HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

The ease-of-use, reliability, and the value I get for the capacity are the most valuable features. All of the deduplication and compression features allow me to buy much less storage to fulfill my business needs. I don't have very many support issues with it.

The benefit to the company is less down time. I can put my time towards other things, such as finding ways to increase performance or doing more proactive tasks.

Support has gone down a little bit in the past few years. It's hard to get the right person initially and sometimes you have to wait for a call back. It was better when it was 3PAR.

Stability is great and it's getting better every year. I have less and less issues as HPE works on the software.

Our newer array is much more scalable than I had in the past. I don't anticipate ever reaching a limit on it.

Overall, technical support is great, other than some problems getting connected with the right person. But once you get to the right technical resources, they are very easy to work with and quickly resolve our issues.

Initially, we were using another HPE DBA product and we were hitting its limits. So this was a great fit for us. We bought it just before HPE acquired it and the solution has been great ever since. This solution replaced a product that wasn't scaling well for us. Now we have a nice, scalable solution.

When we are looking for a vendor, we want somebody who can be a true partner with us and not just somebody trying to sell us something.

I was not involved in the setup of the original 3PARs we have, but I was involved in five subsequent installations. They were straightforward compared to other storage products that I've used, such EMC.

I'm sure they probably looked at EMC, but I wasn't there for the initial sale. For now, we are staying with HPE.

Don’t have any second thoughts and just go with it. It's really a great product and should fulfill most business needs. It is easy to use.

We have used HPE 3PAR Flash Storage in the past for all our IT data. For example, we have used it for claims, office management, business intelligence, business information. It can be used for a lot of purposes.

The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year.

I have been using HPE 3PAR Flash Storage for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage was scalable in the past but in the current market, it is a four out of ten. You are not able to add more power to the solution, it is not stackable.

We have approximately 6,000 users using this solution.

The technical support is good.

I have used Nimble and Primera.

The installation is not that difficult nowadays. It takes approximately two days.

When we need to do the implementation HPE comes with us and does it together with our maintenance department and an external company.

We have three engineers that do the maintenance of the solution.

The price of the license depends. Some people expect more from the hardware. Some expect more from the licensing, and that is because you can receive several licenses nowadays, such as the terabyte license. You buy the storage, and you pay extra for the terabyte license for the software. There is a one-time purchase for the license and you pay annually for the maintenance.

I have evaluated NetApp.

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage is old and is obsolete and we are moving to newer versions of the system.

HPE has several storage options, such as Nimble. HPE has a lot of operating systems for their storage, and they all have a different approach. They were all from different companies which HPE bought, for example, Nimble and Primera.

I would not recommend this solution anymore. I would advise others to look for new types of storage solutions.

I rate HPE 3PAR Flash Storage a four out of ten.

We use it only for storage.

Its stability is the most valuable. It has soft alerts. When an alert is raised, we get a call from HP saying that there is this type of alert, and they need to do a remote session to check things. Similarly, for firmware updates, they get in touch to say that a firmware upgrade is required on your storage. They schedule a time and take control remotely to upgrade the firmware. In all such cases, there is no downtime. Everything is done when a full-fledged operation is going on.

Its user interface is also quite good. We are quite accustomed to this user interface. We can easily take a look at the current usage or the amount of storage. It is quite easily understandable, and I can present those things to my seniors or other people who are not that tech-savvy, and they can easily understand what we are trying to tell them. We can easily show them that we are using around 87% of the storage, so we need to plan for another tree and things like that.

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree.

I have been using this solution for four years. 

It is very reliable. In these four years, we have not had any big failure or faced any issue.

Scalability is not an issue. If someone has 3PAR and within one or two years, they find that they need to add more storage, it would not be an issue. It will scale perfectly fine. 

We have already consumed around 87% of the storage. We may have to add another tree. We had a discussion with HPE, and it was quite good. The only reason for not going forward with it was that the amount of money that we will be spending in just upgrading the storage has a life of only two and a half years now. We are now evaluating whether we should invest this much money for two and a half years, or we should invest more and buy a completely new storage. We can then use this storage for other backups and all those less important steps.

From the application side, we have 50 users. There are also a lot of other users who are connecting to the applications and the storage because their data resides on the storage. For its maintenance, we don't require any engineers.

We haven't raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR, but they always call us if there is any soft alert or any firmware upgrade. The only thing that we have to do is to schedule a remote session during which they will perform the update activities.

Before HPE 3PAR, we were using Dell EMC. We have used three storages from EMC. The first one was very reliable. It was 300 series that we were using in 2003 or 2004. After that, we replaced it with the 400 series EMC storage, but it was not that reliable. Every three to four months, one of the disks would fail invariably, and we had to raise a ticket. After some time, they will review the ticket. They didn't ask any questions, and they would just replace it and take the faulty one. After that, we moved from the Dell EMC storage to HPE 3PAR, which has been very reliable. We haven't faced any issues in all these years.

The initial setup is really smooth. 

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree, but when we purchased it, it was okay with us. We had compared it with EMC and other solutions, and it was okay at that point in time. 

Our storage has a lifespan of seven to eight years. When you purchase it, you need to keep a headroom of around 40% to 50%. After three to four years, you generally plan for an upgrade. The price is not so bad today for two years or so, and within a year, I might find that I have to upgrade or increase the storage. This usually happens when there is a radical change or a new application has come that is consuming a lot of data, but generally, there is a plan for the amount of data that we generate and the storage upgrade. 

3PAR is very much reliable. In these four years, I've not raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR. 

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten. It has good support, good UI, and good reliability.

We are using it for Oracle Databases. We're are also using it for VMware and NetBackup. It's one of the storage solutions for NetBackup.

The primary system comes with not too much software and is pretty simple and straightforward. You're not really using too much. The solution doesn't make things that are too complicated.

The replicating software is very good and the duplication part of it is very efficient.

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution offers good stability.

It has a good ability to scale.

The replicating software is pretty complicated. I probably would have put it on a sequence.

I've been using the solution for about a year now. It hasn't been too long.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

In general, the solution can scale. That shouldn't be a problem.

The technical support on offer is very nice. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We're very satisfied with their level of service so far.

We were using Synergy. The company wanted to go to an all-flash drive. At the time, HPE was one of the biggest manufacturers of all-flash drive. Therefore, it made sense to switch.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy to go back and look at it. It wasn't too complex at all.

The solution is moderately priced. It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive option.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with HPE.

Anyone interested in any solution should probably research the software that comes with their own system a little bit better. If you do that, there's a chance that you might not buy some of the things that we bought and that were defaulted on setup. That was not good. Knowing what works together well will help in the long run. Don't be afraid if a third-party asks you questions. They're probably just trying to get to the bottom of how your setup looks.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten overall.

We run a High Performance Computing grid for Nuance and run GPFS on top of 3PAR. We are using SAS-based 3PAR for data and the 8450s, all SSD, for the metadata.

It has been performing great. We have had SSD based 3PARs since 2013 and we have only lost about four drives so far.

We are an R&D group, so it does not change the function. However, it improves the performance for our grids. 

It allows us to buy less capacity for performance. We would buy spindles just for the IOPs, so we were wasting space for the performance. Now, we don't have to.

The performance is the most valuable. We had the spindle problem that most places have. With the chunklet technology, it allowed us to spread our load across all our drives, unlike traditional raid groups that can leave some disks idle while other take the load.

It is more specific to High Performance Computing, but I would like to see a faster Ethernet connection. Right now, it is 10G. If they could do multiple hundred gigs to speed up the transfer from the array to the servers, that would be good. We are trying to get away from Fibre Channel.

When we went to 3PAR, it has the Call-Home function. Now, I do not have to do a whole lot for monitoring and problems. The sales engineer (SE) will show up with a drive, and say "You've got a drive down." Therefore, we don't even monitor it.

This makes our job so much easier.

We typically max them out. When we buy an array, we buy a SAS-based array with 480 drives. We use a clustered file system on it that prefills the LUNs, so it looks likes it's full the day that we get it. We receive sales calls asking, "You are beyond 95 percent full, do you want to buy another one?" However, we have not even started yet! 

When we want to scale, we buy another one. We spread the filesystem horizontally across arrays.

We used the technical support early on for tuning and configuration. We went pretty deep with tech support onsite to get the most out of the arrays.

We had the MSA P2000 series previously. We had 120 of them in one data center. Therefore, we went from the MSAs to the 3PAR, and the decision-making was based on the performance. Our issues was neither a throughput nor an IOP problem, but more of a file open issue. We have billions of files where you need a lot of different spindles with different heads moving around independently of each other. 3PAR provided this for us.

We first started with the 3PAR V400 series, which is two racks that had to be wired together to provide 600TB of storage.  With the 15TB SSD based arrays we replace 6 racks of V400's with 8U of 8450's. 

In R&D, it is hard to put an ROI on time. We are a worldwide company with Ph.D.'s working on the system 24/7. We don't want them waiting around so everything we do to speed up their process helps.

You can find cheaper storage but you pay for performance.  3PARs performance has been consistent.  I have seen other arrays slow down as the load increases due to controller saturation.

We had been an HPE customer before, and when we first started with the MSAs, we had an issue where HPE got a batch of drives in from one of their vendors that had a bad firmware on it. Basically, we had to replace 960 drives with the system online.  HPE recognized replacing 750G drives with 500G drives was less capacity than what we purchased so they gave us three more arrays just so they could match the space. That was a huge turning point for us going to HPE. We have had vendors say, "It's your problem. Deal with it." We have had vendors walk away from us. For HPE to actually come up and do this, that was a big deal.

We benchmark vendor solutions ourselves, and knowing the internal technology that makes it work is important.

We had a project where we did get somebody else's storage. It got to the point where we could not keep it performing enough to keep up with the load. We ended up just getting rid of it after a year of problems.

With our 3PARs, we have never lost data.

I would really push the chunklet technology. That is the main benefit out of 3PAR. The way it subdivides a disk into 1GB chunks. 

For high-performance computing, we're always interested in innovation. The 3PAR solution, for example, with dedup and the chunklet concept is a piece of technology that nobody else has, and is a great advantage to our data center.

So the benefits from using 3PAR, for example, is that with the chunklets, we can get performance and features that we've never seen before. So, for example, a traditional customer will buy a storage array and deploy their files on the storage arrays. For us, for high performance computing, we buy multiple arrays and we distribute the loads across all the storage arrays. With the chunklets feature, we have the ability to distribute as much of the load as we have storage arrays. So, for example, if we want more performance, it's just a matter of buying more storage arrays and the load will distribute itself.

So one of the topics we always discuss with the 3PAR engineering team is the ability to have 3PAR run on standard hardware. Pretty much software-defined storage. That would be a really nice feature for us, because we always are trying to get the workload as close as possible to the CPUs. And in order to do that, you have to go software-defined.

The stability of the 3PAR and the DL servers is very reliable. As a matter of fact, when I was talking to HP sales, I was recommending to actually buy the servers with only 90 day warranty, as opposed to the three year warranty, because the servers are so reliable that they almost never fail, and we feel like overpaying for support where it's not needed.

We have 15,000 hard drives today across all our storage arrays. We have not reached the point yet where we don't see the 3PAR devices not being able to scale for us. The innovation, like flash introduction with 3PAR, is actually gonna accelerate the fact that we can get more performance and more capacity in the near future.

Technical support for 3PAR is very good. One of the advantages of using the 3PAR product is that devices are calling home. So what that means is that HP support will know about a problem before we realize we have a problem, which is a very nice feature, considering the fact that when HP can provide you feedback on when things gonna fail, how they will replace it, and it's always done within 24 hours.

The problem we had was scalability, and we tried a numerous amount of vendors, and HP, with its product portfolio, did a great job being cost effective and allowed us to scale to the point where we could run our business more effectively.

As a high performance computing environment, we needed storage and servers, and we're using 3PAR and the DL server family from HP. We double capacity every year, so we are looking always for scalable solutions that are cost effective, and HP has been a great partner so far for us.

So in our high performance computing environments, we are I/O bound, which means that we process about two to three million files a second. In order to process that data that quickly, in the past we had to buy a lot of spindles, the traditional hard drives. With flash, we don't have to buy that many spindles anymore. We can save money by just buying the capacity, and the performance with flash is tremendous. And the device we're using for that is the HP 3PAR 7450.

The partners or the vendors we worked with in the past are EMC, NetApp, and IBM. We actually had their hardware in for testing. Some of them we actually bought, based on what we thought was the right thing to do, considering the performance we saw during our tests. But in the long run, the support we got from those vendors wasn't always what it's supposed to be, and the performance also was sometimes an issue. The advantage with HP is that when we have issues, HP always brought in their engineering team. We could discuss with them the issues we have, and they were always fixing our issues in a decent amount of time.

When we look at products, we're always interested in knowing what the other vendors and other customers are offering. Unfortunately, in our world, in the high performance computing world, we're not like a traditional corporate IT environment, where feature sets are really important and performance and latency need to be predictable. In our world, it's all about performance and latency, and if you can get the features with it, that's great, but the features are not really driving the effort.

So the criteria we use for our products is always about performance, latency, and cost. The reason for that is as a high performance computing environment, we want to get the most of our hardware. The tests we run against the hardware are typically tests that most people don't run. It's heavy duty, long amount of time, and HP was the most reliable in our tests, and also the best performing.

Considering the amount of issues we have with it were pretty much zero. It's a very good price. There's a lot of innovation going on. There's a lot of support, but there's always room for improvement, so…

The advantage of using the 3PAR, even at a smaller scale, is that you get all the features from day one. So if you're a small shop or a large shop, either way the features are available to you and it allows you to scale really easily, to the point where you could start with something small and end up with something really large, without having to change your model and architecture.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

I've seen a lot of data storage systems. It's the only storage system you can watch over the application time and it keeps measuring it. We have some thresholds on our end on it, a very good graphical user interface and reporting. 

There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has limited flexibility in building replication solutions. There are limitations to the number of IOPS the system can do. It's not bad as it is doing its job. However, for the application, if you need a toolbox, you can build everything concerning periodic replication modes of synchronous or asynchronous three-site, four-site, with supported cascading which requires you to buy an IBM product. 

It also takes a few hours to one day to upgrade the system and sometimes; it takes more time because, in some HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage, you have an eight-node system. If you do an upgrade, you do it node by node and every node might take more than an hour.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past seven years.

Last year after summer, HPE had to locate replication groups getting stopped and took a lot of time to find out what's happening, and yet we still don't know what's happening over there. It feels like the message is quite clear after replicating from A to B, and it states that B is not responding very well.

There is a timeout, and it stops the replication group because there is no stability or consistency and is not good at that moment. So that might be negative, but when was the last time? I think in November of last year.

At one point, some remote copy groups stopped working, and we used a disaster recovery plan because, in production, we replicate everything from A to B and then split up into some remote copy groups, gathering together some data source and clusters. If one of those remote copy groups stops, you don't have DFP anymore and you have to restart them. And last year after starting one of those replication groups; we had some performance issues because they're trying to get in sync as soon as possible using all the resources, so we had to plan very well outside the business hours.

We have proactive datacenter care; I call it a storage advocate, and we can send every question to them and we get quick answers. They also help to find out if new releases are available and other services. For now, they have more insights on that. They have better sources sometimes, and I have better sources than them sometimes, but they do a great job and they also assisted us concerning the compression issue we had at the beginning.

It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available. 

We have done total cost of ownership calculations over the past five years, and we also ask for some cost prices for the sixth and seventh year so that we can get some insights into what happens after those five years. We have some systems that are five years old and we keep them because it's flash data storage. It's still almost a three terabyte solid-state drive, and the support cost is not that high. We'll have a look after that. I see other things happening on the Hitachi boxes with all those license defeats. This is also positive for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, everything is on the license. When we bought the systems, it was the case and then I've been reading something about it. You can buy the rest of the licenses. If you buy a system, that will not be replicated to another system, then you get a license without replication software.

The job of direct channel support to HPE 3PAR StoreServ is not an end of life or end of support but HPE Primera has now replaced it and I hope they get all the functionality in there like the HPE 3PAR. I remember it seems like HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera have support for volume plugins and that will be a big game if they can implement volumes on their system because that kind of release is much better than the datastore level.