate any additional functionalities we may not be aware of.

I haven't encountered any areas that need improvement since I consider HPE Primera a great solution. HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement.

Only HPE can manage the product. There is a single interface to manage multiple servers. The product should allow other low-cost management software to manage HPE Primera. If we have many HPE servers and storage, we must have HPE OneView to avail of all those features. If we don't have HPE OneView, we cannot manage them completely. HPE OneView’s license is expensive. There are other applications available in the market which are cheaper than HPE OneView and can also manage our infrastructure. When we add HPE devices to other applications, it doesn’t give us all the options to manage the infrastructure. The product should allow integration with other solutions.

Primera should be more user-friendly. It's currently a bit disconnected. Moreover, there should be more availability in Brazil.

Everything is up to par. We are happy with the product and do not need extra features. The pricing is very high. There are other products at much lower pricing.

The solution could improve by having seamless migration from other storage systems. The process should be made easier.

I would like to see improved training offered with HPE Primera. Being the front-end facing the customer, it would be beneficial to understand better how to support the customer with their questions. Currently, the customer reaches out to me with their questions and I take the questions to customer service. It would be better if I had the knowledge to be able to resolve the concerns myself.

Some application solutions can be more acceptable on the HPE Primera site because the size is important and costly.

The IOPS and throughput could be better. That's the only drawback compared to other vendors.

I'm very satisfied with HPE Primera, so I can't think of an area for improvement, but if they could increase the value of the IOPS and the throughput, that would be good.

Like most storage, we want to see flash become more and more stable. Like any flash that uses MLC or TLC techniques, over time, the more writes you have, the less usable the storage becomes. They try to plan for this and have a lot of extra space in the arrays, but over time, their performance does degrade. This is true for any flash storage. It probably would be advantageous to make the storage solutions from HPE more inclusive with the add-on software. A lot of people say, "Well, we don't really need that extra software to do this or that." In most of the cases, if it's done right and they use it right, there is a value-add in these additional software tools that are optional. Their support should be improved. Currently, it depends on who you get on the phone.

We used to receive hardware errors a lot of times. The ambient temperatures rise rate was approximately 35 to 55 degrees, but when it was approximately 27 or 28, we used to get errors a lot.

The solution has good performance but it could improve further. When we compare HPE Primera to Huawei, Huawei is a better solution. However, here in Sri Lanka, the support is not that good for Huawei.

The solution could prove the reporting.

The cost of HPE Primera could be lower.

We haven't come across any issues with the solution. I don't recall missing any features. They could work to make scalability easier. It's quite expensive to upgrade right now maybe just now as its a new model. Their latency is good, however, if they can continue to push their capabilities, that would be ideal.

We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data.

One of the drawbacks of the model we purchased is that it is not running NVMe drives. Even though they say that it is NVMe-ready, it is still on the SSD drives. The model that we purchased has only eight hard drives, and only the ones on the top could work on NVMe. The rest of them are still on the SSD. Its competitors, such as EMC and Pure Storage, are moving or have already moved to NVMe. HPE should improve this solution for NVMe. HPE should also improve IOs in this solution. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage.

There really isn't any aspect of the solution that needs improvement for the customer other than its price. It is a very good solution, but the Georgia Republic is a very small country and customers in both the government public sector and in the private sector do not have money to purchase enterprise or high performance solutions. They are looking at mid-range or mid-class solutions. I can say that they need to simplify the solution. In SimpliVity, they need a lot of integration with virtualization technologies. For example, putting some add-ons or plugins in vCenter. vCenter is a management software of VMware virtualization. Secondly, it would be better if they cold simplify the deployment of Primera. Thirdly, if you have already purchased Primera and you need to scale your infrastructure and you are thinking of buying more hardware disks, you will need to purchase the Rebalance Service from HP Enterprise. They need to improve that methodology. The customers need solutions that do not require a lot of administrative tasks.

On the software end, in regards to the integration, everything gets aligned with the software-defined data center concept. Which means that everything needs to be done for software and programmatically. This is an area that needs improvement as well as on the hardware end, the ability to expand capacity to larger numbers. In the next release, I would like the ability to do direct file services. This is a block-based solution, if you need to do file servers, you have to put servers around it. On the controller side, I would like to see NAS capabilities. That would be helpful.

On the software side, in terms of integration, everything gets aligned with the software-defined data center concept, which means that everything needs to be done programmatically. There is room for improvement in this regard. On the hardware side, you should have the ability to expand capacity to larger numbers. I would like to have the ability to do direct file services. This is a block-based solution, so if you need to do file services with it, you need to put servers around it. From the controller side, if we could have NAS capabilities then that would be great.

The interface needs to be more user-friendly in that sense that installation and management are still a bit on the high end. It needs to be simpler.

This solution would be expensive for small business and it could be priced more competitively for that market.