HPE GreenLake Reviews

Our primary use case for HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity is to provide storage to meet our fluctuating needs on-demand.

Many times in the past we ran into a situation where we need to add a bunch of space for our engineering department when it was developing something. Now we can just add that on the fly without any interaction from HP.

It helps us figure out what we have and what to do to plan ahead. If we see a trend, we can plan our best architecture for the future.

This solution has eliminated over-provisioning because we know we have storage at hand. We don't have to over-provision. We can just add as needed.

In terms of IT productivity is less of a hassle administratively. We won't have to worry about if we're going to have enough space or if we need to expand. We can do it right on the fly and our storage administrators can do that easily.

The most valuable feature is the ability to add storage space as needed.

The solution covers our storage requirements. That is all we needed it to do.

I'd like to see better reporting and monitoring of growth so we can better detect where the needs are for scaling. Also, I'd like to see more analysis so we can see where our company is growing and use that to make future plans.

We find the service to be extremely stable.

The solution is very scalable. We have no issues with that whatsoever. We've been able to do whatever we need to do at any time.

Technical support is good when we've needed to use it.

Our decision was made through our constant conversations with our HP representatives and IAS (Integrated Archive Systems) working together to make a plan to fit our needs.

As far as a different solution, that would have been to just have a storage system where we'd have to call in HP to come in and add more storage every time we needed it. We didn't want that because we wanted to evolve from that direction.

The setup was pretty straightforward. No problems there.

This solution completely decreases deployment time to demand. There isn't really deployment time involved.

We used IAS as a reseller. Our experience with them was very good and we continue to have a good relationship with them.

I don't think we have seen an actual return on investment or that the return is not directly related to the product. We have a reduction on storage costs of about 20%.

The pricing is based on the plateaus of usage. The more you use the more you pay but within ranges.

We believe it has saved the organization money. As far as the exact amount, I'm not sure. I would say probably about 20% on storage costs.

We are an HP house all the way, so we didn't have other choices. Before deciding to go with HP, we looked at a lot of other solutions out there and HP seemed to be the best one for us. They're on your side, they help you out when you need it. We find that they've been responsive and really easy to work with.

I'd give this product a ten out of ten. The ease of use, scalability, customer satisfaction and the great service department have combined to make our experience with them outstanding. HP and IAS as our service providers have been great as a team.

The fact that we can now add storage on the fly without any downtime means better productivity and scalability on demand. We're never waiting on a vendor to come in and add more storage, we can just add it and keep working. That gives us more flexibility to do other things and we're not waiting for somebody else to configure it for us. We never have to worry about if we're going to have enough space or if we're going to be able to expand. 

The only areas we did have a problem with was when we reached a certain plateau. It makes sense that as you grow, you pay more. Well, at one point, according to HP, we were at that plateau. We got charged extra for going over the storage allowance. We thought we didn't deserve that extra charge because, by our understanding, we hadn't reached the plateau yet. So we had to contact the company. They had to reevaluate and check out the claim. It turns out that they had set the usage plateaus incorrectly. I think they should handle that part of the billing differently and make it clear to the customer when they are reaching the limit of their usage in the contracted range.

As far as people considering the solution, I would tell them this is probably the best way for them to go. They don't have to worry about growing their storage when needed. They can just do it on the fly and be done with it. It's flexible and it's a time saver.

Our use case is to build a large enterprise storage cluster.

We are using the service to do colocation.

The service has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. If we do not have this type of service, we would have to buy storage for five years and use maybe 50 percent of that storage right now.

Our IT team is more productive right now. We eliminated the need for doing some manual tests.

It is the flexible way to pay for everything that you need and pay as you go. We can pay for just what we need right now.

It has great flexibility and scalability. It is a very good, stable service.

The time to receive a price when I am going to a proposal is too long.

2 years

100 percent, it is a very stable service. We have not had any outages.

It is a great way to scale.

The technical support is very good.

We are a solution provider, and we bought new storage to provide services to our customers.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is a very simple, easy to install and implement.

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen ROI.

We have reduced our organization's capacity management efforts around 40 to 50 percent based on the personnel managing the service, since this is the easiest way to manage.

It has saved our organization 30 to 40 percent. 

The service has decreased the time it takes to deploy IT projects by 50 percent. When we don't have this type of service, we need to take 45 to 60 days to have storage ready. Right now, we have a buffer onsite and are online in a few hours.

We have reduced a lot of our VMware licensing costs.

Lenovo and HPE were on our shortlist.

We chose HPE because this was the more precise service.

Look carefully and understand with this model you can buy just what you need right now, and not overprovision.

We are using it to procure and replace hardware. It covers storage, backup, and compute. We acquire all of these components through GreenLake.

It has brought newer technology in more quickly. This comes with an associated lower risk of failure, as we can replace older gear that we might otherwise have been stuck with.

It has helped us with the planning, and in concert with this, we are doing a lot of virtualizations. For a lot of cases, we are bringing in less gear and equipment to be able to accomplish the same things. It makes better use of what we do bring in.

Eliminating the need to overprovision ties into just using the hardware more wisely. If you are dealing with a lot of standalone Windows Servers, studies have shown they don't get used all the way. Since we are bringing in virtual hosts and running VMware on them, then building guests on top of that. We are packing more out of the same hardware.

The service decreases the time it takes to deploy IT projects when we have several sites going at once. Once we get it in-house, we have our own processes for installing and configuring, so it hasn't really changed that much, as we are using the same standards processes.

It has made the administrative aspect of our IT operations easier. Going through this faster, we are keeping the generations closer. We are not winding up with four, five, or as many generations or iterations of hardware. Everything is staying much closer together, so it is a more consistent infrastructure.

Personally, it was being able to cycle out the old gear faster than we might have been able to otherwise. 

It helps us have a better defined lifecycle in place.

The service has increased the flexibility of our IT operations by being able to do more of our refreshes faster.

Part of the integration, with cutting things over to Unisys, may have hurt us a bit. We had a couple of rough implementations earlier this year. Part of that was due to some internal system changes on HPE's side. We are keeping an eye on this to make sure it doesn't happen again. It was dealt with and cleaned up when brought to the attention of our account team.

From what I heard in the keynote address today, it sounds like they are expanding it to Aruba and pretty much any HPE product. Based on what we need, that would be able to cover the whole range.

We are heading for our second round of GreenLake. There have been some changes as we have learned things that worked better, but it has been the same process even despite some personnel changes on both sides (HPE and us).

Getting hit by some of the Intel bugs was not helpful, but that was outside HPE's control.

It has scaled up for us worldwide. The only places where we really can't implement, or do GreenLake yet to its full extent, are in places where the in-country rules prevent us from doing that.

The technical support is good. It is really no different than the old purchased, straight, capital expense, purchased support. It is still the same support on the back-end.

Things were getting old, and we had to replace hardware. Back in 2010 and 2011, we bought a ton of hardware worldwide. We were at a big conversion. We would put off refreshes for a while. It all needed to be dealt with. Some of the stuff that we are replacing even now is seven to eight years old. It was bought back then, and we haven't been able to get back to it until now. We knew, sooner or later, some of this stuff was going to start failing and hurting us.

We set up GreenLake before it was called GreenLake. We worked on that for close to a year to get it all in. Not only was HPE writing the book for this service, but also some of our internal processes had to change to deal with the service. 

A lot of deployment was done through HPE. When HPE divested their support environment to Unisys, we didn't have much choice there, as there are a lot of former HPE people working under Unisys now. 

If you ask enough people in our organization, we would tell you that we wish that divestiture hadn't happened. They should have kept it in-house.

When we did the first refresh in our main facility, we were able to bring in as much as we did at once. We stood it all up at once. Then, being able to do the migrations off for our old stuff, that went faster than it otherwise would have. There was no way in the legacy capital expense outright purchase model that we would've brought all that stuff in that fast. We would not have gotten that approval.

If you are looking to turn some of your capital expense into operational expense, this allows you to do it. It is a good idea.

We're an HPE shop. We have been since before I started there.

Something that burned us upfront was underestimating some of the work involved. Once, we got some of the hardware in, then there was some other back-end stuff that had to happen. We buried a couple of people in a backlog because we were moving so fast. We had to slow ourselves down a little to allow that backlog to catch up.

In terms of refreshing the gear, we are able to do it a lot faster. With the four-year cycle that we are doing on GreenLake, and at end of this year, we are starting the second cycle, which has always been the goal, but we have never really been able to hit it. Even now, I still have some hardware out there which is seven to eight years old that I would love to get rid of. Some are easier than others, but we have done quite well over the last four years with shuffling a lot of the older stuff out.

We're working in a new data center in Virginia and are using it for our primary storage and compute. We're a cloud services provider and we provide co-location and disaster recovery. We're using it on the cloud services and the disaster recovery sides of the business.

We haven't had great success with it. Both times that we've had to increase the hardware, the deployment took way longer than expected. In addition, we haven't yet gotten to a use point where the cost is below what it would cost us to provision the same set of services on HPE hardware outside of the GreenLake service.

In terms of our capacity management efforts, it's actually provided us too much capacity at this point in time, and we're working to try to fill that capacity. We're currently over-provisioned in that service.

It hasn't increased the flexibility of our IT operations because in that platform, on that set of racks, we're not able to add in different solutions that we would normally buy internally and deploy on that set of gear. So we have to create a separate set of gear for anything extra that we want to add into the environment.

I think the solution has cost us money. It hasn't decreased the time it takes to deploy IT projects.

The most valuable feature is the ability to grow into a lower price point at some point in time.

Also, there's more visibility into the solution than we have in some of the other areas, but not significantly so.

I feel like I'm paying for 20 percent that I'm not using, because it's always over-provisioned by at least 20 percent or a minimum commit of 80 percent. Once you get up above that, you're looking at provisioning more and then that increases it again. I would like some flexibility on pricing at those lower bands, and not having such a high commit-percentage, if that's economically feasible.

There is room for improvement in the ability to scale down without a significant increase in cost. Fulfillment of the hardware in a more timely manner is also an issue.

We solely use HPE hardware across our organization, so I don't know that its stability is different than any of the others. We have more experience with some of the other hardware - 3PAR, c7000, the blades, etc. - so we're more familiar with them. We've had some issues with trying to configure the Nimble correctly for a few of our applications that we're working on, but support has been pretty good in working with us to get through those.

In terms of scalability it's tough for us. Right now, it's actually counterproductive for our scalability. I'm hoping that once we reach the upper band in our contract that it will provide us some scalability there.

Technical support has been really good.

We had heard about GreenLake at conferences and thought it might be an opportunity for us to use more HPE resources. We chose to try it at this particular deployment, versus our normal, self-provisioning of the equipment. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We deployed it ourselves.

We have not seen ROI.

Right now we're paying about $180,000 per year.

HPE is our shortlist.

My advice would depend on what the application is. In our particular application, it hasn't been helpful thus far. If you have an application where you're going to be at a price point, right out of the gate, which makes it cost-effective and you're only going to continue to grow at a steady pace, then I think this solution makes sense. But if you're starting at the very bottom of the scale, where the price point is high and you're not going to use the services that come bundled with the products, then it might not be as cost-effective as it could be.

I would rate the service at three out of ten, simply because of the costs associated with it. I could implement what we have now at a third of the cost.