HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The features I like are the reliability, the cost, and support. It is quite an expensive kit, but the support we get and the reliability is what we pay for, and that's important to us.

The scalability has improved our organization. We can add to it, and we can future-proof it in that regard. It's flexible in that we can grow it or shrink it as our business demands require. It allows us to be flexible. Since we do have peaks and troughs in our data storage, we need to be able to either add, take stuff away, move things around for projects, and that's just what they can provide.

I would like to see, obviously, regular disks and more storage on them. I would like to be able to fit more data into the same amount of space or smaller. That's always where disk storage is going to go. They continue to innovate on the disks, bigger capacity disks in the same amount of space so we can get more storage for the same amount of room of physical space.

The stability is excellent. It has been very stable, and we do give the storage quite a good workout. It's busy all the time, most of the day, 24/7, most of the weekends. Our account manager says it's one of the most worked three-part storage devices he's seen. We do use it a lot. It's been perfectly stable, and we have, “touch wood”, not had any particular bother with it.

We absolutely have used tech support, and they have been great. They're very good. Luckily we haven't had many issues, but when we do, we contact tech support. They're usually very good at getting back to us, because it's automated tech support. They will actually call us, and tell us there's a problem before we even notice it ourselves.

We were using an HPE product, and that basically folded, as it got quite old. We went and looked around in the market for what is current, and HPE came along and said, "We can do that. Our replacement for this unit is now the HPE one, and this is what we recommend." We got some consultancy from them just to go through our requirements and our needs. They did lot of graphs and showed that it was right for us. It was recommended to us by them.

We considered Dell before HPE. We chose HPE due to its reputation. We had a relationship with HPE previously, and actually they were able to come in and recommend, and actually spend time with us to sit down and ask what our needs were, analyze, project and give us both sets of figures of what we need, how quickly to fulfill them, how long it would take, and that sort of thing. They were able to come in and do this. Other vendors really just tell us, "Here's what you'd like." That certainly won't do as we need to have some details in pre-sales. This solution does fit our needs very well. It is flexible, and we get good support with it. It's stable, and it works, and so I'm happy with it.

When looking for a vendor, look for reliability, backup, support, and reputation. It's got to be someone we know who has a good reputation in the industry. We do go with some newer sort of vendors as well, but we like HPE for their reputation. We know their stuff is good because we've been using them for years.

We're almost entirely HPE outside of the network stack, so it's nice to have one place to call for support.

When comparing the cost to the comparable EMC solution at the time that we purchased it, 3PAR was significantly cheaper.

It was almost 100% financial decision. They had similar performance, similar build specs, but the business relationship with HPE was much greater. EMC didn't put their best quote forward when we did our bake off, they came in and put in a really high bid. When they found out we were going to go with 3PAR based almost 100% on the cost, they came back and gave us a better bid, but it was a little bit late at that point.

The technical aspect really were comparable. The difference with the EMC product was in the way that they cashed to their flash. HP's is strictly tiered based on a optimization. The EMC product, could cash reads for any tier into the flash. There was a performance advantage there the I don't know that we would have gotten. However, it was enough to make the decision easy.

The performance that we get out of it.

We probably purchased too big an array for our needs. We're not even touching on the IOPs that it can do. That's been a great benefit; the support on the 3PAR has been really nice also.

It's very reliable and it was cost competitive with other arrays at the time that we purchased it.

Support in the European region. These are things we are addressing with HPE and they're fixing already, but that's been the biggest problem - getting support engineers scheduled for maintenance, replacing a drive, doing an upgrade. We've had scheduling problems with them. We had one instance where the engineer just didn't show up with no excuse.

Our support in the US has been phenomenal, no issues at all. But the European support was poor initially.

Nothing bad to say about 3PAR. It's been completely reliable. There's always going to be drive failures with any piece of spinning disc. Those are expected and they've been treated, at least in the US region, with really rapid response times, really great support. Support for upgrades has been painless. HPE is very proactive about doing that - they'll let us know that there's a new version and they'd like to upgrade the array. It's fantastic.

It's getting better in Europe, but it could still stand to improve.

I would recommend it over anything. It's a great array; the cost was very competitive; the performance is great.

We have a HP 3PAR C7200 storage array with a small portion of it being Flash. Even though it's a small percentage of our total SANs usable capacity, the applications that we run off it have greatly exceeded our expectations. I can't even fathom the performance increase of having an all-Flash array. Using HP's Adaptive Optimization including the Flash storage, it's great to see if one of our applications is under heavy stress to see it move to the Flash to increase performance for the end users. This, compared to our last standard SAN setup, has easily increased the performance and accessibility of our on-site applications ten-fold.

For the end users: This allows us to deliver content to them faster, access their files faster, load apps quicker, and increase stability of them, all to boot! This was a very imperative piece as we have an extraordinary first year of full 1-to-1.

For us (IT): Having the access to this technology has been amazing! This allows us to do so much with our virtual infrastructure. We can monitor things more accurately, move things around with no performance decrease, and, let's be honest, seeing all those IOPs is just fun!

Overall, having the Flash availability with a HP 3PAR Storage setup has been night and day from our last solution, and I can't wait to really start pushing it to it's true limits.

• 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. 
• The overall speed has been great as well. 
• Create vVols and assigning them to the hosts is streamlined and easy. 
• The ability to delegate and control every aspect of the storage array has allowed us to split the workload safely. 
• The 3PAR StoreServ Management console has also given the console the fresh look that it really needed. 
• Also, their support has been fantastic every time I have had a question or a problem they have been able to help me every time the first time.

The management console could use some work. All the functionality is there, of course, but it can be hard to find some features or do certain tasks. I feel like to get to some features, I need to dig through many sub-menus then tabs in those sub-menus to change a simple thing. Their StoreServ Console (optional) Makes this better, but it still isn't perfect. I would love to see some better help documentation on the StoreServ console other than just writing out the tooltips in a document. I would also like an easier way to re-assign the shelf numbers as they cannot be set statically at least in the build I'm using.

I would like to see more integration with VMware as the plugin currently is good, but I would love to see a ton more functionality with it such as adaptive monitoring. I haven't used HP's OneView software, but I would really like to see something like that built-in with the base product other than purchasing this at an additional cost just to manage all my HP products in one place. I'd also love it if HP started branching out and integrating some of the more well-known solutions into their products by default, such as Veeam and SRM. I know that from a sales point, that might not be the most revenue-generating mood, but it would definitely make a lot of SysAdmins happy.

We have a large population of students and we have gone full one-to-one this year. We are striving to deliver content to them as seamlessly as possible to encourage a learning environment where they can get to everything they need without having to think about it. This can be quite a challenge just by the sheer diverse volume of data that the students use. Everyday is a new challenge that we are more than happy to tackle head-on.

The most valuable features of the HP 3PAR solution for us I would have to say would be around thin provisioning and being able to provision big and then see what the utilization is like. And ultimately, the biggest thing, if you could draw a line from all of these features here down to one common thing, it's really the ability to change your mind. Now, as a service provider, you have to be able to change your mind, because your customers will, and if your customers change their mind and you can't, then you're kind of backed into a corner. So, you know, with the HP 3PAR and all of the dynamic-ness of that, you're able to change your mind at pretty much every layer of the technology stack.

So a key example of how the HP 3PAR has benefited our organization would certainly be from a reputation point of view. HP 3PAR is globally well known as a very high end, if not the best storage offering. But in particular, again, drawing back to that performance requirement it also has a reputation around performance and it does deliver on promise. We make big promises to our clients around performance, we have to be able to back that up with a technology that will actually support that initiative.

In the future releases of 3PAR, in terms of the overall roadmap, now I have been to the CDN booth and obviously can't say too much about that. But, HP's roadmap tends to align very well with our expected roadmap, for lack of a better term. And in terms of where we're wanting to see the technology go in order to accommodate the needs of our clients HP has a roadmap that aligns very well with that. So I would say I don't have any particular requirements that I don't think HP already have on their roadmap without saying what they are.

The stability of 3PAR is unquestionable. From day one, we had had not to bag the LeftHand product set, because it has a place in the market, but we had had some issues with that when we really pushed it probably too far. So when we moved to 3PAR as soon as that became apparent, and never looked back. You know, there's been no issues with 3PAR throughout the way through, and I say, the ability to change your mind and change your rate levels, change the way you're deploying the storage, that means that you don't have to break it just to make it what you want it to be.

So the scalability of 3PAR, bearing in mind we operate cloud platforms in New Zealand is far beyond what we need because our market is fairly small, and so being able to scale to multiple petabytes on a single SAN is great to know that it can do that, but it's not something we've had to worry about in terms of an overall capacity limit.

We engage quite heavily with HPTS, as we call technical support, and when it comes to implementing new technologies or birthing a new 3PAR, then we don't do that alone. We work closely with HP to make sure that it's all done according to best practice.

So before we went down the road of looking at the HP 3PAR, we were using another HP product, LeftHand, which was doing the job fine, but as we started to scale and started to see the demands of the client base that we were attracting, we knew we needed to make a change.

So prior to the HP 3PAR, we were using LeftHand products. That was really local disc in the servers themselves, which doesn't scale particularly well, certainly not back when we started, there was not a concept of a virtual SAN.

The initial setup of the 3PAR environments, I would say is very straightforward, when it comes to a new technology. Not so much now, because we have five 3PARs in play. But when our first 3PAR arrived, we spent a month trying to break it, and we do that with any new technology that we're not comfortable with and not yet confident in terms of our own use of the product. And so getting that implemented and trying to break it for a month, you know, we couldn't break it, and so that was good. But that's kind of our model.

Other than HP, we've been talking to, I wouldn't say working with, but we've been talking to both Cisco and Dell, more so with Dell over the years. But we've really failed to engage to the level that we have with HP. HP have always been incredibly engaging, incredibly communicative, with regards to not only the product sets that are available, where they're going. And the entire ecosystem around these product sets is really what adds to the ultimate value. Anybody can buy a hard drive and stick it in a machine, but, you know, being able to support that long term, understand where that technology needs to go, and then get it there.

So most recently, we have implemented the all flash or the entire flash-based 3PAR 7450, and the roadmap towards making that decision was really around performance. We've always kept a couple of keywords close to our heart with relation to our branding, and performance is one of those, quality being the other. And so the all flash environment has enabled us to deliver on promise with regards to performance.

Our primary use case of this solution is to store all share market data. It's a depository system and we store the share market data and transactions in the central repository. This solution is deployed on-premises. 

We use all the features, but some of the most valuable are the replication, priority optimization, provisioning, and deduplication. There are a lot of good features in this product. 

The GUI interface could be improved. I have been having trouble with one issue in particular. If you look at the DC and DR, if there is a communication break and the link went down—so the data is not replicating from DC to DR—there is no way to find out how much data is ready for transmission. Only the size of the data that needs to be transferred after the link comes up. If the firewall link is down, there is no way of seeing how much data is waiting to be transferred. This is a weak point of 3PAR. 

I have been using 3PAR for five years. 

This solution is stable and reliable. It has good performance and we have a team of three to monitor the 3PAR on a daily basis. The required technology is smarter, so in terms of on-site utilization, it's very good. 

This solution is scalable. If I need more storage, they can just plug in to add it. I haven't faced this issue yet, but it seems like an easy process. I believe 3PAR is most suitable for small or medium sized companies. 

HPE's technical support is very good, compared to other vendors. I appreciate their support. 

The initial setup process is simple and straightforward. The HPE team handled most of it, but we take care of the day-to-day monitoring. If I test an issue and communicate with their team, they provide online support. If we need physical hardware, they provide the physical hardware. 

The HPE partner team helped us with deployment. 

I'm not sure on the pricing of this product because a different team handled that. I'm on the engineering team, so I handle the maintenance and those sorts of operations. 

I rate 3PAR a nine out of ten. Maybe there are better storage options, but from my experience 3PAR's performance is better than the other storage solutions I have used. The market has other big storage options, but I don't have experience in those. As of now, we are satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others. 

We have two use cases: 

1. We use it with our internal applications, so for internal use. 
2. We are provider of national research computing infrastructure. Therefore, we are using it out there with all our systems.

There are not many mission critical applications or processes that we run on 3PAR. The mission critical applications are usually the ones for internal university purposes, like ERP systems. Our research systems are not a mission critical since our researchers can run their computing again in a week. 

If it runs, and you don't know about it, that is the best thing that you can have in IT infrastructure. This is what 3PAR does for us.

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything. I see this as a piece of hardware, which I don't want see and don't want to care about. I want some AI over it, not because I want to fire all my team, but what I want my team working on is definitely not to take care of our hardware.

It has basically never failed. It is a very stable thing in our environment. We don't have such experience with the other things that we have.

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

We are just a customer, who bought a solution and are running it. We don't really do much about it. From what I know, the scalability should be okay. Generally, it was one of the reasons why we purchased 3PAR, because we believed we will grow, etc. However, it is difficult in the public sector if you can't do an RFP for a specific product. So, you need to live with whatever you buy or whatever is the best combination on the market. 

We haven't really purchase any more 3PARs after our initial buy, and that was a few years ago.

I have never used the technical support, but my team is okay with it. At the time when we implemented 3PAR into our environment, we really needed some help. We had some issues, which were mostly on our side, but my team was very satisfied with the support.

We previously used a number of small servers with disks attached to it, distributed all over to data centers. This was absolutely not effective and terrible.

We had quite obsolete infrastructure. We were thinking about whether we should just upgrade it a little bit or if we should take a different path. At that time, a few years ago, 3PAR for us was a change to a very different type of storage. Today, I would say that it is standard. However, at that time, it was a change. We wanted to improve and start doing things differently. In general, at the time, 3PAR was from today's perspective, like implementing AI over our whole infrastructure. It was a giant leap forward.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't need any complex preparation or changing a lot of things in our environment to integrated it. It was quite straightforward. Bringing books and bringing it into the lab in a few days, then everything was migrated. It was very easy.

We had a reseller helping us implement it, then we took over. The experience with our Czech reseller was great. 

We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying.

3PAR has increased your performance. At the time that we purchased 3PAR, it was much more powerful than any of our previous storage.

3PAR has helped our company reduce the time to deployment by 60 percent. It is easier than before.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We did evaluate other vendors originally. We looked at Dell EMC and all the competitors in the market. We chose HPE because they had the best technology and performance.

We have had a very good experience with 3PAR, so we will probably not be looking at different vendors or solutions.

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

We do use the Memory-Drive Flash. We don't have any problems with latency anymore that we had eons ago. However, I can't really tell you from a technical perspective if it was from implementing 3PAR or something else.

We do not use InfoSight predictive analytics yet, but I would like to.

The biggest lesson learned is 3PAR is good, and I want it for future. Let us find a way how to do it. It was a giant leap in technology at the time that we purchased it, and I would like to do the same next time, which will be very close. While I wouldn't say not to buy a 3PAR again, we will need a new technology that will do the giant leap forward again. We need a big step once every few years instead of doing granular steps every year.

Our primary cases for HPE 3PAR Flash Storage 7000 are: 

• Transport sector
• Four nodes, 1000 virtual machines
• Entire rack solution
• Partially flash
• 350TB (dense IO).

The bad news: In its initial firmware, both four-node clusters were locked down. The downtime was 17hrs, and once patched, it worked like a charm — no outage for two years. Whereas, IBM SVC had three outages (node crashes) with impact in the 2 yrs before

• Four-node performance
• No split IO groups as on IBM SVC clusters.
• Easy tiering (with a small % of cache) did a good job in a large scale environment of 1000 VMs on 350TB external Monitoring, giving a detailed dashboard. A nicely virtual appliance for remote callout support to HPE services.

• Made on three times a price comparison, and only on one occurrence, the largest enterprise infrastructure of all three was HPE able to compete with its competitors.
• It's way too expensive for the SMB market.
• HPE care packs like datacenter/enterprise provide highly automated reports and reviews.
• I liked the periodic SAN performance reviews which are highly detailed reports in about 100 pages and provide recommendations and a final score. However, the price is outrageous!

The ease of management is its most valuable feature. It is so much easier to manage storage on a 3PAR array than anything that we have had before. 

I really love the thin provisioning part of it. It has saved us tremendously by being able to provide storage to our Windows guys. They think that they have a terabyte and are happy about it, but they do not use anywhere near that, so it does not chew up space on the array, which is nice. 

Being able to snapshot things for backup purposes has been key. We do that on our databases four times a day. 

We are an all-flash environment, which is really good. One thing that I would like to see is the ability to take storage on 3PAR array and copy it up to the cloud, any type of cloud I want, e.g., Azure, AWS, etc. HPE has StoreOnce CloudBank integration, but I would like to see a little bit more integration from a cloud perspective. In this way, I would have some more flexibility to do more with data, how to store it, and where I have it.

Stability has been awesome. We have a couple of 8440s that have been in production now for about a year and a half with no hiccups; nothing. Its performance has been steady, very good, and it stays up. 

That is why we had P9500s and Symmetrix in the day, because they just stayed up, and they just always worked. 3PAR has been every bit as reliable and available as those systems.

We are in a mid-size company, and the 8000 series has been good. We are not utilizing all of it, so we have the ability to expand. We have a project right now that we are looking at expanding, so from that standpoint it is good. 

You can get way into the 20000 series and just cut into petabytes of data out there. I like that it moves from entry level to as high as you need to go.

Support has been very good. Upgrade-wise, we have had HPE guys call us up, and say, "You need to apply this firmware. We need to get you to this level." Then, we get it scheduled.

They are on time and work with us when we need to get anything done. They get things done, so we do not have to do them, which is awesome. 

I have gone the gamut of old EMC arrays, Clarion arrays, and XP arrays, and 3PAR is just so simple. 

Initial setup was straightforward. It is not a hard array to set up and install. Even though we had purchased installation, this was back when we had the previous 3PAR for a performance tool. I got it and set it up.

I installed 3PAR on the server, and it was not hard to do. 

HPE called us up and said, "Here are the things that you can do with this." I replied, "I already went through all of that." They said, "Okay."

They are very good, and I like the product.