HPE Primera Reviews

My primary use of Primera is as a storage solution for a huge conglomerate with multiple critical businesses including banks, airlines, and retail chains.

The most valuable feature is an all-flash system, which means the data access speed is amazing while the latency is almost nothing, and it can deliver IOPS up to 16,000.

An area for improvement is how the product gets integrated with the technical support and how cases are raised. There are also certain features that require engineering-level access, which should be accessible to storage admins as well. In the next release, I'd like to see support for external KMS (key management system) because some organizations want encryption based on their encryption appliances or methodology.

Primera is quite stable.

The technical support is very good and very effective in resolving any problems.

The initial setup was quite straightforward - everything went very smoothly, it took a few hours, and I didn't face a single issue with implementation.

Our implementation was done by HPE consultants.

I would give this solution a rating of nine out of ten.

This product is used for all of the backend, core storage infrastructure. We migrated from spinning-disk, so it has the same type of workloads. It is 80% virtual machines, and then file services, and database workloads.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of deployment.

Integration with the compute capacity is good, as this is just the storage component.

Orchestration and management are good.

The performance and capacity-based costs are also good.

Another advantage is that HPE sells everything. This includes all of the capabilities of the hardware, like replication, snapshot, and other specific features. They are all included from the get-go, as opposed to everything being separate and in another budget. When you buy it, you can do whatever you have to be able to do with it out of the box.

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.

Between Primara and it's predecessor, 3PAR, I have used this product for about five years.

This is a rock-solid product.

This is the product that is running the data centers for the shop, so everybody in the organization will be affected one way or another by what is there. Currently, we have 6,000 people.

The technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home, where the hardware calls to their NOC and reports and alerts or events. Then they have a pretty standard protocol to call back. They're quite insistent; they'll send you emails and if you don't acknowledge then they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place. 

We use the HPE 3PAR in addition to Primera.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Professional Services installation is embedded in the cost. The setup can be done by the customer but it's a pretty sophisticated solution, so we use the vendor Professional Services. It was not a third-party on top of the cost. Rather, it was included in the options that we chose.

The price to capacity ratio is good.

We had a selection process with all the major vendors, and we ended up with this solution in part because of stability. One of the primary reasons we selected it is because we can buy storage and compute from the same vendor and everything gets optimized. Obviously, everything is designed to work with one another.

I will definitely recommend this product. I'd say that anybody looking to implement it should do their cost analysis very carefully. There's a multitude of solutions, but some of them are more software-oriented. The math can become fuzzy, but once they figure out the financial aspect of it, I think from a purely technical perspective, I highly recommend it.

In terms of quality for block storage, it is one of the best on the planet, if not the best, in my view. If they had block storage, NAS, and iSCSI out of the box then I could rate it as perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using HPE Primera as a storage solution.

There has been a lot of changes in HPE Primera OS, and most of the time any package related to it is simple to upgrade. It does not require any support for the operation. The customer can easily deploy any code directly from the GUI which is very good. Additionally, we have individual storage we can allocate and easily manage.

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.

I have been using HPE Primera for approximately one year.

The solution is stable. However, in the older versions, we used to see a lot of hardware failures and any indications we have a node battery to be replaced. We have almost 18 storage for the last three months, we are not receiving LSA messages, whereas before we were receiving one per month. We used to receive storage or hardware issues from the HPE Primera side. Things have been better.

The scalable of the solution is good. Recently, we have upgraded one of the storage from 50TB to 100TB. It's very easy to mount and connect. There is be no issue with expansion. We can easily upgrade the endpoint and does not take much time. It all can be done without downtime for that. Adding in an SD card is similar to how we have mounted the expansion.

We have around 20 storage HPE Primera's, and we have approximately 30 applications that are using HPE Primera storage. We have a dedicated mobile application used for banking purposes and a database dedicated to working on HPE Primera.

I would rate the technical support of HPE Primera a three out of five.

The support could improve because it would take a lot of time to get an expert to analyze oh problem. We would be connected to the L1 support and then L2, it can take a long time. If the issue is a P1 case, they are taking a lot of time to get back to us with a solution. P1 is the highest priority and the support we receive from the P2 level is the same.

High availability of primera storage .

The initial installation can take almost one hour. You only need to install the hardware to the rack and application. Once we powered it on, there is no need to create any write groups. Everything is automatically created by the HPE Primera OS.

The deployment was done by HPE.

Other than the support for HPE Primera it is a good solution.

I rate HPE Primera an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for all of the backend, the core storage infrastructure at this point.

It's the migration from spinning disk, it has all types of workloads. 80% are virtual machines, file services, and database workloads.

The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment. 

The integration with the compute capacity because this is just the storage side.

The orchestrations and management, and the performance and cost per capacity.

Another advantage is that HPE sells everything. All of the capabilities of the hardware such as replication, snapshot, and the specific features are all included from the start as opposed to being on another license.

When you buy it, you can do whatever you have to, to be able to do with it out of the box.

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.

There are two lines, and they are evolving into one another. Primera is just a word, it was called 3PAR before that. I have worked with both.

Between the two lines, I have worked with these solutions for five years.

There are multiple components, there are many different versions. The software has versions and the hardware has versions. We are using the latest version, the latest incarnation.

It's a stable solution, it's rock solid.

This is running the data centers for the shop. Everybody in the organization will be affected one way or another by what is there. We have 6000 people in our organization.

Tell us about your experience with customer service/technical support.

Technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home. The hardware calls their NOC center and reports any alerts or events. Then they have a standard ideal protocol to call back. They are quite insistent, they send you emails if you don't acknowledge and they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Professional services are embedded. It can be done by the customer but it's a pretty sophisticated solution. We need to use vendor professional services.

It was not a third-party in addition to the cost, it was included.

The hardware came with installation services. We decided to go with it.

Stability is one of the reasons we chose this solution, and that we could buy storage and computer from the same vendor to optimize everything. It's designed to work with one another.

I will definitely recommend this solution. For anyone who is interested in implementing it, they should do their cost analysis very carefully. There's a multitude of solutions, but some of them are more software-oriented.

The math can become fuzzy but once they figure out the financial aspect of it, I think from a purely technical perspective, I would highly recommend it.

In terms of quality for block storage, it's one of the best on the planet, if not the best, in my view. 

If they had, block, NAS, and iSCSI out of the box, I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I would rate HPE Primera a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for my team is expandability. I am using Primera for production. It serves as the primary storage in my production environment.

With Primera in my data center, I feel comfortable. I also use deduplication and compression for all data, and it usually makes things easier.

Data replication and deduplication are the most valuable features. 

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

I have been using HPE Primera for six months. I use the latest version.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support were perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

I might see an ROI in another year.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. It is okay pricing; it could be cheaper. 

I would recommend using the solution. It is a good solution for storage. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

HPE Primera is used for hosting databases and applications.

I have been using HPE Primera for two years.

HPE Primera is stable.

The scalability of HPE Primera is good.

We have approximately 20 people using the solution in my company. We have plans to increase the usage in the future.

We have not had a good experience with support from HPE Primera. They can improve.

The installation of HPE Primera is straightforward and it took one day to complete.

We used help from the vendor to do the implementation of HPE Primera.

The license for HPE Primera is all-inclusive.

I rate HPE Primera a six out of ten.

The use cases of our company's clients have been good enough to help us remove the competition of HPE Primera from the market.

My company takes care of the installation phase of the product for our customers, and we also manage the systems for our customers. With HPE Primera, I can say that it is great to have a tool that provides or serves as a single point of visibility for everything.

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.

I have been using HPE Primera for ten years. My company is a reseller of the solution. I deal with the latest version of the solution.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company mostly provides solutions to our clients that are stable. Redundancies in a two-node system make the solution very stable.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

HPE Primera is a tool that just one user mostly uses. My company's clients who use HPE Primera are mostly enterprise-sized businesses.

My company provides support to our clients who use HPE Primera. My company directly gets help or support from the engineers in our company, which I feel is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I was never involved in the setup phase since it is a process taken care of by the experienced engineers in our company, who I believe wouldn't have faced a problem at all. I rate the setup phase a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The setup phase is fairly straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. There are no licensing or additional costs attached to the solution since everything is built in when it comes to HPE Primera.

HPE Primera provides proactive monitoring and a fantastic AI that helps find problems.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

We not only use HPE storage, we use their hardware as well. We use it for our incubated environment because we have some applications which are running on these journeys, applications, and APA . That storage actually helps us because there are multiple transactions and queries. Our applications are running and that's why we require fast storage.

HPE Primera is mostly integrated with our compute infrastructure and because of that, the particular storage is very much compatible with that compute. It's efficient.

Reporting can be improved.  The reporting console should be better and there should be some out of the box reports. That's the only thing.

I have been using it for two and a half years.

It's very stable. We didn't face any issue with stability.  

As per HPE, they said that it's pretty easy to add more storage in HPE Primera. With the existing controllers, I think it's pretty easy to add more storage. Right now we are using around 600 TB, not more than that, but it can support up to four petabytes.

Their support is fine although it can be slow. It's mostly regional so we can't comment on it, because for it to change regions, it'll take some time for them to know about our whole setup, and then get used to it. Eventually we'll have to get used to it. If they were to change regions and a new engineer is assigned, then we could face some issues. There could be some kind of delay, so that's the only thing. Other than a lack of communication, the support is not that bad. The engineers are capable enough.

We previously used Dell EMC PowerMax, which is a five to six year-old setup.  Primera is a two year-old setup. With Dell EMC, the discs crashed, which needed to be replaced. In the two years we've used Primera, we haven't faced this kind of issue. 

PowerMax has very powerful storage. The number of IOPS and the control stability are the things I liked very much, but it's more expensive than other solutions. They are top of the line, but on a higher price range. 

Setup was a straightforward. We didn't face any hurdles in that because it was a new deployment during that time. It was a new setup when we were going for this new journeys and application service. The deployment was straightforward.

Deployment was done by HPE's partner.  I would rate it a four out of five.

I you compare it with some other storage, then the HPE licenses are much cheaper.  If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 3 out of five in terms of pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Until now, I haven't given any thought to Primera and how it's going to work for us because we are moving towards cloud transformation. In a year, we may not require any on-premise solution, since our whole idea is to take all the workers to the cloud.

For advice, it all depends on what the requirements are. There are other solutions to consider. In all-flash, there are many other vendors, so it all depends on what kind of solution is being deployed and what kind of compute infrastructure they have which can work with that storage. If you're using HPE, then I would recommend HPE Primera because its performance is very good.