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HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VMAX [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (2nd), All-Flash Storage (10th)
VMAX [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Hybrid Tech
Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support
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.
Ali Yazıcı - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Service Manager at Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank
Good interface that is customizable, and the technical support is good
Our primary use of this product is for our core banking servers over FC It is a high end storage, minimal downtime, reliable, good performance, get speedy support when we need. The user interface is good, and it is also customizable. snap and clone operations easy.  Stability and availability…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray is perfect; if we have some trouble or we need to change something, we ask for support and they are helpful and answer immediately."
"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"In Pure Storage FlashArray, the dedupe and compression are excellent, and performance is good too."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability."
"The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The overall quality of the product is fantastic. Advanced Optimization is one of the best features I never thought I needed until I actually used it and saw it in action."
"3PAR stability has been there since day one, and it's one of the platforms that has just been a joy to work with because it changed the way that we are able to protect our entire environment."
"We went to an Active-Active data center, set it up to where both data centers are separate, but they act as one. We can have workloads at either side at any given time, and it is all based on the Peer Persistence architecture."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the native full mesh (multi-pathing)."
"Scalability, because our customer is fast growing and our solution should be able to start very small and grow very quickly."
"It is easy to use and understand. It is also very stable."
"We wanted to make sure that we found the balance of the experience, cost, supportability for a small team to do this and 3PAR came out ahead with that."
"You’re essentially setting yourself up for success with a product like 3PAR."
"VMAX3 is our main system for storage. All our systems and all our virtualizations are connected to it. In terms of expanding it, we are replacing it with a new system, the PowerMax 2000. So our current VMAX3 platform will be decommissioned soon. We are switching to PowerMax 2000 because we are looking for improved performance. We see it as the best fit for our requirements in terms of the performance and the overall cost."
"If someone is looking for a product that can give the best performance under heavy load then this is the product they must go for."
"VMAX is more scalable and has better performance (gives more IOPS, more front end ports...)."
"It is a high end storage, minimal downtime, reliable, good performance, get speedy support when we need."
"We have been able to present storage from the VMAX to hosts without any problems."
"We have never had a bad experience with it because we never had failures. It has good data availability and the performance is also okay."
"This product has enabled dynamic allocation of disk resources, and at the same time, improved the data access speed and application performance by a large extent."
"VMAX is a rock solid foundation to deploy applications which cannot incur a disruption of service."
 

Cons

"The price of this solution is high and should be lowered."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"Support has gone down a little bit in the past few years."
"Technical support was average, and bad handling some incidents."
"In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyper-converged. They are working that way with Greenlake and integrating their own "build your own" expansion environment within 3PAR."
"We do see room for improvement, especially in regard to expanding the defined storage areas."
"I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team."
"The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability."
"The new web-based interface for reports is great for some parts of the monitoring, but for day-to-day usage, it’s not very user-friendly."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ could have better integration into the cloud and converged infrastructure."
"The pricing is a bit expensive. That is the reason we are now currently we are looking for other solutions. That's the reason we are looking at AFF and Unity. We are also considering PowerStore."
"It is still expensive."
"I'm always interested in ways we can scale out and avoid monolithic migrations from one array to another every four to five years."
"Stability and availability should be improved."
"We are trying to scale a vintage VMAX. As far as increasing capacity, it is a real nightmare."
"The way you configure larger size volumes needs improvement."
"I'd like to see improvements where we can scale out an existing array and remove older controllers\drives\etc., within the same subsystem."
"I would like to see support for high-availability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray is reasonable."
"We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"The price was more favorable than Dell EMC."
"The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"For the entire six node cluster and the two 7200 units plus the Brocade Fibre switches, we financed it through HPE Financial. It was $850,000. We leased that and paid it off in October of 2018."
"The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny."
"It is fairly inexpensive to scale."
"It makes for less administrative overhead."
"This licensing fees for this solution are merged with all of our HP annual costs, which in total are a couple hundred thousand dollars."
"This product is quite expensive and in addition, we subscribe to 24/7 support with a four-hour response time."
"We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward."
"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Our licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis."
"There are additional costs to the standard licensing fee, and it just depends on the package."
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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
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise74
Large Enterprise170
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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 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.
What needs improvement with HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
I have no specific ideas for improvement at present. We just need to verify whether our current virtual server setup ...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
Symmetrix VMAX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, Kindred Healthcare, Cosentry, Sumitomo Life Insurance Company, Shriners, BZWBK
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: September 2026.
913,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.