HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It's the main storage system, both for the primary site as well as the DR site.

We have complex business needs. Our business has multiple databases - both Oracle and SQL - an Exchange environment, Active Directory environment, websites, web servers, SharePoint. We have a variety of use cases - including development VMs for custom web apps - all being stored on 3PAR at the primary site. The DR site gets Veeam backups of the primary site, so we have the backup recovery on our other 3PAR.

Performance-wise it has been fantastic. 

So far, we have yet to have a disk fail on either system, other than one I forced to fail when we first got the system in. So the reliability of the 3PAR system has been outstanding. We've had maybe one controller go bad, but not enough to bring the whole system down. It was just random, maybe a degraded state, until HPE Support came and fixed it, and they have been fantastic.

In terms of features I'd like to see, I have been hearing a lot about InfoSight with the 3PAR, here at HPE Discover 2018. I'd be curious to see some of the additions that will bring to the system. We're fairly up to date, so we should easily be able to utilize some of it, once it's available. I know that came from the Nimble platform, so they are still integrating it in.

With the uptime and reliability, it's been rock solid so far.

We just added an SSD tier to it, so we're even leveraging that. We literally have three tiers of storage, SSD, fast class storage, and a slower storage state.

We haven't had needed to do much, other than add the SSD tier, at this point. Normally, we try to guess at our storage needs for about a five-year turnaround time, and then from there we usually buy another storage system to replace at that point. I don't know if we'll go to that model, with the 3PAR. It has been so rock solid that I might look into just extending support on it. So it may save us money on storage systems in the long run.

HPE support has been great.

We used to have a Dell EqualLogic storage system prior to this one. On the phone, with support, they managed to tell us to do something that caused the whole system to come down. That was one of the determining factors to go completely away from anything Dell had their hands in and go with something else.

In our research, as much as I tried to look on the web to find anything negative about 3PAR, I couldn't find it. I found negatives about every other storage system we could find, but not on the 3PAR.

Among the most important criteria for us when evaluating a vendor is support. Support is always a concern. We don't have that many IT staff, so we do rely on vendor support and we usually keep the maintenance up on all of all our main equipment. So having a decent support relationship with vendors is critical.

Setup was pretty straightforward. We attended a week-long training with HPE onsite. Other than that, we've been able to manage it ourselves, for the most part. If there are any issues, we just call them in to support and work over the phone with them.

I believe they did most of the install in one day. They came out for two days or three days, but the majority of it was done - the initial racking - in one day; maybe some finalizations on the second day. It didn't take long.

We definitely see ROI. The price point for the 3PAR was actually cheaper than the other storage systems we were looking at. From just the initial cost perspective, it was already cheaper. From what I can tell working with the other storage systems we've worked with - we've had EMC, we've had EqualLogic on the Dell side, and we have even had older Dell storage over the years - there is no comparison between our 3PAR system and the rest of them.

When we were initially looking we priced out some IBM storage, obviously Compellent, some Dell stuff, EqualLogic. Realistically, we didn't want to go back with EqualLogic, mainly due to support.

With the Dells, they were telling us we could upgrade it, firmware and everything else on it, and we said, "No, we're going to hold off until we get another storage system in place and then we'll try that." When we migrated to the 3PAR, we went ahead and did a full upgrade on the Dell EqualLogic. It lost blocks, it lost about 12 drives, and I was thankful that we didn't actually need that data. We left the data on it while we did the upgrade just to see, following Dell support recommendations, what it would have done. Had we listened to them, we would have had, probably, multiple hours trying to figure out what data was actually misplaced, lost; and it had no way of telling us where it lost blocks. 

So from that perspective, we were nervous about doing a 3PAR upgrade which we did recently. We made sure all our backups were off of it prior to doing it. It had no problems during the upgrade, except that one card wouldn't upgrade, and they had to replace it. But there was no issue affecting any data, which is the primary purpose of having a storage system.

You couldn't go wrong with the 3PAR system.

We deploy 3PAR across all of our locations, Canada-wide. It provides primary storage. It covers complex business needs. All of our financial applications sit on it, all of our databases sit on it. We also use it for unstructured data storage, and we're about 95 percent virtualized so it runs all of our virtual workloads.

At one point, we had HPE EVAs and when we were changing them out we didn't just look at 3PAR, we looked at all the solutions. We actually started out with a V400 which is an older version of the 3PAR - they didn't have the 7400s as yet - at our data center. Eventually, when the V400 became end-of-life, we looked at all the EVAs and by that time, they had come out with the 7400 and 7200, which are a lot less expensive and a better fit for a smaller organization. We were able to throw any workload on it and not worry about performance. It certainly made my job easy and my team's job easy in terms of maintenance and management of the platform.

The most valuable feature is the uptime. It doesn't go down. You can do firmware updates on it, no issues.

Integration with some cloud services would be nice. That's not so much of a 3PAR thing, it's more of an HPE dashboard and management platform. The 3PAR is also a part of it. We would like to be able to provision from the 3PAR and decide whether or not we are going to provision onsite or the cloud. 

And something that I know that they're already bringing in is cloud-based analytics, which they are bringing in from their acquisition of Nimble. When that comes to 3PAR, that is going to be a game changer for us, that predictive analysis.

It's very stable.

I think it does a very good job. We're a law firm. So we store a lot of data. The way a law firm operates, you can't really predict the growth of data because they don't know the cases they're going to take on. A given case may have a terabyte of data and another case will have 15 terabytes of data. You really can't tell.

So the ability for us to quickly grow the platform, scale the platform up, is important. But as important is ensuring that, as we scale, it doesn't impact the existing users. We definitely don't have much of an issue with the growth of any of the platforms, be it the 7200 or the 7400. For us, especially on the 3PAR, HPE tends to hand-hold us through most of the scaling so I really don't have too much of an issue with it. We have a huge 7400 in our data center with about 200 or 300 terabytes of data on it.

HPE has very good support on the 3PAR, including the predictive support. We have turned on the Phone Home feature, which allows the HPE engineers to figure out what's happening to the box. At the time they'll actually call us and tell us about the problem. We have actually had a replacement drive show up before we knew there was a problem.

They are one of the best in support, for sure. We're an HPE shop through and through except for networking. We are HPE for desktop, HPE for laptop, HPE for primary storage, HPE for backup, as well as HPE for archive.

The existing solution that we had was getting to end-of-life. And the workloads that we had on it were driving the IOPS through the roof. Everything was slowing down. We knew we needed a solution that would take us through at least the next five or six years. We really didn't know where the business was going and some of the things that it was going to do. We needed a solution that could guarantee us that level of performance. With any vendor, your platform is as good as the support. And traditionally, with HPE, we have had good support on the service side.

And with 3PAR we have actually had better support compared to what we had before on the EVAs, the older version of the platform.

In terms of the most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• support is very important to us
• the kind of relationship that we think we will have with the vendor
• our relationships with account managers. 

And the reason those relationships are important is that we really can't deal with a buy-it-and-forget-it type of vendor. Even though you might spend less money to get the platform in, when you have a buy-it-and-forget-it vendor and you need to strategize, there is nobody there to help you to strategize. If you can't find the account manager, you don't know the direction that the organization is going. It's like you buy something and then you just drop into a black hole. So it's important for us to work with a vendor who will work with us.

When you buy a platform like a storage array, it's seven years. You have to have some strategy over the seven years. By year three or year four you want to know what you should do. Do I buy the next version? Instead of one platform, they now have six platforms. Where do they fit? So that kind of interaction is important to us. So we are looking for vendors that we think we can work with.

And price is also important. At the end of the day, even though HPE makes a good platform we still have to hold them accountable and make sure that they are working within the price range of their competitors. 

Features are important too. We were looking at a platform that would enable us to maximize our investment. Features like deduplication and tiering were an important part of our platform as well, the ability to move workloads from one tier to the next and to automate that using AO. In addition, features like replication, because we have our primary data center and our backup data center. And then, we're a highly virtualized environment so we needed a platform a storage platform that would be advantageous in that environment; one that would give us a better deduplication ratio built into the platform.

The setup is complex. I don't think it's something that we could take on ourselves. I'm not sure if HPE does the same thing now, but when we bought it, HPE was actually the one that did all of the deployment. They did the "birth" right through deployment. You have to update the firmware, you have to update all the drives, you have to update the controllers. It's a pretty complex platform. In fact, I don't even think they allow you to do it. I think when you buy it, they do it.

I think it's complex enough. Hopefully, some of the tools that they are deploying now will simplify that process. But for us, when we buy maintenance, we also buy the support for them to do it. Even though it was complex, it didn't really make a difference to us because we weren't the ones doing it.

From set up to burn-in it was probably about a week. A couple of days to get it up and running, but then they had to upgrade all the firmware, upgrade all the drives. Then they had to do the validation.

As a law firm, we don't really measure ROI for 3PAR. It's difficult for us to comment. I wouldn't be able to put a number on it. What I can say, though, is that 3PAR has enabled us to bring additional services to the organization that we wouldn't have been able to bring on. The organization has been able to focus on things other than infrastructure performance.

No one cares about the performance. They simply expect that a platform is going to do what it's supposed to do. A lot of us take it for granted that nothing is going to break which, with 3PAR, is probably true - we have never had that problem with 3PAR. It has given us the flexibility of just not worrying about the infrastructure. It gives the business the confidence to roll out services.

The business has grown by leaps and bounds because we have a solid infrastructure and a part of that solid infrastructure is 3PAR.

We looked at all the other major vendors. We looked at EMC back then. We looked at IBM. IBM had some storage platforms back then as well. And since the transition, we have looked at some of the new players like Pure Storage. We looked at SimpliVity and Nimble before HPE bought them.

Some of them were just young. Most of those organizations came on about three or four years ago, so they were just coming onto the scene. While they were very innovative with their technology, with an organization that young, it's a risk to buy a platform when you don't know how long they're going to be around. If we had known HPE was going to buy them we'd probably be using them.

Anyone looking into 3PAR or a similar solution needs to know the direction that the organization is going, and they need to make sure that they are are working with a vendor that is going in the same direction as the business is going. With hybrid IT, there are so many flavors of platforms out there. There's hyperconverged, the cloud is also in the mix, you have edge computing. So if you are looking for storage, you need a storage platform that can take care of the now, but from a manufacturer with the vision to know where the technology is going, so you feel like you can future-proof that platform. You don't want to buy a platform now and then, in a year and a half say, "Okay, well can my storage platform tie into this and this?" And they say, "No, no. We don't do that," and we have no intention of doing that. The important thing is to find a vendor that has a vision that matches your organization and provides the things that you want. You have to know what you want first as an organization, and then find the vendor that shares that vision with you.

Why do I rate  3PAR an eight out 10 and not a 10? It's a very complex platform to manage and it's not cheap either. It didn't really give us the level of flexibility we had for very, very small workloads. With Simplivity and Nimble, they are buying into that mid-range space. But back then, we didn't have a choice. 3PAR was the best choice, that fit everything that we had.

Our use case for 3PAR is for all our block storage. Our biggest consumption for 3PAR is for our hypervisors, VMware and Hyper-V. We're almost 90 percent virtualized and 3PAR fits the need for hypervisor environments very well.

We got our first 3PAR in 2008 or 2009 and we're up to 71 3PARs now.

It propelled our desire to virtualize more quickly, to go from physical servers to more and more virtualized servers.

The most valuable feature is its ease of use. Initially, when we had the hybrid solutions that had SSDs and Fibre Channel drives, the AO was the thing we liked the most - moving the data around where it was needed to be kept for hotspots. But now we're using the all-flash arrays and, with the deduplication and compression, it just really fits our virtualization environment very well.

In the next release, I would like to see faster upgrades, where it's really transparent to our host and our end-users. No node reboots, those types of things are the next feature set I would like to see.

They are very stable, we have very few problems with them.

Scalability is very good. We have replaced multiple 3PAR systems with just one or two 3PARs, because of how they scale in the all-flash environment.

I would rate technical support an eight or nine out of 10.

I had looked at 3PAR before HPE bought it. Then, when HPE bought it, that solidified the decision - that they had the backing of such a big organization. But the biggest factors were the features and functionality, how the hardware worked. And Adaptive Optimization was something we were really wanting.

The very first 3PAR we got was an eight-node V800, so we were very involved because it was a very big five-rack system, a very large system. It was one of the largest in the southeast. The initial 3PAR was not very straightforward, we had to have help. But since then, we've been able to do some of our own installations without much trouble.

HPE has been a long-standing partner with us in terms of block storage, so it's been a continuous investment. 

Definitely check it out, especially in your hypervisor environments. That is where the compression has really been a huge benefit for us, allowed us to regain some data center floor space because we're now able to put more of the environment in a smaller number of 3PARs. 

It's almost a 10 out of 10 but the reason it's not is that some of the upgrade processes have been a little challenging, not always technically, sometimes services-oriented. But other than that, the product itself, the ease of use and the value it's provided for us make it a valuable asset for us.

We use it as our main data storage for everything from SQL Server, storage, databases, to all our virtual machines - servers and desktops  - to file storage for everything: for the city's mapping. We use it for just about everything we do.

The performance is amazing. It's been probably one of the best products we've bought in years.

We upgraded to 3PAR from an HPE EVA about seven or eight years ago and power consumption went down.

• Ease of use / very user-friendly 
• Ease of adding on
• Inexpensive

In the next release, I would like them to make it a little easier to find where everything is in the new console. It now has the OneView look and sometimes I don't think the OneView look is enough. It's too different from the original console that was a separate system. I haven't totally learned it. I knew where everything was, and now I think to myself, "Why do I have to go there? It doesn't logically make sense."

It's very scalable.

Technical support is not as good as I would like. Our biggest problem is usually the language barrier. I don't want to say anything derogatory, but sometimes we have a hard time understanding what they want us to do. And sometimes the required upgrades have been a little bit involved: "You have to do this before you do this," and I want them to explain to me why. It's more work than it should be.

When we knew we were at end-of-life. I have a product lifecycle that I keep track of, how long I want to keep things. We knew that our HPE EVA was running long enough that we really needed to replace it. I was looking, I got some ideas from our vendor - from HPE - on what solutions there were to replace it. We were able to cut our power consumption by 80 percent. We're very happy with 3PAR.

In selecting a vendor what was important to us were ease of use, that it was easy to transfer the current data without a lot of trouble, and it was. It was really easy. It was moved and it was done.

It took me a day to totally get everything in my mind regarding what we need to do and to teach my staff how to use it.

The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny.

We looked at a few others, but I'm probably one of those people who just prefer to have one vendor for almost everything. I'm pretty much an HPE shop.

My advice is, look beyond the sales pitch. Talk to customers, and find out how they're really using it and how easy it is to use. Because, sometimes the sales pitches, in my opinion, it doesn't really get how people are using it day to day.

I can't imagine not having 3PAR. We're very happy with it. I just bought more storage and actually bought another 3PAR which is being installed next week. We're continually adding on to it, and I would consider that one of the bests things we could do because you can never have enough space to put everything. I work for a local government. We now even now have body-worn camera videos, and we somehow have to store them temporarily before they put out to cloud storage. We need good, reliable data because we never want to get caught not having something we need.

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.

Normal file storage, SQL databases, Cache databases, and replications to our DR instance. The business needs it covers for us are not highly complex, only a little.

Performance is good. We've had some issues with doing virtual volume updates using Snapshots. We've had some issues with the dedupe garbage collection process as well. Supposedly those have been addressed with the latest OS update that we've yet to apply.

It has not changed the way we function a whole lot. We were on the P9500 Array before and it had similar capabilities, just different ways of doing it. Still, it has worked well for us.

We're using the Remote Copy functionality a lot, just for DR. That is one of the main features that we're highly dependent on and like to use.

Stability has been an issue going back to the dedupe issue.

I haven't had to do a whole lot of scalability with it. We're on a lease model, so we spec'ed it out for what we needed and haven't really had to scale it up at all, for the most part.

We had issues with HPE support, trying to work through that whole dedup issue; it was long and drawn out.

I'm not highly satisfied with support at this point, unfortunately. I am satisfied with our local reps. They have dug in their heels with us and have tried to help, to get a faster time to resolution, but it's the people we were dealing with through the phone and emails who really were not finding the resolution in a timely manner.

The switch was based on that fact that we're on a lease-refresh cycle. That is what really drives this kind of change, for our business.

Our main criteria in selecting a vendor include stability, that is a big one. What really drove us towards 3PAR was having just one vendor; having HPE as both our server and our storage versus HPE for server alone.

The initial setup was straight-forward. We came from the P9500, so it was more or less a rip and replace. It was involved with the project to replace our Blade infrastructure as well, but from start to finish, it probably took six months from design to implementation.

I see the value in investing in 3PAR. I think HPE, overall, is a good partner for us and we're happy. It's just the support that is the only issue that we've had with them. But overall, I'd say we're happy with HPE as a company.

We also evaluated Pure Storage but we wanted to stick with one vendor.

I would definitely recommend evaluating it. Depending on what you need for your business, it could be a good fit.

It has been rather stable, other than the couple of hiccups that we've had. Once we've gotten through those, it has been rock solid for us.

We use it as a primary storage device for user data and applications. It covers complex business needs in our organization. We have a lot of secure data on there. A lot of our financial applications run on our 3PAR.

It has been excellent. We've got a 7440c at my office and then we have two 8000 series at the other sites. We're using Adaptable Optimization, we've got the different tiers of disks. We find that the performance is excellent, really excellent.

Previously, we had lots of different storage vendors. We moved to a standardized platform using 3PAR and then we were able to have a consistent set of documentation through all of our sites, and we're able to replicate data between the sites really easily.

The biggest benefit is the fact that it's pretty much bulletproof; we never have any issues with them.

Reliability, the fact that it works really, really well. It is a really solid platform.

I know that the reporting functionality is changing. It's going to be much better and that's something that we're looking forward to. 

I would like to see more flexibility with the cloud. I've actually just been in a presentation about it, here at HPE Discover 2018, so those features are coming.

It's still an older architecture, you've got a lot of physical spinning disks. I would imagine more the memory-based computing is coming.

It is massively scalable. It's very easy to add more capacity, it's very easy to add more modules if required. It's the same with the licensing model. I think the licensing model changed last year, or two years ago, and now it's much more flexible.

Technical support is good. It's still separate from the normal HP Enterprise support team. It's really responsive, incredibly knowledgeable. Their engineers are wonderful, really good. We have had really positive results with the 3PAR support guys.

About eight years ago, we had a bunch of different storage platforms, and we actually went through a proof of concept and selected 3PAR. Our company was expanding. We realized that our data footprint was going to grow massively in the next few years. We're a game developer so our data growth is completely mirrored by the hardware that we make our games on. At the time, we knew that there were new versions of PlayStation, Xbox 4K coming out for TV, so all of our assets just blew up, about 20 times the size.

We realized we needed to invest in an enterprise-grade solution. We looked at three or four different companies. Then, we rolled out the F400 series.

The factors we considered were the normal things: Obviously, cost per terabyte or gigabyte, performance, IOPS; scalability was a massive factor as well. We knew that we were going to grow and we needed to be able to just add shelves of disks or add SSD, add SaaS or add Nearline.

The setup is one of the drawbacks of 3PAR system, it's a fairly complicated piece of hardware. You need to get the engineers in to do it. So it wasn't something that we could do on our own. The Professional Services that we engaged with were wonderful, and it was a couple of days as opposed to a week or two weeks.

ROI, that's a difficult one. It's expensive. When we compare that to the cost of the product that we make, and the return that we get, it's a small piece of the overall project cost. So we don't really complain about how much we initially had to pay for it. The value is that it works, and we don't have any downtime. The return on investment is pretty good.

We looked at NetApp, we looked at EMC, we looked at 3PAR, and 3PAR was the best fit for us totally.

• Get a proof-of-concept
• Draw a list of testing criteria
• Have a testing matrix
• Be clear in your objectives

3PAR is a great solution but it has a big physical footprint for the amount of data. There are other solutions out there. If you don't necessarily require the performance and the redundancy, there are other things to consider. But, it's a really solid storage appliance.

I would give the 3PAR an eight out of 10. Because we don't have any issues with it, it's hard to complain about it. But obviously giving it a 10 out of 10 would mean that there is no work to be done. I give it a strong eight.

3PAR is our main storage solution that we use for anything and everything, mainly Oracle right now. But we also have different db8s as well flute.com on our 3PAR. We have a number of different things on it.

It's outstanding, it works like a champ. We have been using it for about 15 years. We have a T400 sitting in the data center right that I'm trying to get up off of. We've been using 3PAR for quite a while.

We're able to move things around with more agility. I can take it off one server and slap it on another in a couple of minutes, so we're really agile when it comes to that. If we run into server issues, it's a quick jump, we're on a new server, we're off and running again. And then I have time to look at the server. That's a really nice feature. 

And the speed is outstanding, it really works wonderfully.

I really like the new RMC (Recovery Manager Cental) software that was introduced with the 3.0 or 3.1 update. It allows us to use our data protector with our 3PAR and give it a nicer front-end than the SSMC did.

I'd really it to be able to interact with older 3PAR storage, and possibly even non-HPE. I would like to be able to pull stuff off of old things and bring it up to the standard that has been set, simply, quickly, and efficiently. That would be a really nice feature. Right now it is a big pain. It seems to work but we tend to get some latency behind. It seems it could be better.

I've never had it go down unless I wanted it to, ever.

Scalability is easy. We just had HPE come out and put in a whole other shelf for us, for more storage. You can scale it out almost indefinitely. It works amazingly, I'm a huge fan.

Up until this point, technical support has been amazing. I am a little leery because I have heard they are doing more outsourcing with their support. I've run into that with other vendors that we deal with and it has never really worked out that well. We always seem to get less knowledge and then we have to go through three or four people before we get to the person that used to be the number one guy that we talked to. And he was the only guy we talked to. He knew how we use our things and at what capacity they were used, so it was easier for him to help us troubleshoot. Now I have to go through all these different hoops and jumps, and I'm not a fan of that.

I would give 3PAR an eight because, first, I don't think anything is ever a 10. It's still really good - but since 9 is really close to 10, and that's almost perfect - it's about an eight. The reliability is really there. Once it's there, it's there. You don't really have to worry about it, which is really nice because we have enough things to worry about.