HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

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.