HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series comparison

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 3.0%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is 2.2%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support

Muhammad Saqib

System Engineer at Hybrid Tech

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.

Reliable and fast servers with good support

Mark Richmond

Chief Technology Officer at Next Level Communications

We use on-premise servers with Lenovo ThinkSystem. We set up Hyper-V and load multiple types of servers including a domain controller, a SQL Server, and application servers The solution provides fast servers that are reasonably priced. We set up RAID ten to ensure drive redundancy, leading to…

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"The solution is scalable."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"Any action we want to do with a Dell EMC product needs a license. But with 3PAR's converged solution, at least there is no need to purchase more licenses to get the all the features that we need. We can get basic and mid-range features without licenses."

"It's pretty stable and scalable. I think we've only had a couple of issues, three disk outages in six years."

"We also use dynamic optimization to go between tiers."

"The product lasts a very long time without having to be replaced. It's had a very long life."

"It is fast and stable. It is really helping us a lot in terms of data store, etc."

"They are using Ansible to automate the provisioning, so that simplifies the day-to-day operations."

"The intelligence around the solution is good."

"With the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, we can grow as required."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

"Ability to cluster two storages together with HA availability."

"The value we derive from using it is greater than other alternatives like HPE and Dell."

"The price of this solution is good."

"The FlexClone feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."

"One of the most valuable features of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is the snapshot feature."

"The servers are fast and affordable."

"The most valuable feature of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its ability to store data well."

"It has been a perfect fit for the workload that our customer is doing."

More Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series pros

Cons

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"It is on the expensive side."

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"The software layer has to improve."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"I would like to see a little better integration with OneView and provisioning ESX Hosts."

"The setup was complex from the perspective of the employees having to go through five days of training. If they simplified the administrative process of maintaining the unit, that would go a long way."

"I would like to see NVMe support, not only on the disk side, but also in the NVMe over Fibre Channel."

"It would also help if they integrate current technologies, newer technologies, and more efficient technologies, as time progresses. For example, integrate the fourth level of NAND devices."

"With 3PAR, there is remote copy software which isn't very good."

"...sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected."

"We've started to see an issue with the older models that we have. We've had issues where facilities would have unscheduled power outages or scheduled power outages and the 3PARs weren't able to come up successfully. We actually had an incident recently where it wiped data that we didn't anticipate would be wiped."

"We have had a few issues with it. We had our virtual environment lock up a few times on storage-based things. We think we have it sorted out, but maybe it came down to a configuration issue on it."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ cons

"I would rate the support of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series a four out of five."

"Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series could improve by having a snapshot feature. Additionally, there can be other features added to help restore the data faster."

"The solution needs a simpler licensing theme around the DM series. The problem is if you only need one of the features, you still have to buy the whole thing. The licensing needs to be more granular or flexible so you have the option to only license FlexCone or Inline Compression features."

"The tool's pricing is high."

"The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series was very hard to configure. Installation of the product was very hard. These are its areas for improvement."

"Many people do not realize that Lenovo has a storage solution, so better marketing from the vendor is needed."

"Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is not stable. If I have sold fifty boxes, about fifty percent of them experienced failure."

"The solution should change the licensing model and allow customers to choose features based on their requirements."

More Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It makes for less administrative overhead."

"This is not an expensive product but every time you add capacity to it, you need to pay for re-balancing."

"We purchased the solution as CapEx and we only pay support now. I find the pricing fantastic."

"We went with 3PAR because we have HP-UX systems. Since we already knew HP-UX, they offered us a significantly cheaper solution than the one that we had for storage."

"This product is quite expensive and in addition, we subscribe to 24/7 support with a four-hour response time."

"From a comparison of bang-for-the-buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best."

"Budget wise, 3PAR is a lot of money compared to other solutions, but what is in the 3PAR integration that customers are getting now from the Nimble and InfoSight acquisitions, it is worthwhile."

"Its price is a bit high for adding another tree, but when we purchased it, it was okay with us. We had compared it with EMC and other solutions, and it was okay at that point in time. Our storage has a lifespan of seven to eight years. When you purchase it, you need to keep a headroom of around 40% to 50%. After three to four years, you generally plan for an upgrade. The price is not so bad today for two years or so, and within a year, I might find that I have to upgrade or increase the storage. This usually happens when there is a radical change or a new application has come that is consuming a lot of data, but generally, there is a plan for the amount of data that we generate and the storage upgrade."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

"The solution is highly-priced."

"Lenovo offers two software tiers for the DM Series: basic and premium. If you need more features like the MetroCluster, you must buy the premium version. You can stick to the basic software if you don't need MetroCluster or features like asynchronous replication. That makes DM Series a little cheaper."

"The solution's pricing is similar to Dell and HPE."

"The price of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is good."

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

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…

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

73%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

22%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

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 perspectiv...

What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...

What do you like most about Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series?

The product’s quality of service guarantees the performance of each workload.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series?

There are extra expenses beyond the standard licensing fee for features such as replication and deduplication, which ...

What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series?

The deployment process of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is very complicated compared to previous GUI systems. Many cus...

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

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TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

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HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 22% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 21% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 4% of the time

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NetApp AFF vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

Compared 39% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

Compared 13% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

May 2025

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

All-Flash Storage

Download Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

ThinkSystem DM Series

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment. The solution is very easy to use. The product is very robust and offers very good performance.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

To meet enterprise storage requirements, ThinkSystem All-Flash DM Series systems provide high performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data management. DM Series runs on ONTAP data management software, which gives customers unified storage across block-and-file workloads. It accelerates your business while improving the efficiency, flexibility, and reliability of your IT operations.

Lenovo

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Information Not Available

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series