HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It's primarily used as our primary SAN, storage area network. We store all sorts of data and VMs on that particular set of disks. It's for local data center usage. We have three data centers now, one in Atlanta, one in Dallas, one in Provo. We aren't doing any site to site replication. It's really just localized and we're trying to get to a point where we are actually doing site to site replication for DR and things of that nature.

The performance is good. We enjoy it. We like it.

The ease of management is what changed. Where we had, in simple terms, about an hour's worth of work, it has minimized that to maybe one-tenth, or something to that effect. Instead of us having to do a lot of steps to ensure that our environment is where it needs to be from a storage perspective, because of the ease of management, the UI differences, it has allowed us to manage our environment.

• The intuitiveness of the SAN itself, a lot of the built-in logic and functionality
• The tiering that it uses to determine what type of disk is best for the various types of workloads
• The automation that is built in 

We used to have EMC and we have found that it's a lot easier to manage.

Stability is very good. No issues thus far.

We haven't really had to scale it yet. We got a pretty large footprint initially. I think we've added some SSDs, some nearline disk. But from that perspective, no issues, no complaints.

Most of what we have had to engage support on has been, "Hey, how do we do this?" or, "Hey, I see this, but I don't understand. What can I do?" We've had pretty good experiences so far.

We had a set of vendors come in and do proofs of concept to help us better understand what options and features were available. Based upon what we found with HPE and 3PAR - I wasn't actually a part of the initial assessment, this is all stuff that I heard when I came on board - it just was the best solution for us at the time.

My team was involved in the initial setup and I managed the team. We had three resources that were a part of the setup, so they were onsite with the engineers. They got a week or so of training each. That was pretty much all we were a part of during the initial setup.

It was probably complicated because most of our team were used to EMC and it's a different kind of mindset. Even today, there are a lot of things that we haven't leveraged because we simply don't have the expertise. Over time, though, as we've used the tool, we've become more comfortable with it.

I don't know if we've done enough analysis to gauge ROI yet.

As far as I know, we had three vendors on our short-list: HPE, EMC, and a third vendor I don't recall at the moment.

Definitely learn the features of the product, what it takes to actually administer and manage it, what type of resource load is also required. It's not necessarily a tool that enables anyone who says, "Hey, we bought a SAN, go take it over." It really takes someone who has an understanding of and background in the tool, maybe even a little background with HPE. Just make sure you fully understand what you're getting into.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We've been fairly satisfied with the product, we haven't had any issues. It's definitely not something that you can easily jump into without that initial set of knowledge to help you understand how to use the tool. From our perspective, the way we went into it was backward. We bought and then learned, instead of learned and then bought. That has been a part of our hurdle but, overall, it has been a good product.

We use this for our highest tier level applications, our tier 0 through tier 2, so those are our mission critical and business essential type of applications. We want to make sure that we have the most critical things running on the best equipment that we have, and it is performing well right now. 

We have been working with 3PAR for almost three years now. We leased two arrays, struggling with it a bit. However, HPE did right by us and provided the resources (people, hardware, and additional storage) to do what we needed to do.

It has been reliable recently. In the past we did not have very good luck with it the first year or so that we owned it. Now that HPE has put the right resources, as well as the additional solid state drives, it has helped improve the performance and stability.

We are taking somewhat of a different approach. We are going more towards a hybrid solution in our data center. We are focusing more on developing our hyperconverged technology, and expanding it. 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.

Tech support is great, and that is for any of their team who has ever worked with us. They are willing and committed to making sure the customer is treated the way we need to be. For example, they were there for about a month or so when we were having calls every day with them. 

Initial setup was straightforward and fairly easy. The hard part was that we were on EMC VNX and trying to get those converted over into the HPE 3PAR, that process took awhile, along with scheduling downtime to get some of the physical stuff migrated over to the new device.

We ran into some struggles when we were trying to implement it. We have two production data centers running Active-Active. Our arrays did not like talking, reading, and writing to each other. Therefore, they were causing some hiccups, but after several phone calls and meetings with HPE reps, and some additional storage, we were able to get it working exactly where we needed it to.

I would have rated it higher, but there was a length of time that it took to resolve and get the product working the way we wanted it to. This happened on day 60 rather than day one.

Low latency storage for production trading systems.

We have multiple trading platforms which are trading different products regionally. The complexity comes when we are applying those trading algorithms globally. It has to be efficient in executing those trades, getting the right prices for the customers with the right spreads for the customer. You have every global FX currency that is present plus equities and future options. If you put all these things together, it gets quite complex.

We have been extremely happy with 3PAR so far.

We have more uptime, better trade times, and less hassle opening tickets with HPE.

• Remote Copy Groups
• Peer Persistence
• Redundancy
• Fairly easy user interface
• InfoSight

It's a very stable platform. It has been running pretty smoothly. It's one of those things where you set it and forget it. We tweak it here and there and we add things to it a little bit, but nothing crazy.

We haven't really had to add anything to it recently.

Technical support is very good. They're very prompt. They know about stuff before we do sometimes.

Last night was a perfect example. We had a problem last night and before we knew it, there was an email and then, about 15 minutes, later HPE Support sent another email saying don't worry about it, it corrected itself, nothing to worry about.

I would think we are seeing return on investment. I'm not sure of the exact numbers.

I've had a great experience with it and I would recommend it to a colleague.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's a very stable platform, it's very easy to learn how to use, has an easy user interface, tasks are very simple for an admin. As I said before, you set it up and you don't have to worry about it after that. With HPE you're in good hands.

The primary use case for 3PAR would be security video recording, and the security video is used for multiple purposes. In the healthcare environment, it will be used for real-time locating, patient wandering, infant abduction, asset tracking, and staff duress.

Taking it to the next level of healthcare, in pharmaceuticals one has to keep track of the production and movement of products and retain those records for a period of two years, as per federal regulations. So now, we need multiple levels of storage: immediate storage, short-term, and long-term, with the data being kept for up to two years.

In these scenarios, 3PAR is an ideal solution, and we've had a lot of success because of its capabilities and the different types of storage. You can mix SSDs with running drives and slower drives for longer-term storage, minimizing your cost but maximizing your storage. And you can also evolve storage as needed. You can increase the amount of storage by adding in drives on the fly, as the need arises. 3PAR provides a very ideal solution for some of my customers.

It gives organizations a single point of storage and single point of backup. I would call it a "single repository" of all your data with a good archiving system. Those are the biggest benefits I see.

There are lots of valuable features, so it's difficult to isolate a few. Number one, being able to provision drives on demand, as opposed to populating a whole stack of drives and not using them. In the latter scenario, you are locking your money in, you don't get a return on investment. On the fly, you can build up your storage as needed, so that's a very good feature. 

The second one is the mixture of drives. You can have SSD drives, fast disk drives, and slower drives, redundancy between drives, and hot-swappable drives on the SSDs, the faster hard drives, and the slower drives. This is a huge advantage as opposed to some other systems out there.

And of course, there are plugins and compatibility with the standard HPE hardware and it gives you a single panel to view the performance of your devices. From a single panel, I can see the performance of my service, my network, and my storage.

I would like to see them lower costs.

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. I believe at the moment we have third-level NAND load-leveling in place. I know these devices are around the corner. In the not too distant future, they should add these types of drives in there. That will give us much faster access. Hopefully, in time, we will replace the spinning hard drives with SSDs only, and the different types of SSDs.

Hot-swappable drives and built-in redundancy gives stability to the solution.

Being able to add drives on the fly gives the solution scalability.

Most of my projects are large P3 (public-private partnership) projects, where we do design, build, and maintenance of a facility for up to 20 to 25 years. We then return it to the client with another 10 years of service. So, upfront, I have to decide what solutions to put in there that will give me the minimal refresh over a longer period of time. I have to weigh the pros and cons of how much I spend upfront and what my maintenance cost will be over time. That's where the 3PAR solution is a good solution for me. It gives me fewer refreshes over a period of time and yet, at the end of the contract, I can still return it to the client with another 10 years of service.

My clients rely on me for evaluating vendors. One of the things I do is take the data sheets from multiple suppliers, compare them, see what is the best fit for the client and then, of course, use my own judgment and experience with my other clients on the given product. Fortunately, 3PAR has been a good product, so, I have no hesitation in recommending it and moving forward with it.

My involvement is primarily in the initial design of the system. I'm not involved with the actual setup. I will engage vendors recommended by HPE, or HPE-authorized vendors, to do the setup for me.

Go out, do your research first on the different products that are out there and make the judgment for yourself. The information is out there.

It is status quo from what we came from. We came from ViON and Hitachi. Part of that is our own problem. It is not as much HPE, as to how we are using it. We lifted and shifted, identically from one system to another.

It is flexible. We receive a lot of flexibility. We do at capacity on demand (COD), so we do not buy it upfront. They have a convenient capacity model that works well for us. HPE are a sub to the ones we buy it from, but they are the best sub that you could ask for. Whenever we have a problem, they come right onsite.

I would like to see more openness with other platforms. InfoSight synergy as a whole is great, if I own all HPE products. 

It is whoever gets me the best price and value. They win the contract. I need that flexibility to work with, for example, if Dell were to win my server contract or ViON were to run the storage, and I still had HPE servers. I need flexibility for interoperability across multiple platforms, not just HPE.

We had major issues in years one and two. 

Now, it is stable. In the beginning, we had some stability and reliability issues. Over the last three years, it has been very stable and reliable.

It is definitely scalable. We do not have any issues.

The tech support is great. If we have a problem, we literally will have boots on the ground with senior sales people, as well as the people to fix the problem, to help make sure we are taken care of.

It was complex for us, but we were literally migrating nine data centers across the globe, from product A to product B. We got in our way more than anyone else did. I can't judge how the product would be in a typical environment, since we are talking about 75 petabytes over nine data centers. It was a big project. 

The product is straightforward enough. If we were to do it as a new implementation, it would not be an issue.

We are happy with it. However, there is always room for improvement.

It is our primary storage. We use it with our VMware environment and all of our high performance applications are stored on it.

I work for an equipment distributor, but we have various business lines: everything from earth moving to electric power generation. These are very different needs. Then, we have our accounting system which is on there, plus business intelligence. All these are different types of workloads.

We purchase the 3PAR that has flash tier and we can migrate between the spinning disk and flash. It seems to work very well. It self-optimizes. I do not need to worry about it. It does its job. It is the self-driving car. You let it do its thing and it gets you where you need to go.

It has improved the ability of the executives to get proper insights, because our old storage was not fast enough. 

It is worry-free. I do not have to sit there and tend it, because I have a lot of other things that I have to do. Once you set it, you can forget it until you need to go and add more storage. It does its thing and you can go do your work.

3PAR has StoreOnce and replication. I would like it if they worked together. Or, if I had Nimble and put that either in DR or a primary cohesive management, but still use the cool features of 3PAR, that would be awesome.

We have never had a problem.

It is good.

I have done two different upgrades with them. That is all I have done because the stuff is all working. 

Technical support was very helpful. They scheduled around me, then when it was time, we just met in a HPE room, they did the upgrade, and I saw everything they did. Then when they were done, we left the room and I was done. I had my stuff back.

We are using Tableau, and it is a heavy thing, especially when you start calling in a lot of data sources. At our old storage, it was iSCSI connected and not adequately responsive. Therefore, they had to trim down the searches, and as a result, they were getting less insight. Now, they get everything they want and in a timely manner. 

We were using Dell EqualLogic. The load from our VMware (when we first put it in was fine) had gone from approximately 20 virtual machines to 150 virtual machines on the same storage. The storage load had increased so drastically that we just could not keep up with it, so we looked at different things. I mentioned 3PAR is an excellent enterprise cost product. 

We switched because noticed there was a lag in our previous storage, then went ahead and got 3PAR. 

We certainly have seen value and everybody is happy, including our executives. They are very glad that things are working smoothly and they can get good insights and information from Tableau.

It is a little more money, but it is worth it because it does it better.

We looked at Dell's competing product. This is prior to them buying EMC. We looked at Compellent. We also looked at EMC and Pure Storage. 

We bought EqualLogic before Dell bought it. After Dell bought it, some things changed. Now I am afraid of buying a small player that might get purchased and the story changes. Therefore, we thought HPE is a very stable partner. Nobody will buy HPE. We can go ahead and trust that it will be a stable, supported product for the foreseeable future.

It does a great job and I do not have to worry about it. It worries about itself. It tells me if there is something wrong.

Go to Houston, the executive briefing center, if you can. It is very good because you get a very deep dive and you can ask questions to obtain information. I did it and thought it was helpful.

I am with a healthcare system. It is for our electronic medical record.

It has been fantastic. No issues.

It is all a part of the GreenLake offering that we have, which includes monitoring, performance, and being able to accelerate delivery with the platform. This is most critical for us.

The most valuable features for me are the simple management of the platform and its performance.

It needs the addition of InfoSight, which is the most critical, along with predictive analytics and AI.

It has been rock solid for us.

It has been rock solid for us.

We have not used their technical support.

We took a look at what our current challenges were with just traditional compute and storage, and we were not fully integrated with those solutions. This solution allowed us to standardize on one platform and be able to deliver it in a quick way. That was all around the most beneficial.

It was straightforward, simple, and easy to set up, along with the OneView tools, for managing both compute and storage. It took a couple of days to set up, and two to three days to get familiar with the interface.

With our electronical health record, we are one of the few customers who are able to offer it as a service to other hospital systems. We are able to deliver these services to our customers, not just within our current business, but future businesses.

My recommendation would be to engage professional services, if you have questions. We sat down and went through a very extensive (six to eight month) evaluation from the components. We visited some labs and other sites. 

Take advantage of what HPE offers as far as professional services, and this will help you make the right decision.

We did evaluate other solutions. We chose 3PAR because of the converge system, the all in one solution.

It has been very beneficial for us.

The most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• Resiliency
• The data replication features
• An all-flash array 
• Performance.

It is for our IT. It is our kitchen sink; we use it for everything.

Our applications are now at least two to four times faster. It was a night and day change.

People walk up to us going, "This is just good. Thank you." It is nice for storage people to receive thanks instead of people saying, "Your stuff is slow."

Comparatively to everything else, the value proposition, the TCO, and the price make a big difference from all the other players who are in the same realm.

Better dedupe. It is hard for all the older generation arrays to put up dedupe because they tend to do the other stuff so much better. They have to keep the stability before any other new feature. They have to get it right all the time, not just the first time.

It is stable as heck. That is 3PAR's main name.

We upgraded scalability-wise, and it just hummed along. It was easy.

I have used support a lot. Even in the beginning, it was easy to call somebody, and people say, "Other vendors when they talk to the support guys, they actually collaborate." 

This was 3PAR five or six years ago until now. When we have an issue, they will call VMware for us instead of us needing to go back and forth.

We previously used EMC VMAX.

When I was at Level 3 Communications eight years ago, we were one of the first customers of 3PAR before HPE bought them. We did a PoC, and it literally made the others in the race look bad. It was that good.

It was so easy. When you make a volume, it takes seconds instead of minutes, if not tens of minutes. It took me less than an hour to set up the array.

I was the one who did all the PoCs. I set up everything and tried to automate everything I could.

Performance is at least two times, if not three times, what we had previously. Even now, it is still two to three times in performance what everything else is by price comparison.

The value is not just in price, there is the time that the administrators administer the array: It is two times, if not four times the difference. Something that they would take task-wise an hour, it will take (at the most) 15 minutes with a 3PAR. It goes the same way with the Nimble.

Back then, it was HPE versus EMC.

Just try it out. Do a PoC side-by-side. It wins.

Most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• The technical aspects of the price
• The return on investment
• The support. 

You are not making a decision based on just one or two things. If you are, you are not doing a good service for your company or your stakeholders