We're customers of HPE. We are also partners.

I updated the solution six months ago.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

On the software side of things, we’ve had issues with printers. We have a complicated situation on the user side of things too. We were able to get through the issues and limitations by using PowerShell scripting. Having IT resources in-house is a must for more complicated cases.

We're an HPE partner.

The solution is deployed as an OVS file. It's an appliance, It's installed as a virtual machine on VMware.

It's a very good solution.

Since it's free for the one terabyte, and it's a very stable solution, it's a good solution to try out. It just works.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If the networking wasn't so complicated, I would rate it higher.

StoreVirtual is a single loader converter. Normally, we will sell NetApp and they scale out some dispatch systems software storage. I know some customers are using the Veeam Manager when it is just a small amount of data and they are using the local hard disk and they want to share storage. We also use the Veeam edition. But now, most customers are more interested in the hyper-converged systems. But you know the cost of hyper-converged. The cost is not so low and customers can pay hundreds and thousands.

My advice is not to pay the full price. Compare it to NetApp ECS or the Lenovo or EMC Unity.

Normally, the customer is using it and we may tell them to continue using this solution, otherwise, we may let them change to another product because HPE is not the main solution for my company. My company is selling NetApp, EMC, Cisco - these are our main business.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this solution an eight. This is because it's very stable and it's easy to use. That's very good. But if you compare it with new technologies like Scalr, like hybrid solutions with SAP to cache to improvements, it may not be a good choice.

StoreVirtual isn't going to be a jack-rabbit - it isn't going to be the best performing SDS you find on the market, but it is most the most affordable and it suits many use cases.  

The management console could be a lot better, as it's got a little clunky feeling. It needs a lot of work on some parts of it, and on the integration with the components that I need inside of the vSphere environment and the KVM environment. It's there, but it's a little antiquated. There are some things coming out that I heard about at HPE Discover that will make my life a lot easier. I'm likely going to upgrade some of it in pieces again, so I don't lose my redundancy.

Check it out. The redundancy is there. The real thing is to make sure you know what you're buying. If you buy any VSA by any company out there, it's tied to a single piece of hardware. Now, you can move it around by doing storage vMotion, but if you have 3 TB, then you need 3 TB free somewhere else. That doesn't move fast, so the idea is to do redundancy and to build that in. To bake that in and build that into your costing model and to plan that. Either do it upfront or plan to do it eventually. That means a minimum of 2 nodes plus a fail over manager.

I would say, number one spend time to understand the product, to get the proper training or the people involved when you bring it in. Make sure it's the right product for what you're trying to solve. It's not a take care of any type of storage problem, there's no specific use cases that you want that it's good for.

Like I said, for the virtual environment, it does great for VMware, Hyper-V, whatever you want to use that type of storage for. Then it's just quick, easy storage if you need it for a file server, it would be good for that. You wouldn't want to use it for a cluster or a high I/O thing, but for the virtual environment and storage that's not dependent on high I/O, it would be a good fit.

My advice is to only use HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) for small-scale and/or per-project deployments via iSCSI (IPSAN) preferably on dedicated network between the host server and the storage systems.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when compared to other products, automatic tiering, availability, and disaster recovery are very good.

This solution also integrates well with the Recovery Management Center. We have a backup solution for VMware and Hyper-V, and it is simple to use with HPE StoreVirtaul.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would say with this particular solution, you're getting a lot when it comes in price point. You're getting a lot of features compared to some of the other products out there.

Ensure you have the right skills – general administration is straight forward but Virtual Connect configuration requires knowledge.

It would depend on who your hardware vendor is. As I stated, if you are an HP customer I would recommend using their hardware VSA Peer-Persistence, but if you are a non-HP customer then StoreVirtual is a reasonably good product.

LeftHand OS has been around forever, and it's a proven product, and it's easy to use.

For mission critical systems, I would only recommend this product when used in a mirrored configuration. Unlike other SAN systems where virtually everything in the device is redundant, the HP VSA is basically a server equipped with a bunch of hard disks and special software. Only the power supplies are redundant so there are many more single points of failure compared to other SANs. While other SAN vendors put the redundancy in the same device, the redundancy of the HP VSA is provided by virtue of the two independent devices. What is unique is that the two independent devices appear as a single storage system to the virtualization network and the switching between devices is done by the HP software.

It’s a solid product and you can roll these out like nothing. We have standardized our deployments to use these models. We will be re-evaluating soon and if we do I will miss the easy setup and GUI.

We use the solution on a daily basis. In general, we have about 350 individuals on it. They are largely a mix of engineers and architects.

The product we are currently using is at end-of-life, so it's not necessarily something I would recommend.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

It is the only product that provides High Availability without depending on OS multipath I/O. It looks like a single unit from the outside, thus there is no need for failover/failback because all nodes are active. It is like a metro train compared to a classic diesel train, meaning it has an engine in every car. Adding capacity means adding performance because you are adding controllers, too. We can’t say it is the fastest product on the planet, but it is definitely not slow. High Availability means synchronized replication over the network, adding a little latency but providing High Availability.

Since it is IP-based, it is important to make sure a network problem does not result in the collapse of storage network. It is best to have redundant switches that do not share the same network as applications. VLANS are definitely recommended.

Pay attention to the managers running and make sure your failover manager is not bound to any nodes. A failover manager needs to be alive for smaller clusters to survive complete hardware/network failures. Make sure there is no single point of failure that would result in multiple nodes going down.

StoreVirtual is mostly a mid-range to enterprise-level storage solution. In terms of performance, it's quite good. However, now we have some other products which are even better than HP itself. It's still a good solution. It's just a more competitive landscape.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had virtualizations and better scalability, I would rank it higher.

I think the one piece of advice is that HP has an absolutely enormous, very broad, very conclusive, comprehensive infrastructure portfolio. Study that with the HP specialists. Make sure that you find the right insertion point and then be very clear about your notion of growth. Be absolutely precise about what you believe your 12-24 months will look like, how they play out, and keep that vision visible to your HP-partner team up front.

The product's fine, but the fact it doesn't have dedicated management is a big thing to me.

Before implementing it and using it you should read the best practice documents as well as white papers upfront.

It is an excellent alternative to small hardware SANs if you already have the disk space on other servers and adequate network bandwidth for your level of disk activity. I can only comment on use within a vSphere environment, but in my experience, it is simply awesome. I would like to warn that before implementing a VSA, you should thoroughly evaluate your storage and network requirements. Good design of a VSA implementation is just as critical as good design of a hardware SAN.

I don't think we'd have any good reasons to go elsewhere. In fact we have done that. We were talking to a guy from city of Carson City, and he was having some server issues and so we hooked him up with our vendor, and they took him out of the Dells he had, and gave him some HPs and he's been very happy ever since.

Always follow best practice to be sure to connect in the best way to your VMware or Hyper-V-environment.

It fulfills all my requirements, the price is good, and it's scalable.

Be sure to look at your requirements, not just short-terms but also medium-to-long term. Make sure you invest only to the typical three- or five-year window to give yourself the flexibility to move into something else if necessary.

We always recommend this to our customers, but we only have one solution.

I would rate the solution as a seven (out of 10).

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.

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 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.

Spend some time reading StoreVirtual best practices and consider buying redundant solid switches, like HPE Aruba ProCurve 25xx, or better. Layer-3 is useful, but not mandatory thanks to split network support introduced in VSA 12.5.

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.

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 design of the solution is critical. If you undersize the hardware the performance will not be adequate. Also, setting the customer’s expectations is very important. StoreVirtual VSA is relatively slow for big block sequential things like migration and large file or directory copies. It is designed for day-to-day random IOPS with at least 50% read IO, typical of most virtual environments.

Talk to someone who knows and has implemented LeftHand and StoreVirtual VSA, if possible. Find an HPE Partner that has deployed this at least 3 or 4 times. If you choose to “roll your own” read the HPE content from 2014 and later then watch the StoreVirtual VSA “How To” video series on YouTube. Also check out Veeam Backup & Recovery’s StoreVirtual snapshot integration as well as HPE’s best kept secret, the StoreOnce VSA for virtualizing your disk-based backup and recovery.

This screenshot depicts a restore operation from an HPE StoreVirtual VSA snapshot of a primary storage, production VMFS volume. This can give you a Recovery Time Objective as low as 30 minutes on StoreVirtual VSA production volumes whereas recovery from a daily backup offers an RTO which can be up to 24 hours. Restores can be executed for SharePoint objects (including sites, libraries, documents, calendar items and lists), Exchange items (.edb files, mailboxes, calendar items, contacts and even individual messages), Active Directory objects (Groups, accounts and GPOs) as well as SQL record and tables. Oracle DB support is now available as well.

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

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

It’s a good, solid product. Make sure you get the HP care pack as you need it to access updates. If you can’t fit in your budget a hardware SAN, this is a good alternative.

When deciding on a vendor to go with we look at 

• service
• stability
• performance.

Explore it yourself. Talk to your colleagues, talk to the technicians, the experts.

We are an IT systems integrator. We have worked with Check Point and Sophos in the past. We are also evaluating Palo Alto for our customers. We are not just dealing with StoreVirtual on its own. 

This used to be a LeftHand Networks product, which HP acquired.

I would definitely recommend the solution to other organizations. I would suggest that they have to remember to benchmark it with respect to their infrastructure. It's not necessarily useful for everybody.

There are various acquisitions that HP has done in the storage space. One would have to see how the consolidation happens in the coming months or years.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

This is a good SAN solution.

You shouldn't buy it, and get HP MSA or something similar.