HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

3PAR completes the HPE solution for my clients. It gives them an environment that is straight HPE from a storage perspective, from a networking perspective with Aruba, from a compute perspective with Synergy. It completes the whole show with 3PAR on the storage side.

The performance of 3PAR is beautiful.

I only offer HPE exclusively, so it fits with the other pieces. The storage, the servers, the compute, the networking. They're all part of the same suite.

It's meant for the future. If you have certain storage requirements, for years to come it will be able to handle them. The price point is aggressive. We're ahead of the competition when it comes to feature sets. In a situation where clients have an existing 3PAR infrastructure, it is the perfect fit.

It is a very stable environment. This is round-three for some of our clients, round-three of orders. We had some orders that came in about three years ago and then another one last year and they're now going through the third round.

It's modular so you can add more. It is scalable.

Technical support is great. Most of the solutions that we offer, we offer with 24/7 support.

Usually, any 3PAR solution we offer includes the startup services from HPE. It is straightforward to set up. Setup is usually a same-day project.

In scenarios where my clients have an existing 3PAR, its a perfect fit. It will give them redundancy and they can buy more SSDs.

The HPE enterprise name is crucial for my clients when considering which vendor to go with. They have been HPE clients for a long time, many years. To them, this brand gives them confidence that the solution will work. They also have great local support from the HPE team and from us.

The reason why we chose 3PAR is because it was future proof. It had some features that the cabinets we were looking for at at the moment when we bought the 3PAR storage, that were not available in the market, like theme provisioning and the movement of blocks, which are really fast and are not so fast. In this way, we can put the hot data where it should be. It also has a really powerful tool to measure data, how it is working, the performance, and if we have any bottlenecks.

Also, it does not have any spare disks, so we did not have to use this as a spare. We even had the spare space. So, we had a lot of features which were not not available for all the cabinets in the market, at the time, when we bought this storage.

For me, the main issue with 3PAR right now is its cost problem. Right now, there are some other storage cabinets that can do what 3PAR can do; what 3PAR used to do a long time ago. Now, they can do it as well with a more revised budget. So, the main problem for 3PAR right now is cost.

It is a really stable product. We have not had any major issues at the moment. For us, it is a really stable product.

For us, scalability is fine.

We have a contract where we have field engineer. He is working for more customers, but is allocated for us. So, we do not have any issues at all.

It was straightforward.

We used our support field engineer. They helped us on the setup. For us, it was not a big deal because of that.

HPE is changing on the licensing way, because in the past, you had to apply for a license for everything. Now, they have made a combo for all the licenses, which is more helpful, but there are a few things which are not completely included in the product. Talking from a license point of view, to be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for reputation. Also, we want to have confidence in the product. We want to know a product has been deployed for a lot of customers. So, we are looking for a mature product as well.

There are tools in place that allowed easy migration from our existing infrastructure, i.e., our EVA arrays. We have a great relationship with HPE that has worked over many years. We have great confidence in what they can deliver for us and that it will fit in well with our existing environment.

The availability of the 3PAR array is the greatest benefit. The ability to perform upgrades to the machine while it remains online is very valuable. It saved us from making our systems unavailable. In addition, the tools that are built into the 3PAR array are a significant improvement and give us great visibility into what's actually being used and how it's being used. It has simplified the management of the array.

If you're familiar with 3PAR, there are multiple GUIs that have been available over a course of time and the new SSMC GUI is excellent. It has great consistency against the HPE line, so that an operator is immediately familiar with it. However, there are a few features that were included in the previous GUI that haven't been brought forward, or maybe are not quite as obvious. I would like to see some of those previous resources brought forward, or at least an option to see an emulation of that previous GUI.

We had great availability and stability with our previous HPE arrays and that has continued with 3PAR. We have not had a single incident of downtime nor have we had any service interruptions of any kind.

Scalability seems to be very good. I think it's been one of the strengths of HPE products in the array space for a long time. With 3PAR, the scalability is excellent.

The technical support is very good. The folks that have come in to work with us, particularly on some of our software upgrades on the machine, have been excellent. The field service staff is just superior.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex. There is more to it than there was in previous arrays, but I think that really ties into making the machine valuable to us. We probably have to rely on HPE a little more for the setup, but they did such a great job. I understand that it was necessary and I appreciate it.

Our arrays were getting on the older side. The new array fits in with our existing infrastructure very well. We have a great history with HPE support and it wasn't a difficult sell. We did look at other options, but in reality, because of the long-standing great relationship and outstanding support, we went with HPE.

For their own benefit, they really should consider 3PAR. It's so reliable, functional, has great support from HPE, and it is tied into so many of the HPE family of products. It is a great piece of hardware.

The ability the use all available disks for different RAID requirements and also the replication is available out of the box. The ability to tune the volumes to spread across newly allocated drives.

Previously, we were with another vendor, and we suffered performance issues due to architecture limitation. With 3PAR, we were able to provide the business an acceptance level of performance which directly has an impact on user experience. We are able to keep up with application and user demands as response times are vital for the business to function competitively.

Better user interface compared to the current PC installed client. A browser based solution was introduced recently and improvements were noticeable.

I've used it for two and a half years. We initially did an evaluation with the 7200 unit. Having tested and being pleased with the outcome, we purchased a 7400 with two nodes, and subsequently upgraded to four nodes. The 7200 was moved to be used for disaster recovery.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It is quite straightforward, it is a completely different architecture as 3par is licensed based on the number of drives and after a point it’s capped, i.e. you only pay for the drives and support.

In-house, good knowledge of SAN architecture is required. All zones activity needs to be done by yourselves.

We would say two to three years.

Always purchase at the financial year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing, and also purchase the maintenance in advance. I purchased it with five years maintenance included.

I did evaluate five other vendors, one example Nimble, however, at that time they only had iSCSI model available.

3PAR is designed around the ASIC which eliminates the CPU bottleneck and RAID limitation in other vendors.

We would say 2-3 years. Always purchase at the year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing and also purchase the maintenance in advance, for example I purchase with 5 years maintenance included.

HP regularly organizes events which are good to go to as they announce new innovations and share other customer experiences.

I like the adaptive optimization and that it functions as virtual storage and I don’t have to go in and carve things across spindles.

The biggest benefit is the ease of administration, since we only have one administrator – me. If I’m not there and others need to be able to allocate storage, I can give a step-by-step guide for my company to follow to do that; whereas if I had an EMC product, for example, we’d need two administrators. We’re an agricultural co-op so we have to run a very lean IT shop.

In future versions, I would like to see Peer Motion become bi-directional, and also able to function over the normal data ports and not require extra ports. I thought I was going to like storage v-motion, but I’m running into problems where Peer Motion doesn’t do what it was advertised to do.

It works as if we have a disk on that is currently our destination, and we wanted to put that on our source 3PAR. We have to tear down our Peer Motion and rezone a bunch of stuff, changing how courts are acting on the 3PARs, and rebuild a new Peer Motion configuration. Because of this, it’s a lot more cumbersome than what we thought it would be.

None. It's an easy system to get installed and up and running.

It’s very stable; rock solid.

It meets our needs. I don’t foresee a point where we won’t be able to meet our needs with 3PAR.

Excellent. We do have critical support, but for us, the cost of critical support is well worth it.

Two pieces. First, the 3PAR people (backend support) are kind of hit and miss, and it depends on who you get. I’ve had some great people and I’ve had others who seem to think it was their mission in life to frustrate me. As I understand it, most are based in Colorado but others are based in India, and it’s really hard to communicate with them at times.

We have what’s considered a secure site, and 3PAR can’t just remote into our SANs, and their technicians seem to take issue with that sometimes. However, the hardware people, meaning the field service engineers, are excellent.

Well, we had an EVA, which is another HP product, and our storage usage was growing so fast that we weren’t going to be able to expand that to cover what we needed.

It was very easy to set up.

We looked at Dell, HP, NetApp, and EMC. There are two big reasons why we chose HP:

1. The 3PAR product is a lot easier to administer because it’s a virtual storage that aggregates all the disks together; and
2. There were two virtual products for what we were looking for, but we liked what it did in terms of optimization better than Dell.

Support and service is a big one for us, we needed good support. Also, we had to make sure pricing was good. For our purposes, it’s the best SAN that we have found. The things that keep it from being 10/10 are things like Peer Motion and the back end service.

Unless you have a very specific kind of load that requires a super high-end array, which 3PAR is not designed to be, I would recommend you look at HP, as there’s a very wide range of what HP can cover.

Although the technology is packed with features, it's still very simple and intuitive to use at both hardware and software levels.

We are now using thin provisioned disks from 3PAR attached to hosts. Using this feature, along with chunklet RAID technology, we are able to reduce the overall physical storage by about 40%. This was a significant change, as we are now able to run more resources and VMs. Also, we are using adaptive optimization, which automatically analyses CPG (disk groups) and makes automatic decisions to move high I/O regions of CPG to faster disks. This makes the provisioned disks attached to hosts work smoothly under any load.

From my point of view, the part of this product that needs improvement is the reporting. I would like it to have richer graphic charts, more info, and more reports.

We have been using 3PAR for more than a year now. We are using two 7200 devices. The first has 48 disks, and the second is equipped with eight flash SSD Disks and 56 SAS Disks. We are using the flash disks in combination with adaptive optimization technology to cache high I/O regions from disks to SSD. We have no dedicated flash storage, but the solution we are using is working great. Additionally, we own ab old HP EVA storage.

We had no deployment issues at all. and everything was done smoothly and without any issues.

Since we deployed 3PAR, there hasn't been any downtime, or other issue with stability. The main production 3PAR uptime is over 360 days to date and without any degradation in performance or any other issues.

The scalability is superb. New disks can added without any downtime at any point, and any provisioned disk can be expanded on-line.

Customer service is good enough in our region.

Technical support is great! HP 3PAR has a service processor that is connected to HP support directly, so HP is monitoring the status of our 3PAR storage. When any kind of issue or a warning is picked up by HP, we are get e-mails from them with recommendations on how to solve it. HP support also predicts failure of disks, and sends e-mail about disk changes before a disk failure occurs. This is a great level of support, and having this means we have no downtime or performance degradation at all!

As I mentioned earlier, we were using an HP EVA storage device, and it was not giving the right speed or IOPS we needed. We started to look at different solutions, starting with NetAPP and EMC, to HP and IBM. As the price and technologies of HP offered was better than the others, we decided to buy HP. And now, we are very happy with this solution and it is a great product!

The initial setup went easily as HP gave us training before we started the setup and use of 3PAR. This was a great experience, as we were working hand in hand with HP technicians on the initial setup, first run, etc. We gained a lot of experience and knowledge from them which enables us to go further with this product.

We set up everything hand in hand. The HP team worked really perfectly, giving attention to every single detail. Also they were answering the questions we had at when we set it up.

ROI is high, as the money spent on each GB of storage is slightly lower than any concurrent solution. We also got virtualization done on this product, so we have saved a lot of energy and costs on physical servers.

The original cost for two storage devices, was around US$200,000. Both devices have been in production for a year now, and we have not changed a part of it starting from the physical disks. It just works! As for other costs, it consumes about 1KW of energy.

As I mentioned above, we had five or six vendor companies for storage. This was NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP, etc. We chose HP as the technology it has, had no real competitors at that time. Also the price was great!

For sure you should ask HP to present you the product and I think you'll love how simple and robust it is. It's a great product for mid-range, big companies, and banks. It's redundancy and expandability are great, and it is packed with a lot of features and technologies.

It's a very convenient product. I find it easy to use.

It's very flexible in terms of management.

It's an enterprise tool.

The integration is good. We've integrated it with other UNIX platforms and Windows platforms.

The solution is easy to install.

The pricing is okay.

I'm not sure how good the security is. 

While the stability is pretty good, it could always be improved upon. 

I've been using the solution for almost four years at this point. I've used it for a while. 

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable and a company can expand it if they want to. 

We only have 100 people that actually use the solution. 

The support on offer is very good. We don't have any issues with them. They are helpful and responsive and we are satisfied with the support we get when we need it. 

We did use Hitachi last year.

The initial setup is not overly difficult or complex. it's pretty simple and straightforward. 

The deployment is fast and within a day you can have everything up and running. 

We have engineers available that can assist with deployment and maintenance. 

We had support from HPE directly. They assisted us in the implementation. 

We're using it as a SaaS. The pricing is reasonable. It's not cheap, however, I don't consider it to be overpriced. 

We have an annual support contract. It will contain a certain percentage of the storage cost.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I've been pretty happy with its capabilities. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

We don't have plans to leave this solution any time soon. We'll likely have it for the next two to three years. 

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.