HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it on a project basis and based on the customer's requirements. We use the HPE systems in data centers with servers and virtual environments. This is the most common use case.

I like that it's stable. This is the reason why we're using these products. We work in the broadcast market, and stability is very important. HPE has global services, and that's also important. Dell and HPE are some big companies, and their solutions are robust and stable.

From an overall perspective, all the latest technologies can improve support and performance. This is very important for us.

As a company, we have been selling HPE 3PAR StoreServ for more than 24 years. Personally, I've been dealing with it for more than 18 years.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine.

Our primary use for this solution is data storage.

The increased throughput has allowed us to scale and maintain performance, or even have better performance.

In terms of the mission-critical applications that we run on this solution, our application is benefit adjudication.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its reliability.

The deduplication functionality is good, and the solution is fully redundant.

The InfoSight feature helps us with troubleshooting problems in our environment.

This solution is becoming dated.

This solution is very stable.

This is a scalable solution.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

This product is an improvement over what we had before. Our old solution, which was an HP Blade Server, was four years old. We wanted to switch to newer technology.

I was not part of the initial setup.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was good.

We have not seen ROI with this solution.

This licensing fees for this solution are merged with all of our HP annual costs, which in total are a couple hundred thousand dollars.

HP is the only company that we've ever dealt with, so we did not evaluate options by other vendors.

Using this solution has increased our system performance. We will continue to use HP products in the future, and this is a solution that is worth investing in.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case would be disaster recovery and uptime. 

The entire company and our fire pump division, for the most part, are run on this solution.

Getting rid of spinning media is our primary objective.

We had a major down five years ago where we actually lost our entire data center, which caused the company to go down for over 12 days. In that time, we bought and implemented a full 3PAR product to get us up and running. We were able to buy a smaller set of storage and invest in the actual technology to get our company back up and running. Then, we were able to buy a second 3PAR to allow us to set up a secondary data center and immediately replicate over to that and succeed in designing a DR strategy without having to relearn everything.

We don't use InfoSight for management. We use it to help us determine if we have our workloads in the wrong place or set up incorrectly.

My users are happier because the response time is there. We haven't really analyzed the true IOPs, or anything. We are just trying to give them a solid user experience.

The solution has improved our throughput. It has allowed our SQL databases and report servers to run at a much higher capacity. Reports which used to take the better part of a day can now run in under an hour.

• Uptime
• Technical support
• Speed

The solution’s deduplication functionality does a really nice job for us in that we are able to leverage the money in a more productive way.

We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly.

The upgrade in the firmware and software need improvement.

The user interface is still a little kludgy.

It is very stable. We have had no downtime since putting it in.

We have not found the maximum scalability yet. For what our initial purchase was, we have been able to grow over the past five years. It has not limited us in anyway with our initial investment.

When I can call and talk to somebody who does not repeat back the question I am asking and we can get to working on it, whether it takes an hour, a day, or a week, I have support for the solution. That is the most important thing for me.

We start of with the EVAs, and as the EVAs aged out, we were moving up. However, it was the EVA that failed on us and 3PAR was just the next, better solution for our scale of need.

The initial setup was complex only that we had never seen the solution before. There were some decisions that we didn’t understand the implications of in the beginning that we were able to redesign as the years of owning it allowed us to better understand what were being offered and how we could better utilize it.

We used Logicalis for the deployment. Our experience with them is wonderful. We appreciate them being our partners and implementing all of our solutions.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by about 60 to 70 percent, because I am able to spin up new systems within four to six hours, where it used to take me two to three days.

Think seriously about the very long-term: the three, four, and five-year costs of the solution. Will it still be there doing what your company needs? Do not just look at the initial capital outlay of year one.

We didn’t really look at anybody other than HPE because we wanted a one stop solution for a single technical support problem, and we knew from Locigalis and from our years with HPE that they would give us an enterprise class solution the first time out.

We like it so much that we are in the process of evaluating our next three to five year roadmap. We are planning to reinvest in the next generation of the systems.

Everything can always get better, but I’ve been very happy with it. I have not been called in during the middle of the night because of it. It is the right solution for the right people.

Biggest lesson learnt: You get what you pay for.

It is for mission critical storage. We use it to keep high uptime. We have two 3PAR systems that we leverage.

Its performance is good. We have a lot of applications that have high I/O, and 3PAR handles those with no problem.

It has improved uptime, as well as speed to delivery.

The uptime for mission critical, because have website services that provides 24/7 roadside support. Therefore, we treat it like it is an emergency service and always has to be up.

We would like to see smoother firmware upgrades going forward. We cannot afford to go down. When we went down, it was very painful for all our mission critical system. When we bought the system, we were under the impression that we were supposed to do firmware upgrades transparently, and on the fly with no impact, and it was very impacting. However, this is the only time that we had any issues.

The reliability has been good, except for upgrades. We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us. The proactive support help us with the set up.

We have no issues with scalability. We have been scaling up.

Support was good. They keep wanting us to always upgrade. However, with this failure that we had, it has made us nervous moving forward.

We had HPE EVAs. Then, we had to move away from EVAs, and the 3PARs were the next ones in the line.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days.

We had HPE support help us. 

We have seen ROI with the product. Overall, the 3PAR has been performing very well.

We looked a EMC before Dell purchased them. Cost is what made us decide on HPE, plus we had a relationship with HPE. We have always been a big HPE shop. Otherwise, the products were apples to apples.

Evaluate your needs. Prepare a cost comparison comparing it to what your needs are. Sometimes, you may not need a 3PAR if you are looking for secondary storage. You may want to go with Nimble. You need to look at what your requirements are, then make your determination that way.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

1. Price
2. Best of breed
3. Reliability.

It is our main point of storage for many applications. We use VMware so we have all the hosts connected to the 3PAR and that's the central point of storage for our whole organization. It's definitely critical, we can't live without it because that's where all the servers and data are hosted, on the 3PAR.

The interface to manage it could be improved. I was looking at OneView. Something basic like that should be available with the 3PAR. OneView has all the bells and whistles, all the features, but I think something basic and similar to that should be come with the 3PAR, at least for monitoring managing it.

It has definitly been very stable. We haven't had any issues with the 3PAR for years.

We believe it will meet our needs in the future. In fact, we already did an upgrade to the 3PAR, because another company was moving to the same location we use and we didn't have enough space. It was really easy, we just had to add more hard drives and another chassis. It was very straightforward to do the upgrade and scale the 3PAR.

It was a matter of hours. Once the chassis was installed, and then the upgrade was added to the chassis - adding the drive - it took a couple hours to do the whole thing.

The support is very good, they're generally very responsive. I haven't had any issues with them in terms of responding in a timely manner to any request that I have had.

We came from the EVA which was the previous version and this is, hands-down, way better. It has a smaller footprint and is actually quicker than the EVA.

There has definitely been a return on investment. Usually what we do is lease equipment. We are leasing the 3PAR for three years, but after the three years I know we are going to use it for longer. I don't think that we are going to use it for less than five years, so at the time I bought the support for five years, knowing that after the three years with the lease, we were going to buy it out. We are probably going to keep it for five to seven years.

It's our primary storage for our VMware environment. Performance has been excellent. We don't have multiple business needs. It's just focused on our virtual storage.

It has really improved performance. Before, we just had different storage devices based on different needs - so we didn't have to buy all-flash for everything. We couldn't do tiering. 3PAR was the first device that gave us that ability. It has really improved how we can streamline our storage purchases, as well as performance. It has done well.

Multi-tier storage was the primary reason that we bought it. I also love the interface that you use for administering it.

I haven't really thought about what a future release should contain. We've liked what 3PAR has so far.

It has been very stable. We've had very minor issues, but I've loved how HPE is proactive on letting us know. Usually, they let us know before we notice it ourselves and they already have a solution for us. It has been great that way.

We have used tech support a couple of times. Usually, it's just involving them in upgrading the service processor or upgrading the OS on the appliance. They have been really good.

The only drawback on it is they seem really busy. We get a critical notification when an important patch comes out, but sometimes it's a month before we can get this critical piece on because they just don't have time on their schedules to do it sooner.

Our main reason for switching was based on age. We weren't having major issues with our storage, but we try and replace things on a five-year schedule, at that level.

When selecting a vendor the biggest factor is a vendor we know. In the past, we had used one that seemed to be leading edge. I had a guy on the financial side that was pushing more for that. He really liked how that vendor didn't require you to purchase their drives. You could use off-the-shelf, enterprise-rated drives, so the costs of expanding the array seemed to be cheaper going that way. But after two years that company went belly-up and disappeared. This time, even though there were a couple other vendors he liked better - Nimble was actually one of them at the time, but they were still new enough that I pushed back - I said, "Nope. I'm going with somebody whose name I know."

The initial setup was very straightforward, very easy to do. It took a couple of hours. It wasn't very hard. We only had about seven servers that we had to connect to the three chassis, so it was very easy.

The biggest thing is we haven't had to buy multiple, different storage devices. That has reduced our costs significantly.

Nimble. At the time, Nimble wasn't an HPE company.

I would rate 3PAR a nine out of 10, primarily for a couple reasons. First, we've never had problems with it. It has been super stable, it has done everything that we've wanted it to do, and the performance is great. Second, I never give anything a 10, because there are always improvements that can be made.

Its ease of administration and reliability are the most valuable features.

It allowed us to put storage in remote facilities without purchasing a complete SAN solution.

There is a need for just cleaning up the administration page a little more and making it a little faster. We'd like to see a little more preemptive alerts for the usage and spikes.

Stability has been great, we haven't had any issues with it. The normal firmware patches come out to keep it up to date.

Scalability has been great. As we have needed to add storage, its just a matter of adding the disk and then, adding them to the bulk.

For the 3PAR the technical support has been great. They've been able to help us with any issues that we've had.

This was a net new solution for our remote facilities so we had nothing in place. This was something that we purchased and built out ourselves.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward, specifically for the way that we wanted to configure it. It was the ease of administration, setting up the pool, connecting it to the chassis and then, zoning it to our brocade fabric that made the setup straightforward.

We looked at Dell, EMC and Pure Storage. However, HPE was the only one that provided the flat SAN solution that we wanted for those remote locations.

The important factor while selecting a vendor is the range of products for the solution in terms of the issue that I'm trying to fill. Also, how the vendors support their products and the price are other crucial factors that we look at before selecting a vendor.

Make sure you're looking at everything that's out there and that 3PAR has come a long way.

The service and the support, as well as the technology. Yes, there are plenty of technical features that it offers, which we would expect from HPE. One of the reasons that we use HPE is because they tend to provide a quality product with all the latest advances in technology; so, its storage level, things like deduplication, all-flash array, real-time replication.

In addition to that, it's just as important that the ongoing support and monitoring of the system is proactive, and also the account management side. If we have particular challenges with either the specific design and build of the array or we need to upgrade, we feel like we have good support from the people who own our relationship to help guide us through that process.

It's a very critical technology component within our service offering. The storage sits central to everything else, such that it needs to be really robust. It needs to be highly available and it needs to be secure as well. All those things are very important. Because we're a service provider and we offer multitenancy, we need to be available to do that in a way such that we can host multiple clients’ data on the same storage system and in a secure fashion.

I suppose I’d like to see more security in terms of encryption on the device without it impacting performance. For all I know, that might exist. It’s something occasionally we get asked for. Our understanding has been that there are challenges around introducing inline encryption to a storage system because it increases the performance overhead.

Initially, some years ago, it missed a few important features. Until reasonably recently, one feature that was missing was the asynchronous real-time replication. In the last year or so, that's been introduced. I think that's taken too long. That was a little bit of a step back.

We've been using 3PAR for about five or six years.

Overall, touch wood, we've never had a major failure. We found it to be very, very stable. I think there are some challenges when it comes to upgrading the firmware on the system, and making those incremental updates. Apart from that, it's pretty rock solid.

I suppose that those types of highly scalable environments that perhaps larger service providers need; we don't really push the boundaries of the product in that sense, too much. There are some step changes you have to make, I suppose, as you grow, which you'd prefer not to. You have to invest, maybe, in more enclosures or those kind of things, whereas you'd like it to be a bit smoother.

From a financial point of view, which is probably the main challenge there, HPE are providing solutions for that in the terms of flexible capacity, where they help part share the financial responsibility and give you a more linear and smooth scaling of the system, and help you fund that.

Before 3PAR, we used the HPE EVA technology. We’ve always used HPE.

We have looked at EMC as an alternative to HPE 3PAR, but in terms of servers and storage, we are very much aligned with HPE and have been for over 20 years, so there are a lot of reasons why we use them.

One of the reasons we selected 3PAR was a similar reason that HP first acquired 3PAR: It's used by the world's biggest service and cloud providers. They're particularly focused on the multitenancy elements. It provides virtual domain technology that allows you to securely separate different customers' environments and where they store that data. You basically create multiple virtual SANs within a SAN. For a service provider who's doing multitenancy, clearly that's a big advantage for us.

The most important criteria when selecting 3PAR was the multitenancy piece, because we get a lot of questions from our clients around how we securely segment their data; if we can prove to them that our administrators can only log into their specific domain within that shared storage system and we can provide an audit trail.

Absolutely get the design of the system right. Work very closely with the right pre-sales technical teams. If you don't, it can be expensive to try and rectify that after you've bought it.