HPE MSA vs. Nexsan E-Series

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

• 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

• 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

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

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

• 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