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Dell EqualLogic PS series vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell EqualLogic PS series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), All-Flash Storage (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of Dell EqualLogic PS series is 4.7%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 10.8%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ10.8%
Dell EqualLogic PS series4.7%
Other84.5%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

Khuram Ayyaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Executive at Virtual University
Has enabled uninterrupted access to educational platforms and simplified storage management
Dell EqualLogic PS series is easily scalable, and we can add extra boxes and storage. It was easy to deploy during COVID. Deploying Dell EqualLogic PS series is straightforward, with no complexity involved. Dell EqualLogic PS series is a good product. We did not experience any failures in the last six to seven years, and it is still running as our storage for offline data. There are snapshot capabilities in data protection available, but we did not use that feature because it consumes much space. We have only 150 terabytes of space and simply use it to create volumes without utilizing it for snapshots. We use thin provisioning in Dell EqualLogic PS series, but I did not explore that feature further.
CO
Information Systems & Security Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Ease of use in data center boosts resilience and infrastructure efficiency
I find the HPE 3PAR StoreServ valuable for its ease of use and resilience, which is beneficial. The main benefits I have seen from having HPE 3PAR StoreServ include its use at a small branch I managed for about three years with around 60 users. It operates effectively because it is an HPE product we use there. I have not experienced any significant issues besides occasional IT-related ones, such as local database problems. Since handing over the administration of the system to someone else and moving to another department, there have not been any issues. There are many features that exist but I haven't needed to try. Before moving out of that role in my organization, I knew it was a product I enjoyed working with for infrastructure purposes. After completing my new role, I intend to return to infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution has been working well overall."
"The solution can scale."
"Technical support, when we had access to it, was very good."
"I have been using Equallogic arrays for myself and my customers for over seven years now, and they continue to be my gold standard for SMB storage."
"You can always trust it. It is stable."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We were attracted by the flexibility of being able to put in a new shelf whenever we needed to, to expand."
"It has contributed to the implementation of virtualization and all its benefits."
"The solution, stability, and the performance work well for us."
"We were expecting 2:1 as a rule of thumb, but in reality, we ended up sitting at greater than 8:1 across the entire array with all compaction and reduction features factored in."
"The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent."
"The technical support has been fantastic."
"3PAR is a stable product; we have used the current device and an older version for more than seven years and although we had accidents with nodes and hard drives, it is high-availability storage and we never had a blackout and we have never been offline."
"We've seen a huge improvement in processing times and coming from a traditional SAN over to the HP 3PAR all flash solution, we saw about a 90 percent reduction in the processing time to some of the batch processors that we were running, which for us is very, very huge."
"If you design it right and implement it right, it's headache free. Just keep it there and it does what it's suppose to do."
"Its snapshot capability is the most valuable feature, because replicate our databases from production to nonproduction for development. This allows us to do it very quickly."
 

Cons

"Why is it not possible for both controllers to be simultaneously active (load balancing)?"
"It is at the end of support and no longer supported."
"The performance isn't as good as, for example, Nimble."
"One problem with this solution is that synchronous replication requires lots of duplicated space."
"If I need to have more space or more capacity, I need to replace the product. It would be ideal if we could scale without replacing the box itself."
"EqualLogic is really not going to be relevant in the marketplace too much longer."
"We are having some issues right now where some of the database operations are recovering and we find there are so many IOPS that EqualLogic fans cannot handle it."
"The solution does not scale well at all. It's a box, so we only have so much space to work with."
"The support on it is very limited for Direct Connect, and it just wasn't clear."
"We have about 1.2 petabytes of storage sitting on the 3PARs at the moment replicated; we'd really like to get into data compression and deduplication on those devices, but at this stage we can do that only on the SSD in the environment and not on the remaining storage."
"I'd like their technical support to be better."
"I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything."
"The one thing that we've always struggled with are the file sizes. HPE 3PAR still has a limit of 16 terabytes for VMDK limit and I think there is more to do in this aspect."
"I would like to see a little better integration with OneView and provisioning ESX Hosts, but other than that it meets our needs."
"We have used technical support. Usually, they're pretty good, but there's some room for improvement there."
"There were one or two small issues where it would have been more helpful to talk directly to a subject matter expert."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, the solution is cheap. I rate it a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"All features are out of the box. The license will be in the virtual, OS, or application layer."
"I didn't buy it. It was another person seven years ago. So, I don't really know, but all storage platforms cost a lot of money. It is probably in the mid-range, but you get what you pay for."
"​It is a fair price."
"Dell EqualLogic PS series can improve its scale-out feature. Sometimes the customer has a limited budget for storage expansion. When they want to expand their capacity, they need to buy a complete controller plus storage capacity, which sometimes is out of their budget. If Dell EqualLogic PS series support could scale up the environment in which only hard drive extension controllers should be supported, then customers can expand within a lower budget."
"It seemed expensive at first, but the durability lowered the cost of ownership dramatically over time."
"Initial packages include all upgrades and services."
"There are annual maintenance costs beyond the original licensing period."
"It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available."
"The tool’s price is higher compared to other products."
"We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice."
"I would like it to be cheaper."
"Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries."
"Take advantage of what HPE offers as far as professional services, and this will help you make the right decision."
"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
May 1, 2015
Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR
Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise74
Large Enterprise170
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell EqualLogic PS series?
The technical support for the solution was really good.
What needs improvement with Dell EqualLogic PS series?
I do not have anything in mind regarding new capabilities for Dell products at this time.
What is your primary use case for Dell EqualLogic PS series?
We are essentially a university, and we have deployed Dell EqualLogic PS series in our data centers to run our production sites, student portals, websites, our on-premises portal, and campus manage...
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspective, it is reliable, easy to set up, stable, and offers quality block storage. All...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
As a customer, I always prefer to have a lower price. Any customer will always ask for the cheaper price.
 

Also Known As

EqualLogic PS series
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FAW Foundry, AW Engineering, Unimat, eLongNet Information Technology, BDO Brasil, Odyssey Space Research
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell EqualLogic PS series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.