HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use the solution for multiple business applications, with SharePoint, our internal management system and Exchange 2016. We are customers of HPE 3PAR and I'm a system engineer.

I think the main thing of value to me is the intelligence around the solution and how data is taken care of on the storage side of things, with your LANs and your virtual volumes and how it sort of manages everything else.

The scalability could be improved plus management. Currently, you can only identify what's connected to it through the system names and the like and it would be helpful to have an overview of everything that comes to it. It's easy to upsize but you can't downsize.

We've been using this solution for about seven years. 

This is a stable solution. 

The product used to be very scalable but its end of life will be in about a year so there's no point to upgrade or enhance it. 

The support is quite good and we'll continue to use this product.

The initial setup is complex, it requires you to do your volumes, fibre channel volume from the switch and the same connection from the storage. You also need to make sure you've created warning profiles. I don't recall how long the primary setup took, but the secondary one took us four to six hours to get it going. We used a consultant and we have 1,200 users.
We have about six people involved in maintenance, they are admins.

The product is at end of life so although we'll continue to use it, I wouldn't recommend it. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

As a partner, we use it to run databases and for virtualization. Another use case is the cloud.

All-flash provides optimization through deduplication and compression and provides high performance for both databases and virtualization. It has increased IOPS by 200 percent. In addition, it has reduced deployment time by ten percent.

One of our customers, using SAP, had 16 terabytes of data. When we implemented this solution for them, their storage was reduced to two terabytes.

• High-Availability 
• Security
• High performance

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

It's stable and uses Call-Home. Support is 24/7.

The 3PAR solution has a problem with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. It's predictive. If my customer has a problem, they inform the customer of the problem and send any necessary parts. They also email the customer to let them know when they need updates.

The initial setup is easy.

We see ROI after six to eight months, by using all the capacities of all-flash, including deduplication and compression.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good.

In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

We use it for our file shares, our virtual hard drives, and for all of our Hyper-V clusters. It stores everything, like backups. 

We have virtualized almost all of our servers, except the ones that require high I/O, like maybe our SQL Servers. Everything else in the entire organization runs off of our 3PARs.

We actually aren't all-flash, but we do have flash drives for our hottest data which is used most often. This definitely makes everything much more efficient.

The 3PAR arrays replicate offsite. Everything is safe and optimized. There's automatic promoting and demoting of blocks, moving hot ones to the flash storage and the less used ones onto Nearline storage. This optimizes everything and uses the resources to their best ability.

It has increased performance since we added the flash drives. Originally, we had 2-Tier storage (the Nearline storage and SAS storage), but adding the flash storage really improved performance by maybe 30 percent.

We can cut a VM quite quickly, so we can probably stand up a workload in half an hour. So, the time to deployment is quite good.

We have been able to back up our data more frequently now that we have everything on flash. It responds a lot faster, so the IOPs are a lot faster.

The failover/failback: Just to keep our mission-critical stuff running all the time.

The solution’s deduplication functionality has helped us save a lot of space. People save their files over and over again or email them around, then everybody has a copy of the same thing. Therefore, the deduplication is very helpful.

if it were easier for us to manage the product ourselves without having to get HPE to connect, because it sometimes it does take a bit to get the scheduling worked out with the HPE support. If it were simpler, then it might be easier for us to handle it ourselves.

The stability is very good. We have HPE connecting in remotely to help us with any of the major firmware updates. This keeps everything running great.

It has not failed us yet, so it is very highly available and error free, so far.

We could add more drive cages, so I'm sure it's quite scalable. We haven't hit our limits yet, so we haven't had to do that. However, it's supposed to be quite scalable.

Technical support is very good. We bought the support package where they will connect remotely to help us with upgrades and firmware changes. So, it's very solid.

Previously, we had all sorts of different storage arrays, e.g., the MSAs, which are also from HPE. We also had just servers with hard drives in them scattered around everywhere. Now, we have centralized everything onto the 3PAR arrays. 

It was a little complicated to set up originally, as it takes quite a bit of rack space and we are a small organization. Once it was set up, it was well worth the effort.

We bought through a reseller called PC Corp in Alberta, Canada. PC Corp was very good.

I would definitely recommend it. It is a good fit for our organization, and if it works for you, that would be great too.

File Persona is now included, so we might explore doing file shares straight off of the 3PAR array.

We do not use HPE GreenLake.

Biggest lesson learnt: The initial pain is worth it.

It is storage for our SAP environment. SAP is the mission-critical application that we run on the solution.

The snapshotting capability allows us to do a database replication very quickly. As a result, we have some applications which need a fresh copy of the production database everyday, and we are able to give that to them by eight o'clock in the morning.

Its snapshot capability is the most valuable feature, because replicate our databases from production to nonproduction for development. This allows us to do it very quickly.

The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent.

It has latency issues.

It seems pretty stable. Once we got over the birthing pains, it has been pretty reliable.

As long as the array is not full, it is available. We filled it up.

It is very scalable. We can grow it up to the size that it will contain. Then, we have to move to another array, a bigger one, if we have to. However, my understanding is that is a pretty seamless process.

We moved to 3PAR from a different array, which was a smaller array with fewer controller cards in it. So, 3PAR did not increase our performance, and it has increased our latency by at least double.

We went with 3PAR because we have HP-UX systems. Since we already knew HP-UX, they offered us a significantly cheaper solution than the one that we had for storage.

The first array that they sent us was in some type of a factory mode. We didn't find that out until we loaded a bunch of data onto it, then we had to back it all off. We had to replace the array, which was sort of painful.

We are actually a federal customer, so we get the HPE Federal direct team helping us. Our experience was good, except for that one problem with the first array.

We evaluated Dell EMC, HPE, and some other competitors. We went with HPE because of the price point.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using 3PAR is the snapshot capability.

3PAR is our primary storage for everything aside from VDI, which is where we are using our Nimble.

We use everything from point of sale to database. Those are the two big mission-critical applications. There is also virtualization for servers.

It makes for less administrative overhead.

The solution has improved our throughput by helping us keep up with the demand and acquisitions that we have been going through.

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

The quick, easy deployment, along with its administration, are its most valuable features.

I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team.

It has been a lot more stable over the past year that I have using it. Early on, we did have some issues, but working with HPE, we were quickly able to fix all that. Since then, it has been very stable.

It does help with the growth, mainly in some of the point of sale systems that we need.

I would rate the technical support about a seven or eight (out of ten). They have been pretty good. The response time has been pretty good for any issues that we have had. From a hardware standpoint, we haven't had that much. It has been more from a software side, and we have had some pretty good responses from HPE.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is quick and very intuitive. You can turn it on and figure out pretty much what you need to do right away. You don't have to have too much hand-holding for it. So, it's fairly easy to use.

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

It has reduced time to deployment by about 30 percent, mainly from the virtualization server standpoint.

I have used a number of different storage solutions, and the HPE products are probably the best from an ease of use and administrative standpoint. 

From my experience in the past with other storage solutions, it is very easy to use with pretty good support. So far, from what I have seen, I do like it.

It is a real good solution. It is probably one of the better storage solutions for large enterprises and main back-end storage that I have used in the past.

We do the InfoSight predictive analytics. We have just gotten into it with the 3PAR storage, as we have mainly used it on the Nimble side.

We actually don't use the deduplication right now. That is something that we have looked into, but haven't implemented yet.

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.

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.

We use it mainly for our virtual environment.

Performance-wise, it's pretty good. You can't say we have the high-end version, but the one that we have does meet our requirements. Overall, we are happy with the performance.

We like something called Virtual Volumes and how we can do thin provisioning. These are the main things that we usually look for.

Redundancy-wise it's quite good. We've got redundancy at each level.

At the present time, there is nothing we see that we are lacking.

It is pretty stable. That's the reason we bought one more 3PAR. We just had the 7400, but got the 8200.  We may procure the 8400 as well. Overall the platform's quite stable.

In terms of scalability, it's quite scalable.

The support that we receive from HPE is pretty good and that's one of the major factors. Sales - anybody can come and sell it - but the main thing is support. After sales, support is the main thing and they've got a really wonderful team back at our place.

We were predominantly an HPE customer, but in the middle we had other vendors also come in. But, gradually we are going back to HPE.

From a technical perspective, I'm not directly involved. I'm mainly from a management and overall overview of the system.

Nowadays, from a storage point of view, there are so many vendors in the market. So cost is one of the factors that pushed us to go with HPE 3PAR. Cost-wise they're pretty competitive.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• stability
• after sales support 
• cost.

The experience that we have had with HPE is pretty good.

Product-wise, it's good. It differs from environment to environment. What we require, for the criteria of our environment, is met quite well.

I would say do a PoC. Have a look at the solution. It's pretty stable, scalable. I don't see a problem, why anybody should not go with HPE. They've got multiple solutions in terms of storage also. 3PAR is not just a single solution. They have, they can cater to a hybrid. A lot of things are there. SSDs, a normal SATA disk, high end or low end. So it depends on what your requirements are. You should be doing a PoC just to confirm that it is it.