HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it for our main production system, for SAP, and also for SharePoint, Microsoft products.

We have a good relationship with HPE, but we still have some challenges in the Arabic implementation and in migration, but for daily work, it's fine.

We built a DR solution based on this, we can sustain our business for any amount of time, 24/7. We have minimized downtime to 10 minutes now, because of this solution.

Support.

More flexibility and expansion, and also relocation, a cloud solution.

It's stable. We haven't have any issues, unless it's human error, until now.

We have issues with scalability because 3PAR has limited storage capacity, so we have to invest more after a while.

We have gotten to level 3, the last level of support. We had some high issues with them, but they were fixed. It took some time. The issue with it was, when it's in production, even one day is too long.

For storage we had Dell EMC, and we used to have IBM but not any more.

IBM is not a Windows platform, and Dell, they didn't have storage at that time. Now they have EMC. So they both have a full solution, like HPE. And they are presenting a solution to us everyday.

What is most important to me in a vendor is that when I need them there, they're available.

I give it an eight out of 10 because of scalability.

HPE is a full solution, and they have a bigger scale for everything. You can build something cheaper when you combine companies, but there will be problems after a while with support and troubleshooting. Everybody will blame the other.

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.

It's advantageous in terms of the cost, in terms of the performance, and taking up less space. We are exploring more with this storage.

It has features which are really giving advantages to our company, because we as a service provider are providing the services, infrastructure, and applications - or software as a service - to other entities. In that case, a virtual domain has been introduced in 3PAR and we can create their own pool where they are able to manage their own resources, instead of we, as storage admin, getting involved in that.

The features we need to provide to the different entities, it's meeting our criteria. That is the reason we went ahead with 3PAR, and we implemented it in the environment. So far, so good. People are asking for the services and, yes, we do provide the services through the 3PAR. 

And IOPs which has been gravely needed in terms of the back end and in terms of the front end, to meet application needs, I'm glad it's meeting up. So we are not encountering any risk at all.

So far, no disaster has happened, so I can't comment any more than that on the stability.

Since it's going to expand to a 240 disk maximum, in terms of scalability I have to go for another controller with the nodes and stuff. But based on the model, if you go ahead with a good different model, it supports more disk space in your enclosure areas.

So far I've only opened one case, in the beginning when I implemented a 3PAR in my environment, and I can say I'm satisfied.

It is straightforward. It's user friendly.

We did an evaluation comparing it with the EMC, and we determined that it's better to go ahead with this.

We started to initiate a business continuity project, to cover disaster recovery scenarios, and we decided to implement a 3PAR solution for the Remote Copy functionality from this area. We can share this with software integration and cover the business requirements.

We have never had problems, it's running well. The other point is the performance that the storage provides. We currently use 3PAR with full flash, and the performance is really amazing.

I saw recently saw that they will integrate the predictive software from Nimble with 3PAR, and I think that's a good move. With the next firmware release, software release, we will really profit from this integration. I think it's a really good idea that HPE is now integrating this as a possibility on 3PAR.

It will completely meet our needs, moving forward.

It's difficult to say anything about tech support, because it's running so well that we are not regularly in contact with support. I think we had some issues during the implementation phase. We had, I would say, two or three times where we contacted the support, which was really good. I have no complaints. The knowledge and the competence were good.

Because we are so happy with 3PAR, it's so reliable for us, for the moment we don't see any move to Nimble storage. It depends on the strategy from HPE. They will probably combine the two storage technologies; I don't know what will be the future.

I think the storage is very good, the way it stores, the thin provisioning it provides, and the data protection. And it's easy to deploy in any environment. We are using VMware. So for me, it's a right click and it's deployed. We can configure and create LUNS very easily with 3PAR management, and the interface is very user-friendly. Easily understandable.

For me, now, it's a stable product.

Of course it will meet our needs going forward. We have just utilized maybe 30 to 40 percent. It should be scalable for up to five more years.

We have proactive support on it, the logs are being sent to the proactive team, they are working fine. Before we notice that there's a problem in the storage, or any part, any hard disk, they already notify us, and the part is already delivered. The engineer is already coming in, and the support is very good.

I think HPE is the best because of the after-sale support they provide. Not all companies provide that much support. I don't want to name any vendors on this, but some vendors, when you have a problem they will tell you, "Our engineer is not available," or "The product is not available," or "The part is not here, it will come in two weeks," and that sort of thing. But HPE support, I feel it is the one. Within four hours, the product is delivered. Within the next hour after product delivery, the engineer is available to support me.

If you design it right and implement it right, it's headache free. Just keep it there and it does what it's suppose to do. Gives us peace of mind.

1. Reliability
2. The support channel

Nothing comes to mind. Most of these products usually come with more features than you need.

Whatever failures you have, there is no single point of failure. So, any failure, you get an alert, you have time, you plan the fix, the replacement, and so on. So your operations are intact.

In terms of scalability, I think it will meet our company's needs for the near future, but, later on, no. I don't think it will. It's not because it's not scalable, it's just that technology changes so much. Three or four years, you get something new.

The support channel, you open a ticket, they follow up, the replacement part comes to your doorstep in a maximum of three working days. And the price we paid for that, upfront, is very minimal. So, when you buy an HPE product, if you pay, say 10 or 15 percent more, you get the Care Pack for a total of five years. Other vendors, they charge much more for the same deliverables.

When looking to work with a vendor I would look for manageability features. Monitoring, central monitoring, alerts, mass deployment, functionality. If you have one server, two servers fine, but if you have 100, these pay back easily.

We are using it for the installation as part of our customer solutions. We are not end user, we are integrator, and we are using it in big IT infrastructure projects for our different customers, mainly for NATO.

They are reliable. They are fulfilling their requirements. They have the right features for our customers. It's the overall combination, together with the complete architecture of the servers from HPE.

There's nothing at the moment. Everyone is pretty happy.

From our perspective, and from our experience with the customer, it's a really stable solution. We have no problems with the customer, no negative feedback from them, and we have been relying for years on close cooperation with HPE in this area.

I think our customers will use it for the long term, even though they are now on the way to change. I think the special environment we are working in, they will use it for some years, and it is scalable.

The support from HPE in our projects is always very good. We have been working together for 15 years in this customer environment, and one of the main reasons to stay with HPE is the very good support we have had from all the HPE people over these years. That's one of our main success factors.

I give it a nine out of 10 because it fulfills what we need and, as I said before, it's reliable and it satisfies our customers. That's the most important point for us; to have satisfied customers.

It's the performance that we need. Before, we had another system and we noticed that the performance wasn't enough, so now we have two types of 3PAR systems, the 20850 all-flash and also the 8450 all-flash. We can really see that the performance is much, much better and the latencies are much lower. That's what we needed. 

The performance.

The new interface, the OneView, is a nice interface. 

The command line is very extensive, a lot of tools so in comparison to other vendors. It's one of the great things about 3PAR, that you can really drill down on performance, get statistics, really know how your system is internally performing. You don't need to wonder what is happening, you can really see it inside.

For performance it's all okay, but we are also hoping for the compression feature, hoping that we can have not only good performance but also more gain in our capacity; we are still waiting for it to be deployed.

We have had a painful migration to transform from the old way of doing dedupe, in version 2, to the new way of doing dedupe; and also getting rid of the old CPGs with the old way of storing the data. So it's a bit painful, cost a lot of manpower to do it.

One big thing that we really need - it's a simple thing - is longer names for our volumes. Now they're only 28 characters and we try to have the same name convention as our VMware guys, the datastore names. We want the same name, but if we want to create a SnapShot, and we want to add something - an underscore or something like that and maybe another number - then we have issues. It's only 28 characters and we then hit our limit. Twenty-eight is too low nowadays. I will ask our Technical Account Manager to do an enhancement on that. It should be 64, or at least more than 32 characters. 

It sounds simple but, somehow, I think it's a deeper integration issue and it's not so easy to change. But I need to ask for it because now we are trying to use SnapShots for copying production data to servers and we need those extras, a space, character spaces, to create a longer name.

We haven't had any downtime. There have been some small issues sometimes with an upgrade, a link went down but we didn't investigate further. Or sometimes we send it to support but it takes too long. But no downtime, not like we hear from other customers. Sometimes they really have a node that reboots; or our colleagues in Hungary, they had some issues, but we haven't had any downtime or the like with our 3PAR systems. We're happy about that.

Setup was very easy. I think even for the 8450 - we had also prepared ourselves -but in one day we had installed everything and it was up and running. So it's easy to set up.

I rate it about seven out of 10. It's not bad but it's also not the best. We had some issues, now they are resolved, but one issue existed for a year. We needed to migrate everything, and all the extra work needed to be done by our VMware colleagues, and they would not be so happy if we ask again to transform something.

Also some things were promised, like turning on/turning off dedupe and compression on the fly. But now it will create another one, compress, and then migrate it via the VMware tools. So we are really depending on vMotions. We wanted to remove the load from our VMware colleagues so that we could say, we will do the transformation to compress, you don't need to worry.