HPE Primera - license - 1 license

What is our primary use case? We use HPE Primera as part of our data storage solutions, with an emphasis on maintaining stable and mission-critical systems. What is most valuable? In terms of data storage, after replacing HDD disks with SSD disks using HPE High-Five, the system now keeps stable. We have more capacity than expected, and even if we face issues with one or two disks, the system maintains the same performance. The interface is user-friendly and web-based, though it does not cover all requirements. What needs improvement? The user interface is friendly, yet it does not cover all steps that can be performed via direct port connections on storage. They could add more functionalities to the interface. For how long have I used the solution? HPE Primera has been live for almost two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The system is stable, particularly with mission-critical solutions in place. Although we have yet to experience a stress situation, the system operates smoothly even with a greater IOPS capacity enabled by using SSD disks. How are customer service and support? When we asked for HPE support to resolve issues, their help was punctual and on time. However, the depth of root cause analysis provided was not satisfying. We could not get a genuine explanation for why systems were failing under certain conditions. How would you rate customer service and support? How was the initial setup? The setup does not seem complex, based on feedback from our team who used an experienced resource with HPE expertise. What about the implementation team? We used an experienced resource with HPE expertise to handle the setup. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I cannot recall the exact figures for pricing from memory, but it seems to be an acceptable and reasonable price. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We did not evaluate other solutions, as we had requirements dictated by an RFP process. What other advice do I have? On a scale of one to ten, I would rate HPE support around six to seven due to the lack of depth in their root cause analysis. I would recommend this solution to others because it is a stable product, and although it has some product problems, it is common for every vendor to release fixes to improve. It is the latest that HPE offers. I rate the overall product an 8 out of 10. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner

What is our primary use case? We are using HPE Primera for a virtual environment. My virtual machine is residing on it. What is most valuable? HPE Primera is quite a stable storage system that provides good provisioning and allows for the changing of partition sizes. What needs improvement? The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I am quite satisfied with the solution’s performance. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Currently, I don't find any difficulty expanding or scaling up the storage. How are customer service and support? We have a tier-one support partner available to support HPE Primera storage, and we are satisfied with them. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? The solution’s initial setup is very straightforward. It takes around four to five days to deploy the solution. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The solution is quite cost-effective. HPE Primera is about a couple of thousand dollars cheaper than Dell NVMe. What other advice do I have? Almost all storage has the same capabilities. HPE Primera has password protection and hybrid storage, and we can connect it to the fiber. It is not difficult to integrate HPE Primera with other third-party tools. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? HPE Primera is used for shared storage. We have two servers connected via fiber channel to primary storage. In these two servers, we are running three databases. These three databases are installed in the shared storage. So, the shared storage is into the HPE Primera storage or disks. We have 80 volumes of one terabyte each, and we have a total of eight terabytes capacity on Primera storage with an extra capacity of four terabytes for the caps. The applications running on the HPE server mount all the mounting points in the shared storage, including the database. What is most valuable? HPE Primera is used for shared storage. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We delivered the first Primera storage in 2022. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution's performance using SSD disks is fantastic, but its performance using HDD disks is not so good. I don't know if that is because of some problem with the controller. We have a lot of customers that use 3PAR with HDD disks, and they don't have any problems. Unlike 3PAR, HPE Primera storage only supports rate six. Whenever you have a problem with rate six, you need to spread and make a lot of copies. That could be the reason you have problems when you need to do an ungrouping of one disk. That could be the reason the performance was not good. The experience of HPE Primera storage with HDD disks using rate six was not good. However, the experience of HPE Primera storage using rate six with SSD disks was fantastic. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? HPE Primera has good scalability. You have 24 slots for SSD disks, and you can expand them well. You can put more controllers. I rate the solution's scalability a nine or ten out of ten. How are customer service and support? Technical support's first response was quick. They analyzed and acted on the problem very quickly. However, the responses in levels one and two were not proper enough. We expected to receive a response about why one disc going down consumed 5,000 IOPs just for the ungrouping process. When the disk failed, the other 11 disks tried to share the checklist of the disk, and it consumed 5,000 IOPs just for that. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral How was the initial setup? An HPE third party did the initial setup of the solution. We did not face any issues implementing the solution. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The pricing for HDD was good. What other advice do I have? My customer required that the storage be 3PAR. However, we could not deliver 3PAR, so we presented HPE Primera to them as the new HPE storage. Our HPE partner who sold the solution to us mentioned that HPE Primera is a very robust solution that could replace 3PAR in terms of life cycle. When the problem happened, we opened a critical ticket with HPE. HPE analyzed it, and everything was okay with the configuration. The response HPE gave was to replace the HDD with an SSD. When we did that, the solution's capacity moved from 1.3 terabytes to 30 terabytes. One application that was expecting 1,300 IOPs moved to 30,000 IOPs. Any problem you face that consumes around 5,000 IOPs will be unimpacted by the application itself. We won the competition because we were the existing vendor except for the hardware. We won the deal three years ago because we sold the solution together with the hardware. The hardware was not a big problem at that time. Later, the customer had to replace all the HDDs with SSDs due to problems. We are still arguing with the customer that the problem was not ours because we only use 900 IOPs for 1,300 IOPs with SSD. It's not a problem from our end when the disks fail during HPE Primera's ungrouping process. We knew nothing about that when we bought the hardware through the HPE partner. Our experience with HDD was not good, but it seems to be good enough with SSD. I would recommend the solution to other users, warning them to be careful when dimensioning their solution over HPE Primera. If they use HDD or SSD, they should consider that the system will use 5,000 IOPs when one disk fails. Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Implementer

What is our primary use case? I use the solution in my company for virtual machines. My company uses Cray ClusterStor E1000 NVMe Gen4 for all HPC clusters. HPE Primera is useful for data replication. What is most valuable? I can't see any useful features in the product since it is the staff members in my company who primarily use the product. What needs improvement? HPE Primera's deduplication area is not as good as the one offered by Dell PowerStore, making it an area where improvements are required. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using HPE Primera for a year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is a scalable solution. It is possible to add or scale up the product. The product is useful for medium-scale companies and not for large-scale businesses. There are no plans to increase the use of the product currently in our company, but we may plan to increase its usage after five years. How are customer service and support? The solution's technical support is good since it is available twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. The product's support team can be contacted via phone or email. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have experience with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series and HPE MSA 1060 Storage. HPE Primera is a built-in storage. While NVMe is also the same. HPE MSA 1060 Storage is an entry-level storage. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series is in an end-of-life phase, so since our company wanted to shift to some other storage, we chose HPE Primera. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series was a good tool. How was the initial setup? The solution can be deployed in a couple of days. What about the implementation team? The product's vendor installed the solution in our company. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? HPE Primera is a little bit higher than Dell PowerStore. The price difference between HPE and Dell is not a big deal. HPE NVMe Storage was purchased for around 60,000 USD. HPE Primera costs around 80,000 USD. My company has purchased HPE Primera under a five-year contract, so we are at peace now since we don't have to pay anything more to HPE. The product is cost efficient in my opinion. What other advice do I have? I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines. The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks. The product's interface is simple to use. I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines. Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore. Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB. I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice. I rate the tool a seven out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? I use the solution in my company as a cloud infrastructure where we run VMs. My company uses VMware ESXi and HPE Primera as storage. HPE Primera is also useful to run and allocate machines to VMs. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using HPE Primera for a year. My company is an end user of HPE Primera. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Around 100 employees in our company use the solution. The product has been only used in our company for a year. The application for which my company has purchased HPE Primera is still being developed, so we need to have more uses for the tool. How are customer service and support? I rate the technical support a ten out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? My company uses HPE 3PAR. How was the initial setup? I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process. The product's initial setup phase is a bit complicated since it can only be done by someone who is experienced. The tool has certain delicate settings to deal with during the setup phase. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. Considering the whole infrastructure, the solution can be deployed in a week's time. A team must take care of the product's deployment process since there are many areas, like the storage, network, and server parts. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The tool is expensive. I can say that HPE Primera is one of the costliest tools in the market. What other advice do I have? HPE Primera has improved our company's data-intensive application performance. In our company, HPE Primera provides me with centralized access to all the data while allowing me to manage the storage and allocate different machines to VMs, making it a reliable and good tool. My company hasn't used the product in a way that allows me to describe a scenario where the tool's capability was beneficial for our business. My company has not tried to use the tool's scalability features, considering that it has only been a year since it was installed in our company. I believe that the need to use the scalability feature of the product will come into the picture in a few years. Right now, the product's size and capacity are enough for our company to continue with it in our environment. HPE Primera's most beneficial features for storage management tasks stem from the fact that my company can have online access to the health and all the other parameters of the product through HPE's website, which helps a lot. My company can get critical information about the storage from any place, and it also generates alerts, making it a very good solution. My company is satisfied with HPE Primera's data protection capabilities since we can take snapshots of the VMs, which helps us ensure that the VMs are always protected. My company has integrated HPE Primera into a whole new infrastructure, so we have never tried integrating it with the old infrastructure in our organization. Though we know about HPE Primera's AI-driven operations, my company has not used it extensively. As the IT landscape has been changing lately, users need to think of software-defined storage because it gives flexibility for expansion and is cheaper than HPE Primera. If you have money, you can go for HPE Primera. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? We are HPE Primera’s customers. Our primary use case is to ensure quick and secure access to basic application data for online transactions. What is most valuable? HPE Primera provides me with system reliability and 100% data reliability. The storage is good and is consistently reliable and scalable, allowing me to use it whenever needed. The overall performance is great. What needs improvement? We would like to have more flash storage and its stability. This is an area of challenge for us. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The product is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? HPE Primera is good and scalable. We have 300 users for the solution, and two administrators manage it. The product also has online community engagement and patching management. It's a regular process. How are customer service and support? The customer service and support is excellent. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We worked with something from Oracle, but it wasn't reliable. Therefore, we switched to HPE Primera. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. It took us two days to deploy it. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The solution’s pricing is affordable and worth the money. What other advice do I have? It's a commendable solution, especially suitable for online transactions. It is reliable in meeting data requirements. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? We use HP Primera to store all data related to machine learning applications. Our machine learning team's critical research-related data is saved on the tool. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature of HP Primera is that you don't have to buy an additional product for application replication. This tool offers a feature for replication from the area, allowing you to configure the application with two data centers directly from the software. Unlike Dell, where you would need to buy a separate RPA for the replication from IT tools ID, with HP Primera, there's no need to invest in new hardware for this purpose. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using the solution since 2020. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's a stable product. We haven't experienced any production downtime. The only challenges have been with bugs and additional software. Besides that, I haven't faced any latency issues or related concerns. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The tool is scalable. Our current capacity is now full. We have approximately 5000 users for the solution. How are customer service and support? I'm not happy with the customer service and support. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral How was the initial setup? I installed the device from scratch, and the process was straightforward. We just did the hardware racking and stacking, and I placed HPE Primera on the network. On switching on the network, it conducted self-monitoring. Soon, I assigned IPs to the controllers and configured them. The process was simple. What about the implementation team? I implemented the solution independently. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The solution is cost-effective. I rate it an eight out of ten, with ten being excellent. What other advice do I have? I recommend HPE Primera because it's one of HP's most stable product. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:customer/partner

What is our primary use case? HPE Primera was in use by our company for one of our customers when we were using only the SAN environment. What is most valuable? The most valuable features of the solution depend on the users' infrastructures. If the people use only the SAN environment and there are no replication, TR-069, or NAS requirements, then HPE will try to fit in for such requirements. The features I like in HPE Primera are similar to the ones offered by NetApp. I prefer to use the features I like and want in NetApp and not in HPE 3PAR or Primera. If people use only the SAN environment in their company, they can go with the NetApp HPE 3PAR or Primera. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using HPE Primera for two to three years. My company has a partnership with HPE. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is a stable solution, and I haven't seen any hardware failure in it. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is a scalable solution as it allows its users to use its scalability options. How are customer service and support? I rate the technical support a six out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral How was the initial setup? The product's initial setup phase was easy. If you speak about device management, it's a bit difficult, though not extremely complex. I rate the area concerning device management a six or seven out of ten. The device management is difficult because the CLI is a bit complicated, especially when compared to NetApp. The product's installation and deployment may take three to five hours. One person is enough to take care of the solution's deployment phase. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Multiple vendors are available in the market, so choosing a product depends on a user's requirements. Compared to HPE Primera, there are products under Dell EMC. The final decision to choose a product depends on the commercial perspective of the potential buyers in the market. What other advice do I have? The solution's maintenance is not difficult. Those who operate in a SAN environment can go with HPE Primera, especially if they don't have any requirements related to DR or NAS tools. Considering the lack of features in the product, I rate the overall tool a six out of ten. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner