HPE MSA vs. HPE StoreOnce

SME environments, those after quality and reliability. Price point is medium. Reliability better than the competition in our opinion. Ideally suited for smaller IT teams, needs little technical skill once setup and running. Start small and expand later, lands of options for increased storage space and configurations.

Incentivized

Vm backups are the fastest I've ever had with this unit for any backup software system. Agent backups are the fastest ever to this device too. Veeam supported HPE StoreOnce for file backups way back. However, we discovered you cannot do this for large network drive scenarios. So, we have to have a separate backup system for file based share backups. it would be great to resolve this at some point in the future. Also, replication of a primary SO to a DR SO works amazing now based on the 52x0 series HPE StoreOnce units. The older 5100 series just could not cut it to copy to another backup target fast enough for large data backup consumers.

Incentivized

• Reliability - Very reliable. Great uptime and few issues.
• Affordability - Great price/quality balance.
• Scaleability, aimed at SMEs this serves our 400 server, 4000 user base, 50 TB storage well.
• Support - HP quick and effective to sort out issues.

Incentivized

• We really like the deduplication feature of HPE StoreOnce. It helps reduce storage footprint by 1:3 to 1:10 depending on type of files being stored.
• It's easy to manage files on HPE StoreOnce servers using command line options.
• We use Veeam Backup Server software to manage our backups on HPE StoreOnce.

Incentivized

• Collecting support logs from the HPE MSA could be better. It takes a long time to collect logs, sometimes so long your login times out.
• The HPE MSA could have a better management GUI. The layout of the menu, having the navigation buttons all around the edges is odd. It would have been better if it was in just one location.
• The drive type and capacity options available can be better between the small form factor and the large form factor. We would have liked better options in the future.

Incentivized

• For fastest performance and best dedupe, ISV software supporting Catalyst required
• VTL capability requires more overhead and space due to aging policies, etc.
• Use of CIFS/SMB for backups is significantly slower than Catalyst.

Incentivized

It is a functioning Replication system for us and checks all the boxes that the auditors are looking for. Further, it is inexpensive and the storage we purchased was cheap. HP has a good reputation in the industry that plays into the decision also.

Incentivized

It just works and the support contract we have is good enough for the company needs

Incentivized

My team who are currently administering HPE StoreOnce do not come from a storage background. We still didn't had to struggle much configuring and using HPE StoreOnce. Of course, HPE team was very helpful in smooth technology transition. For critical errors, we already have phone home feature enabled and HPE support team has been excellent and their response time in dealing with technical errors/incidents.

Incentivized

We had couple of incidents so far and HPE support team was very proactive through the process until the incident was closed satisfactorily.

Incentivized

It was pretty smooth, at least smother that a Dell EMC Unity we set it up last week

Incentivized

The dual controller configuration of the HPE MSA trumps the Synology DiskStation's single controller configuration. For that alone, I would select the HPE MSA. Without that setup, any controller issue or firmware upgrade is disruptive to the systems the SAN is providing storage to. Furthermore, HPE's support is better than what Synology currently provides. The lack of phone support on Synology's part slows down the troubleshooting of issues compared to HPE. Furthermore, HPE's engineers are able to do a remote session and can work on the problems directly compared to Synology's support.

Incentivized

NetApp is a great product and very well established in market. But HPE StoreOnce features like scalability using disk based duplication that lowers the backup footprint. It is very well coupled with HPE Recovery Manager Central provides backup protection and backup efficiency. We were also offered a nice discount while choosing HPE StoreOnce.

Incentivized

• A positive ROI of the HPE MSA is the ability to configure the RAID set of the array to our requirements. We can maximize the storage capacity of the array improving our ROI.
• The flexibility of configuring the HPE MSA is another positive ROI. In our production environment, we can use a fiber channel switch while in our DR office none of that redundancy is required so we directly connected that MSA to our VMWare servers.
• HPE's support is another positive ROI. We have been able to connect with support right away to troubleshoot an issue. Part replacement is also excellent, ensuring our HPE MSA is not in a degraded state for long.
• The HPE MSA's architecture is rock solid, there have been minimal issues with the hardware, besides the rare time that an SFP has gone bad and needed to be replaced. We've had no issues that brought down the MSA.

Incentivized

• HPE StoreOnce doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge for day to day administration and management. This helps reducing IT support staff cost.
• It provides an amazing compaction ratio and saves you a lot on the storage side.

Incentivized