Item: Huawei OceanStor
Rating: 9
Author: Zakarieya Abderoef

Overall Satisfaction with Huawei OceanStor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Huawei OceanStor is being used within the data centre to run mission-critical workloads i.e. SAP ECC6 database and application servers. The system being deployed in the data centre SAN environment is the Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash storage system, which has been configured with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) disks for maximum performance. Since this is an all-flash system, it addresses performance, reliability, and availability features.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The Huawei OceanStor Dorado All Flash NVMe storage array provides maximum performance.
The OceanStor Dorado is ideally suited for use with databases, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Virtual Machines, and file server environments.
The capital and maintenance costs were very competitive for a similar storage system at other storage vendors.

Cons

The licensing needs to be explained better. There is not much information about how the licensing works for the OceanStor, and what I found was a vague summary and not clearly explained. This became a problem when we deployed the system and realized we needed an additional migration license.

Return on Investment

OceanStor Dorado All Flash Small footprint saving data centre rack space
Maximum Return on Investment since you can order this with extended Hi-Care or Co-Care maintenance and support.
OceanStor Dorado All Flash uses less power than traditional spinning disks, thus saving you on power costs.

Alternatives Considered

IBM XIV, IBM Spectrum Storage, IBM Storwize, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, Dell EMC Unity, Dell EMC Avamar, PowerProtect DD (formerly Dell EMC Data Domain), Dell EMC VMAX All Flash Storage, Cisco UCS B-Series, Cisco UCS C-Series, Cisco UCS E-Series and Western Digital SSD

The Huawei OceanStor product line is very broad and they offer a wide range of storage systems from entry-level for the small enterprise to high-end storage systems for those demanding workloads typically required at medium to large enterprises. Huawei OceanStor is very reliable with many software features at competitive costs when compared to other storage systems. Huawei OceanStor can easily integrate within the data centre as their system supports many operating systems, hypervisors, SAN switches etc. Another important point to note is that Huawei has made it known that they spend a substantial amount of their revenue in R&D and that is confirmed in the reliability of their products.

Support Rating

When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.

Key Insights

Do you think Huawei OceanStor delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Huawei OceanStor's feature set?

Yes

Did Huawei OceanStor live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Huawei OceanStor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Huawei OceanStor again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Hyper-V, Nutanix AOS, Veeam Backup & Replication, Azure Backup

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend the Huawei OceanStor, especially the Dorado All-Flash NVMe product line. There are many features and installation is quite simple, and it becomes even simpler if you deploy Huawei OceanStor DJ within your environment.

Huawei OceanStor Feature Ratings

Comments

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Huawei OceanStor Experience