HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The solution allows us to provide solid capacity.

The team provisions and it has been wonderful for our environment. We manage hundreds of terabytes. It allows us to deliver more storage than other solutions. It allows us to have many files so we can provide better service for our customers.

Right now, we don't use a solid-state disk. We use a historical monitoring platform for a Telco. For the long-term storage, we don't need so much speed. However, now that we are dealing with the main BI and doing big data with that information, we will need to speed up really fast. Right now, we are thinking of adding some solid-state capacity, or even better, get a new, solid-state controller. That is the new initiative that we have been looking into.

We have not experienced any down times since we started 3PAR. For us, it was the right decision. It was the best way to provide a storage solution for our company. It has been running for over two years without any down time.

In terms of scalability, once we made the capacity planning in the very beginning, we did not need increased capacity. Our operation is stable. We manage a certain kind of volume of data. We don't need to increase so frequently. We have been working with the capacity with which we started at the beginning.

We have used technical support. They came most of the time, even if I didn't need it. I called and they sent some drives if I needed them. There were some pre-failure alarms that we needed to replace and they took care of it. Technical support has been working great.

We were using another solution before. We were spread over different locations so it was the most affordable solution we found.

We needed a new solution. We were working with a partner and they showed us options. We discussed price and we got the point between stability, reliability, and price. These were the main factors in choosing this solution.

The setup was straightforward. It was easy. Most of the activities were done remotely. The field engineer did a lot of it. The factory people get in and set up all the equipment.

We talked to Dell and EMC. We decided upon HPE because the partner with whom we worked hand-in-hand had been working with them for many years.

I would highly recommend this solution. The trends in storage solutions have been going through a lot of changes. They are not as centered on basic storage. They are moving to local and multiple nodes of storage. These storage-defined solutions have been evolving a lot over these last couple of years. It will be a harder decision to choose between one or another vendor.

I think the biggest thing about it is it supports mixed workloads. Instead of having to have different arrays or anything to support different workloads, you can actually support them all within 3PAR and you can, which I think is one of the key things. The other thing is it's virtualized and the performance on it is good.

I do a lot of research when I'm trying to find an answer to something, and I want the documentation to be clear. Tell me what's supported. Case and point, we just announced Direct Connect with 3PAR 8000, which we didn't have before. If you look at SPOCK, the information there was not clear and it looked like we actually had a big debate going. The support on it is very limited for Direct Connect, and it just wasn't clear. The feedback got sent and I think they cleaned it up, but I haven't checked.

If you have a bunch of mixed workloads and you have an environment, it'll support most customers' solutions. You can get a lot more storage in a smaller footprint, so for your data center, power cooling, and OPEX, it's a good solution.

Most valuable to us are the capacity, the scalability, and also the reliability.

The benefit of HPE 3PAR flash storage is the scalability. It generally has good reliability.

The SSD disks mainly did well performance-wise. Now that the cost of the system is reduced, it's more financially viable as well. We did have firmware problems with them over the years, but generally we're fairly happy with it.

We've been with HPE for about ten years.

Stability is pretty good, but we had a fiber channel previously, and we found that was a bit more reasonable than the HPE.

Scalability is very good. The 3PAR is very modular, so we can just install more modules as we need.

I give technical support a 9/10. If we have a problem, we log a call and they come back to us within half an hour. It is pretty good.

We were previously using HPE SAN, but we then went to the P4000, and now we're looking to upgrade our data centre again. So we're quite happy with their solutions and the help. We think it's one of the best ones out there.

The initial setup was complex. We had the HPE consultants in to work with us, and we had a few issues initially. But we managed to get them resolved.

We looked at IBM, Dell, and HPE. We went with HPE because we have used HPE storage solutions before. We have also used HPE network server equipment and we found them to be good quality equipment. Additionally, we found that working with them was quite a good experience.

We currently use the P4000, which is iSCSI. We will go for the fiber channel next time, which we have been comparing with the 3PAR.

When choosing a vendor, their reputation, and obviously the quality of the products, are important. HPE is pretty consistent with these.

The compression it offers is probably the most valuable feature for us. We're able to reduce 16 terabytes of data by a 2:1 ratio, giving us the ability to put a lot more onto the 3PAR than our previous solution. Our files include a lot of large videos.

We have about 250 users on it and it's not messy. We're able to tailor it to our needs, including the GUI, which makes it easy to use.

IT is always evolving, but there are no improvements that I see right now. There will be a lot of new stuff, I'm sure. I'm interested to see what happens in the future.

We have no issues with deployment.

It's highly stable and has 99.9999% uptime.

We just got up as much as we need. We had no issues with scalability.

Our prior solution was end-of-life, and this was about six or seven years ago.

It wasn't the most straightforward setup. It would be better with an easier setup.

We looked at EMC, Nimble, and Pure Storage, but 3PAR is the market leader.

We're a big user of the adaptive optimization environment, so we have a tiered storage environment. We have SST, which is about five percent of the total environment. We have the 10K drive, which is about 25 percent of the environment and the remainder is the inline storage as drives being four terabyte drives.

We have an awful lot of data sitting in our environment. We have about 1.2 petabytes of storage sitting on the 3PARs at the moment replicated. We'd really like to get into data compression to do duplication on those devices. At this stage, we can do that on the SST in the environments but we can't do it on the remaining storage. We'd really like to be able to see the storage data being migrated across those tiers and do duplication as much as possible, not just on the actual SST layer itself. The other features I want to look at, at the moment is the storage federation, we'd like to start clustering out our devices so we can spread it across more storage arrays. I'd just say, it's been a very good choice and it's been certainly one of the foundations stars for a very successful project for ourselves.

Once we put it in and got comfortable with the product, it's been extremely stable.

Technical support is very good. We have a product support agreement on those systems, so the HP support teams are constantly monitoring them and reporting back to us the state and health of the systems. Yeah, it's a very good service from a proactive point of view, so we are hearing things from the support vendor, rather than us going to them constantly to say there's something wrong or we need some attention.

We went through a very exhaustive testing environment and selection process to make sure we were getting the best platform to support our metro storage cluster. We have achieved all the goals we've set out to attempt, so I can say with some confidence that it is a carrier grade class piece of storage and from the point where we put it in we've run without fault, without outage and we're very pleased with them at the moment.

The performance is a good feature.

We have consolidated our storage solution from six EVA's of various ages into a single 3PAR array.

The support needs to be improved.

I've used it for three years.

The only issue I run into with HP storage is that they are not really focused on parallel file systems. It's not that their hardware is incapable, it's that HP's knowledge and support in this space is extremely limited and they are not interested in developing it.

No issues encountered.

The array was fully built out when purchased. The only scalability available is to stripe the file system across a second array, which is a very viable option.

The pre-sales team is 8.5/10, however, post sales team is a 3/10.

The parts replacement is good, however, as for serious technical issues, getting to someone who actually knows enough to help is usually a challenge. This is especially for areas that HP are not interested in developing.

We migrated pieces from various storage technologies - EVA, Nexsan, and an old EMC Clarion. They were all EOL and 3PAR appeared to have the performance to consolidate all the workloads at the right price.

Any time you're setting up a parallel file system, the setup is going to be complex. I'd say it was no more complex than any other. However, HP's limited experience with parallel file systems on their hardware (especially at the time we purchased the 10800 three years ago) was limited so a lot of performance tuning had to be done prior to releasing the system into production.

We did it mainly in-house, but HP brought in a partner for the rack, stack and cabling. I then did the implementation with limited guidance from HP engineers.

I don't know the financials, but we were able to quadruple the production output by shifting the work to the 3PAR array.

I don't have an idea of actual numbers, but I do remember at a high-level meeting, stating that a three year lease, including hardware support, would cost us about as much as we were then paying for support for the six EVAs that we owned.

• DDN
• EMC
• Isilon

3PAR is the best storage product HP has ever sold. It's not cheap, but it's definitely one of the better block-level storage products out there.

The 7200 and 7400 are both easy to manage. The reporting suite is a must and gives you all the information you need to manage storage. Thin suite helps you manage how the storage is used and reclaimed, and one of the best features is the new AFC (Adaptive Flash Cache) which combined with AO (Adaptive Optimisation) really helps performance.

We have implemented two 7400 arrays replacing older EVAs with replication, we used to use CLX (Cluster Extensions for EVA) for the Windows machines, but we never had anything but manual failover for the VMware environment.

With the 7400, we implemented Peer Persistence and this removed the requirement of CLX and also gave us a similar site protection in the VMware environment meaning that we no longer have to do a manual failover.

Majority of the day to day management can be done via the GUI, but certain functions have to be setup via the command line interface such as AFC.

I have used the 7200 for over two years and the 7400 for around six months.

Deployment and migration was quite straight forward.

Both versions are very stable. The 7200 has not had any downtime since it was put into production back in November 2012.

The products that we bought both scale very easily, and were bought knowing what the maximum was (which increased on the 7200 from the time of purchase).

It's very good for the amount of times we have been in contact (not much as there's no need to make contact).

Tech support is fantastic. It seems that you have your own personal support, as we are notified whenever a new firmware/patch/update is released, and we have had the remote support team upgrade the firmware numerous times. We have had only two failed drives on the 7200, and each time the process was simple.

Prior to the 7200, we had a HP P2000 storage array, and this proved not able to cope with the workload (it was designed/implemented and used to be managed by another company) since the 7200 has been installed, there haven't been any issues.

The 7400, replaced four EVAs (two 6500s and two 8400s) and we switched these because they becoming instable causing various issues. They also lacked the failover ability for our virtual environment (without having to buy SRM).

The initial setup was straightforward as it was planned for. Also, the installation document that was filled out had all the info required to make it that way.

Both installations were carried out by myself.

For the 7200 there has been no downtime in over two years and this is priceless, whereas with the old P2000, which wasn’t designed or setup properly, we had multiple downtime periods.

For the 7400. each of the 7400s replaced an EVA 6500 and an EVA 8400 taking up three racks of space, which was condensed down to a single rack. For the first two months, we ran purely on the FC tier (tier one) and the performance was better than both the EVAs. We have three tiers of storage SSD, FC and NL and now the AFC and AO in place, performance is fantastic and we have plenty of capacity.

• EMC
• IBM

After spending months of looking at products and choosing the HP 3PAR’s the best advice is to:

• Plan the installation and migration – this saved us time in getting the new storage in production
• Think about all the features you require as they aren’t expensive and probably will save you money (Peer-Persistence was a good one for the 7400)
• Don’t buy for years – as they are easily upgraded the capacity should be sized correctly.

SSD, SAS and SATA disks in one box, transparent failover between datacenters, delivers performance as promised.

Less data is stored in silos, more is kept in this central solution with advantages of raid, tiering and backup. We are looking into Flash, we already own some violin boxes and have a small capacitiy of SSD disks in the 3PAR.

Monitoring and reporting.

6 months, it’s predecessor HP 3PAR T400 for 6 years.

Small bugs in the GUI that were resolved in the latest version.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

9/10.

9/10.

No, we owned its predecessor and were very happy with that.

Initial setup was performed with a reseller, but you should have some idea about how you would like to ‘shape’ your environment. All can be altered afterwards if you would reconsider.

Vendor team. I would rate them 8/10; An HP technical expert was needed for some configuration add-ons.

Yes, comparable systems from Dell, EMC and Hitachi.

Organize a couple of meetings with the technical staff to build the storage array that will meet your demands. Knowing in front which type of RAID you will need and the type of IO will benefit you.