HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It is performing great. We are using it for our data store and everything, so that is 3PAR mainly using it. It is a school, so we use the management system and all the virtual machines on the 3PAR.

It is fast and stable. It is really helping us a lot in terms of data store, etc.

The Call Home feature is really a great feature, so I do not need to monitor the 3PAR. The 3PAR team is monitoring it and letting me know if there are any problems.

I am not sure because I am not an expert in 3PAR solutions. I do not know what the new features are. Already what we have, it is huge for us.

We have been using it for more than two year with no issues at all. I think it is really stable.

Right now, we have only one. If I need one more, then I buy one more box and attach it to it. I can scale up to whatever I want. I am not nervous about scaling up at all.

I hardly need to call their support. 

I did for when we were going to upgrade our 3PAR, because initially the 3PAR has some blank space for hard drives. So, we ordered additional hard drives over there, so that was a time they need to come up and update all the framers and everything before we were doing it. So, it was already taken care by the 3PAR team, and it was excellent support, too.

We were using a different HP storage. I think it was MSA 7000 series storage that we were using. Right now, it is 3PAR.

It was pretty much straightforward, because our network is not that complex.

We were looking at competitive product just from a financial point of view to have multiple quotations. So, that is why we looked at a different vendor, but as an IT team, we had 3PAR and HPE on the mind already.

Go for 3PAR, straight away as I am very happy with this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a school, we always have low budgets. We are a nonprofit organization. We do not have too much budget, so we care about prices, discounts, and especially about the product quality. The last 16 years, we have been an HPE customer. We are very much happy with HPE products.

The primary use is our new datacenter. We're using it to increase performance. 

It's performing really well.

Having moved over from a LeftHand, which was seven or eight years old, there's a massive boost in performance. It has definitely improved the speed, the responsiveness, of all our applications, which is always good.

• Generally, the resilience and the redundancy of the system.
• Speed has obviously helped.
• We do a lot of replication, as well, with our other 3PARs, so it's keeping that data synchronized.

Just generally the management - which I know, they introduced a few new tools yesterday, here at the HPE Discover conference. Generally, the management of the multiple systems that we have. That's really the only problem, always having to go to all these separate tools to manage everything.

The stability is so far so good. It has been pretty seamless. We've used it now about eight months and it's been stable since then.

We planned for scalability so we bought four enclosures, which was overkill, but it's planning ahead.

We switched mainly because of the end users, the customers, the guys that use the systems and the applications. They're the ones who start screaming when things are slow. We used to have that problem, where things were slow due to the storage bottleneck. But now we're finding other bottlenecks, so it's good.

It was straightforward. I was in the datacenter with one of the HPE engineers and we went through everything. He was knowledgeable, he retired about a week after he set it up. So he had a lot of experience.

We did try a few other vendors during a trial period. We simulated failovers just for fun, just to see how quickly they respond. Some of them had issues getting parts to us immediately.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• reliability 
• availability of parts. 

I give an eight out of 10, from working with it and using the features, but also seeing what some of the other competitors have out there. One of the big ones is Pure Storage which I was a big fan of. So, they were the competitor to the 3PAR, as well as Nimble, which was obviously acquired.

It came down to costing as well, in the end. But to be fair to the 3PAR, it wasn't comparing like with like. It was comparing an all-flash array with a hybrid 3PAR array.

Try to decide quickly. Have your criteria and stick to your criteria, rather than trying ten million different solutions and taking years to implement. That was the biggest issue we had, the fact that there are so many different vendors out there. If you're trying to create a proof of concept, it just eats away at time. At the end of the day, there are a lot of nice things with the 3PAR that made us select it. Try not to waste too much time trying everything.

We're using all-flash 3PAR to set up a private cloud hosting platform within our company; so for the amalgamation DCC work, bringing smaller datacenters onto the sites. We use that as our primary storage. We use RCG technology to replicate across our two datacenters.

 It's seamless. We've had no issues at all.

Certainly now, with the all-flash arrays, the performance that we get out of those means that we can host far more VMs on a smaller virtual volume. We get much better performance out of those volumes now.

• The Remote Copy Group is amazing for the replication stuff. 
• We also use dynamic optimization to go between tiers. 
• The reporting, as well. We can quickly see performance per CPG and per LUN. You can drill right down to see actual performance to the virtual volumes themselves. That's really good.

We're going to start to explore integration with public clouds, and I know that that's something that's very hot in the storage space at the moment. That's something we're looking at. 

Apart from that, we're looking forward to going to the next firmware major release 331. And also the InfoSight stuff that's coming along the pipeline.

3PAR, for us, has been incredibly stable. We haven't had many issues at all, except at periods of change; in firmware updates, that kind of stuff. 

We have seen some issues prior, but those have been resolved very quickly by the engineer who's been working with us on the firmware upgrade. We've rolled back, fixed those issues, and then been able to proceed.

Really scalable. That's one of the reasons we're here this week at HPE Discover, is to have a look at what options we've got to increase the space in our 3PAR, because our platform's growing. Our storage will grow with it.

We use support all the time. Once you get to the level-2, level-3 guys, then usually they've got the right ideas.

It's getting better. I think escalation processes have improved dramatically over the last 12 months. We're engaged with our account managers as well, to help improve that process. We're quite strongly engaged with HPE about the technical review and support process. We have had issues in the past, I'm not going to lie. But it's getting better.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we're pretty much an HPE house. But I think the options you have to expand - within the storage space - you've got to have all those options. Especially performance. I think that's what we're looking for. And the support, as well.

It's an eight out of 10. It's pretty solid. We've had a few problems. But, from a performance point of view, our customers are very happy and so are we.

I'd take a serious look at it. I think 3PAR is a great product.

Mass storage. 

At the moment, it's performing very well, but we need to look to expand and innovate.

With the HPE GreenLake Flex feature, we can grow as required, and at present, we are growing faster than our requirements, so we need to look to develop and innovate.

Flexibility.

The ability to not only be integrated with hybrid IT, but on-prem.

Stability is fine.

At the moment it's under-scaling. We grew quicker than we expected. 

We know what our issue is and that's why we have to look at Nimble and what it has to offer us at the moment. At the moment, it looks like the solution that we're going to be moving to.

We've been using 3PAR now for the last three years. Prior to that, the EVA 6000 for five years.

We scoped out and scaled 3PAR for three years. We're now approaching that three-year mark, so we're here at the HPE Discover conference to re-approach and scale and future view for the next three to five years.

This is just my initial view, but I'm going to give it eight out of 10. I need to do a lot more in-depth research into the product and how it's going to benefit Aldermore Bank.

Stick with what you know and rely on your instincts.

It's used as online storage; for almost all applications we have one.

Performance, in general, is good.

Primarily good performance because it's an all-flash system. Basically, the applications run faster.

Synchronicity mode through the application we use.

There is a caching solution, I know it's in development, to increase the performance further.

It's very stable. Yes, we've had issues with it. Sometimes control is rebooting and nobody knows why, so there are issues.

It's very scalable.

We've spoken with technical support about the above issues, they have not found the root cause yet.

There are several important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• quality of the products
• the technology
• cost of the solution, of course.

I would give it a seven out of 10, overall. It's a little bit difficult to figure out where the capacity is used. There is deduplication that, of course, saves space, but it sometimes it's hard to find out where the space is used. If you delete something, do you get it back? So it's not very transparent regarding capacity.

In general, the solution is good.

We use 3PAR for storage of all the city's data, everything from videos of sewer lines, to orthophotos for our GIS system, to storage of our databases, data in general.

It's performing awesomely.

We're able to expand more. It's faster, more efficient. The technology is 10-years, 20-years advanced from where we were before.

• Ease of use
• Low power consumption

We saved a ton of power just turning off our old one when we went to the new one.

All of a sudden something didn't work. We've never had downtime where data wasn't available, because it's got multiple ways of staying up. It doesn't usually go down. But we've had some issues when we were trying to upgrade, doing some firmware upgrades.

We've never had downtime in four or five years now. Except when we want to.

It's very scalable.

We've had our issues, but overall they've been pretty good. Doing some upgrades, we've had some problems.

We were using HPE EVA. The support on our old EVAs, the cost to keep them up was more than going to a new one. Then, by the time we added the power savings and the reduced space and the heating, it was just so much less that it was well worth it.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria for us is ease of connectivity. I also like the fact that I know Hewlett Packard Enterprises. I've worked with them for a long time. They're very reliable.

I give it a 10 out of 10 because it's just been awesome. We have four 3PARs running our enterprise, the city.

Don't be afraid. It can do just about everything you want to do; for a small/medium business, to a large business. I'm running a small city and all our storage is 3PAR.

I am from Dubai. We are one of the major system integrators in Egypt. We have customers using some other EMC Storages, and they have some performance issues. When we introduced the 3PAR Storage, mainly for the virtualization, they were very happy, because it is very useful for the performance and utilization points. The customers have been very happy since we introduce them to 3PAR Storage.

I am a system integrator, so we sell a lot of 3PAR Storage to our customers. Our business has increased compared to previous days. 

• For virtualization, the failure rate is much less compared to traditional storage where you need more hard drives.
• When it come to 3PAR, it uses chunklets, so it is easier for the customers.

As a management tool, it would help us to have more customer reports. Even though, we use it for other things, if can improve more things in the supporting, like the reporting tool, it would make it easier for the customers.

The stability is really good. Even though there is some downtime, the support is really fast. 

It is a very scalable solution. 

Our customers, they are smaller customers. Very few customers will go to the maximum, but for us, this is fine.

The support is really fast. There is very good support for 3PAR Storage.

It was really helpful. Because when I was a customer, having a downtime in the night, we called them (the support team), they immediately reacted. It was product tech support, and within two or three hours, the problem was solved. 

It was business critical. It was a multinational company. All the data was down. But within a few hours, we sorted it out. The customer really appreciated HPE, as well as the partner.

It is very straightforward. It is very simple.

I have sold at least 10 to 15 storages. But I have only had one incident, out of these 10 to 15 where HPE could not install fast enough. Not bad for failure rates.

We highly recommend HPE 3PAR, plus the latest other storage solution from Nimble, too. We highly recommend 3PAR to all our customers. We are replacing lot of other vendors (EMC, even Dell). We are replacing a lot of storage solutions with HPE 3PAR.  

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I am a partner. Even though, we are partners with HPE, we are also partners with EMC Oracle, but we prefer HPE. With HPE, the support, reliability, and credibility are much higher than with any other products.

The primary case is the utilization of VMware, and it is performing well.

We have much better performance than we managed earlier and are now saving lots of space. We feel as we spread things out that we have become more efficient in our performance.

Its consolidation.

We are waiting for compression.

It is performing great; no downtime.

We do not have a need for it yet, but it should be no problem.

Technical support has been very good when I have used them before. I felt like I was reaching the right person. They call me to check up when they have seen that we have some problem and tell us what we should do to fix it.

We used Nimble previously, before it was an HPE product.

We had a big issue with the performance. Last year, we spoke with HPE's people, and they recommended this solution and we are now certified.

The initial setup was straightforward.

HPE helped us with the initial setup.

Speak with HPE and describe your whole scenario before buying it, so you do not buy and hope.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability. That I feel I can talk to the vendor and they understand what I want.