HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

It's pretty stable and scalable. I think we've only had a couple of issues, three disk outages in six years.

I don't have any complaints.

More than five years.

It meets our needs for now.

We have Care Packs for 3PAR and we are very satisfied with this part. On the C7000, we have six-hour auto repair. They're very proactive, so we are very satisfied with that service.

I'm not working with 3PAR directly. I'm a manager. But from the experience of my employees, I don't see that they have any issues with complexity. To be honest, we have a senior administrator with a lot of experience with 3PAR and other vendors' storage, so I think it's not too complex for him.

It's the basis of the storage of one of our five companies. All ERP and customer products rely on 3PAR storage. It's used heavily every day.

It's fast and it's affordable.

No complaints. 

No downtime, it's stable, and they are very happy with it.

I can't say anything about this because they bought the necessary size two years ago, and they don't need to expand for now.

The support is good. Fortunately, we have not needed to call them many times.

It's much better than two other platforms we have, one of them is EVA4400. EVA is less affordable and not as powerful. It works, but it's very much less powerful. For example, six months ago during a restore, the production environment was completely blocked, it worked slowly. This doesn't happen on full-flash 3PAR.

It was straightforward. No problems.

When we look to work with a vendor we look for 

• response to our calls
• affordability 
• that they have been in the market many years
• the cost.

I rate it an eight out of 10 for the reasons I've already mentioned: the affordability, the speed.

We are trying to create a valued addition, because the project is still on, and we are looking at how it can benefit the business more. It's a new solution in place which we are looking at now.

At this stage I can't give you any feedback on that. It's too early.

No stability issues at this stage.

Scalability is the main purpose, that I can scale out with something, where I can keep adding more modules onto it.

Tech support is good. They're knowledgeable. The people with whom I'm dealing are pretty good. We go through the usual channels, but right now we have a partner in place who is helping us out.

We were running on some technologies which were going off the market, and we wanted to upgrade them. So we looked to put 3PAR in place, and we are moving into 3PAR now.

It was not complex. It's pretty straightforward. It took approximately two and a half months, the project which we have run through it. So it's pretty good. And now that our actual deployment starts off, we'll get to know the actual time lines on it.

When we look to work with a vendor we look at their reputation, and along with that is the way it can be scaled up. Also, the new technology innovations which can can be added to your portfolio must be excellent. That's where we started off moving into HPE.

At this stage I would rate it somewhere around eight out of 10, because there were some initial challenges in finalizing the design, etc. Now we are looking into the cloud solution as well, so we'll see how that goes.

We are using many products from HPE. We are using storage savers and 3PAR, and even the private cloud. We are happy with the service, the products, the support. This is what we like most. It is only not about buying something. The support and the services you get after buying is the most important thing in IT.

Anything that will make the datacenter more scalable, more available, that would be great. Also, easier to operate or monitor, that would be good.

I haven't had any reports about any incident or problem, so I assume it's stable and working fine. It's good.

In general what HPE can provide, it can meet my needs.

Usually the support is through partners, a contract after the sale, and they are always available. Kuwait is a small country so they are onsite. We don't have a problem contacting tech support.

When it comes to upgrades, if they're complex, they're complex from our side. We need to identify what we need exactly, and most of the time this is done with a consultant or in cooperation with HPE and their partners. Once we know exactly what we need and what we're missing, then it's straightforward.

Because we are a university, it may be that our IT is more sensitive because the whole learning process depends on the IT services. So any problem, even for a short duration, would cause a big headache.

I give 3PAR an eight out of 10. I'm happy. We are happy. We cannot give it a perfect score because they need to improve more. We always we need to push them.

The reason why we chose 3PAR is because it was future proof. It had some features that the cabinets we were looking for at at the moment when we bought the 3PAR storage, that were not available in the market, like theme provisioning and the movement of blocks, which are really fast and are not so fast. In this way, we can put the hot data where it should be. It also has a really powerful tool to measure data, how it is working, the performance, and if we have any bottlenecks.

Also, it does not have any spare disks, so we did not have to use this as a spare. We even had the spare space. So, we had a lot of features which were not not available for all the cabinets in the market, at the time, when we bought this storage.

For me, the main issue with 3PAR right now is its cost problem. Right now, there are some other storage cabinets that can do what 3PAR can do; what 3PAR used to do a long time ago. Now, they can do it as well with a more revised budget. So, the main problem for 3PAR right now is cost.

It is a really stable product. We have not had any major issues at the moment. For us, it is a really stable product.

For us, scalability is fine.

We have a contract where we have field engineer. He is working for more customers, but is allocated for us. So, we do not have any issues at all.

It was straightforward.

We used our support field engineer. They helped us on the setup. For us, it was not a big deal because of that.

HPE is changing on the licensing way, because in the past, you had to apply for a license for everything. Now, they have made a combo for all the licenses, which is more helpful, but there are a few things which are not completely included in the product. Talking from a license point of view, to be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for reputation. Also, we want to have confidence in the product. We want to know a product has been deployed for a lot of customers. So, we are looking for a mature product as well.

• High resiliency with four controllers, no performance impact on single controller failure
• Cage protection
• Performance
• Easy to use and maintain

Failover times.

Yes, we have had a few issues with stability.

No, we haven't had any issues with scalability.

Very good but not perfect.

HPE does the initial setup (hardware and initialization) which makes things much easier. Using 3PAR is simple and straightforward, unlike its competitors such as EMC.

Current licensing model is good. Future users can optimize by buying the best suited model for their needs and future growth plans.

I wasn't part of that effort at the time, so I can't comment.

Go for it, it's a good choice, unless it's too big/expensive for your needs.

Switching from HDDs to SSDs, because of better performance (IOPS) and, hopefully, reliability.

No improvement for the organization, it's "only" storage, but due to moving from one system to two systems, we are now able to use fail-over and load-balancing functions on different locations.

• OS/patch/firmware installation can only be done by a division of HPE Support, which must be coordinated.
• Error reporting and alarming needs additional VMs per node (SPOCK) and cannot be integrated in HPE Remote Support, which is used for all the other HPE devices (FC Switches, Proliant Servers, etc.).

Approximately nine months, and still in the migration process, so a total assessment of the whole product and it's functionality is still not possible.

So far, no issues with stability.

So far, no issues with scalability.

The level of technical support which we have used up to now has been good, but luckily there have been no major issues. I cannot rate how such issues would be solved.

It's not a different solution, same vendor with the follow-up product, with newer technology and more space.

The setup of the storage itself was OK and not too complex, but there are additional VMs (or appliances) needed for remote support, reporting, etc., which can only be set up by HPE or a partner technician.

The new licensing model includes every function for the same price, and in terms of price, everything is possible if HPE is interested in getting the contract.

Yes, Tintri T850, but at the time of the PoC the solutions provided by Tintri were not scalable enough for future demands.

Everything works as expected but, as stated above, we are still in the process of migrating our data from our old storage.