HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

All of our servers are HPE, and it links all of the 12 remote ports that we have in Saudi Arabia, so we have only one centralized datacenter. It is the building ground of Saudi Ports' authority, to be honest.

The backup batteries, the WPS, could be better. We have two different vendors that provide the WPS, and HPE is one of them. When we had the outage we shut down the entire thing and tried the backup generators. The electricity was out for 20 minutes and the HPE battery didn't last 10 minutes.

A little over a year.

The stability is good. We had one incident where the downtime lasted less than 30 minutes. So I would say that it is accurate, fast and reliable.

It is pretty scalable. When we implemented the solution we started with only seven ports and we began to add new servers. Then we started publishing new services to our clients.

The technical support is quick and responsive. They will prioritize things based on how critical the problem is. If they need to be on site, they will come on site. If they don't, then they will fix the problem remotely; just log in and do what they need to do.

We have not looked at other vendors because we are very happy with HPE. We are currently looking to upgrade within HPE.

• It has a real active-active architecture, so one volume is served by both controllers with the processing advantage of a central global cache.
• It is easy to manage with the management console.
• It is always on with cache software.

It has given us higher performance over our servers/applications, which work better now than with our previous storage system.

It needs more host ports.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

There have been no issues with scaling it for our needs.

You should use HPE installation, or at the very least, authorized partners. 

This product does not impress me anymore.

This solution should have better reporting and alerting. Deduplication and compression should function without a performance hit. The 16TB LUN limitations should be fixed.

I have used this solution for over seven years at many different companies.

There is a performance hit for a few hours or days every time you add additional storage until the additional storage is added to the pool.

The main issue is the 16TB LUN limit. This bug has not been addressed for years!

I would rate the level of technical support as average.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was average.

For the price you pay, there are far better products out there.

I evaluated Pure Storage before choosing.

Do not buy this solution. It lacks the innovation required to compete in the market.

It is an enterprise-class storage and meeting approximately almost all the business requirements of NxtraData. Upgrading the disks is a challenge that we like the most.

We started our cloud journey based on this storage solution and upgraded later on to achieve the desired IOPS.

Since the world is moving from enterprise storage to the software-defined storage, I believe that they also need to work in the same direction and that it should be hardware independent.

I have used this solution for more than three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate the technical support a 7/10.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Prices are flexible and one should negotiate hard before taking a final call.

We evaluated the NetApp solution.

Nowadays, we should look for software-defined storage rather than such OEM dependent products.

We went through a whole data center refresh cycle and one of the things is that we needed to look at our disk system. Everything was for spinning disks, so we decided to make the leap to an all SSD data center. We brought in all the competitors, went through an RFP process and 3PAR came ahead. Some of the main things, for us, that we were looking for was the Veeam integration, i.e., the ability to set I/O limits (floors, ceilings, etc). That was the one thing that we were missing and the customer experience was suffering because of it; we were having all these I/O bottlenecks so we were spending more time having the disk manage us, rather than us managing the disk. It was a huge struggle for us.

A little bit of a background about us. UBC is the largest university in Western Canada, we have over 6000 VMs and what we do is Infrastructure as a service for all the higher education in British Columbia. That is around 25 or 26 other institutions, so they look at us for their infrastructure and we provide it. We're not for profit so cost is really important to us because it's publicly funded and it's the tax payer's money.

We wanted to make sure that we found the balance of the experience, cost, supportability for a small team to do this and 3PAR came out ahead with that. It wasn't just the technology, it was, also the relationship that we had with HPE over the years. We don't really have time to fiddle around with things because we're a small team we just want to get to the point and move on and do the next thing. Even though we're not for profit and we're a university, the customers still have the same demands as a bank in all this; they're servicing students and students are young people who just want to click on things, and they just want things instantly as they've been trained with an iPhone (you click, download an app and it just works). They don't have the patience so that trickles down to our team, which then trickles down to the vendors. It's like show us what you can do and go through the list if it doesn't work, then it's out.

The other important thing, in my opinion, is that the relationship is also very important. Technology problems you can be overcome, but relationships issues with the sales teams and resellers really can't. If you have a poor relationship and no matter how well the technology works, that's still going to impact it. HPE has been a partner with us (we do have a lot of partners), but they have been a loyal partner with us and really wanted to know what our problems were and how to resolve them. They get down to the point, such as how do we solve your problems and they understand when we went through it. It doesn't feel like we're being sold, but instead like we're kind of working together.

The one thing that we've always struggled with are the file sizes. With our competitor, we have had issues with the file sizes (I'm talking about the VMDK sizes) and how big a drive can be. HPE 3PAR, still, has a limit of 16 terabytes for VMDK limit and I think there is more to do in this aspect. There are ways to go around it but we still want DDUP and the compression functionality, if we want to turn those on we have to stay at 16TB. We're working with them on that and it is our biggest hurdle right now. Five years ago, 16 terabytes was big, but not anymore, i.e., not with current file servers. We don't know what the users are doing on the other end, because it's the Infrastructure as a service so we just get the feedback. I want to make a 64 terabyte drive and we need to work through this right.

Actually, we're new with users of the HPE 3PAR solution, this is our first 3PAR and we have just acquired it three months ago.

We're really happy with the stability of the product. Everything's self-service, so our whole cloud-front is fronted by the vCloud Director. The goal with this small team is self-service, so we just publish the new tiers and people start using the tiers. There haven't been any complaints. There are a few technical things with them, we think are to do with the software that we will work through with them, provide feedback, and see how it goes. It has actually exceeded in quite a few spots.

It's VMware so they're all data stores, and data store moves are non-descriptive so we can just keep providing more data stores and then, the software figures out where to place the workloads. If the customers aren't happy with the current performance tier that they're on, then they can self-move to a higher tier. SSD's are coming down in price, it's a usable price range now and having an all SSD data center is actually functional.

Technical support is good. It's the standard HPE support where you go through the tiers and if you've worked in IT for a while, you know to mention the words as how to move up. For example, you can ask for the duty manager and then you'll get escalated. However, we haven't got to that point yet. It's pretty new, I'm sure that with anything new we seem to push things to the limit, so it will get to that. I can't say anything negative about it.

They sent us a team to work with us for the setup process. They still kind of managed the firmware and upgrades right now. It is pretty new and simple to use, it wasn't hard to figure it out. They sent one of their post-sales SEs to come in and go through the training. In two days, the team kind of got it. It's mostly that one of the goals to go back to a small team is we want something that is set and then to forget about it; we don't want to sit there all day and manage it. We want to put it on the floor, be able to do capacity planning, alert all those pieces but we don't want to manage it.

Traditionally, we were using NetApp. We did look at IBM, Lenovo, Nimble and all of them. Actually, Nimble didn't come to the table, they missed it; so IBM, Lenovo, and Dell are the solutions we looked at.

They missed the thing, it's hard to describe because earlier we used to strongly believe strongly in just using NFS for ESX since it was easier to manage. However, with SSDs, NFS actually puts in a little bit of latency in it because you have to change that protocol thing. When we wrote the IRP, we made sure that everybody could reply and I think they missed it. There was some sort of miscommunication, so basically, everybody was on that chart.

When we are looking at a vendor, it's a mixture of everything. Basically, for our IRP, the feedback from the vendors was good, this is our problem how would you solve it. These are mandatory and minimum requirements whilst selecting a vendor, these are highly desirable, and we broke it all down so that they could fill it all in. The feedback was good, it was easy to fill out but there were somethings that some players could do. Veeam was big and we use them for all our stuff, but not everybody integrates with Veeam. The alerting capacity planning and all those things were a big thing for us too.

We're not fully pushing the envelope on it, but there are no complaints. Everything's good, the team has been good from the support to the setup to the post-support setup, to we've actually opened a ticket to do their firmware upgrade part. They gave us the plan and broke it down as to what they're going to do and when they're going to do it. Things have been good.

The thin and deduplication technologies are quite effective. The replicate, peer persistence, port persistence, and the recovery managers work really well.

• Always online
• Easy to service
• Easy to manage
• Really provides powerful advanced management and troubleshooting

Customer facing management should be easier and simpler for those who do not work with it too often.

We have been using this solution for over five years.

It has been very stable.

There were no scalability issues. The scale-up in the architecture works really nicely and there are no disruptions. This is also the case with the firmware and software updates.

In terms of technical support, this is where HPE has a problem. The support is cumbersome and most of their staff speak with a poor English accent. Some of the support staff works in privacy mode, which means they might do something that the customer is not secure about, and this causes uncertainty.

We were using an end-of-life, old product before. It couldn’t keep up with new technologies.

The initial setup was fairly easy, but you have to understand it well if best practices are to be gained.

The system just went to an all-inclusive license model.

We evaluated some of the EMC products and NetApp was being looked at.

I usually say look at the weak points in a system. 3PAR is great since it does most of what is boasts about in a good and mostly satisfying level. So the weak points in this system are quite high compared to a lot of other solutions. They tend to get good technology integration into the product, even though it sometimes takes a while. For instance, compression only came out now in the latest OS version.

Speed, it is because systems could respond quicker and customers do not have to wait as long as before.

System response time.

Cost, it is still fairly expensive, cost could go down to make this technology more popular in the market.

Three months.

No issues.

No issues.

Fairly good.

No comment, because we requested our local vendor to perform the setup and configuration for us.

Always bargain with your local HPE account manager, the price could go down a lot if you know how to negotiate with them. For example, it could help if you tell them you have another brand of product on hand and it cost less than HPE, then they would likely offer you a huge discount for their product.

Remember, the initial setup only covered the default configuration, you have to know what you need before you know which configuration settings suit you the best.

Hardening is another issue.

All the SSL options, default password, and cipher suite are other issues which we looked at very carefully.

Transparant redundancy for VMware virtual machines, because this makes it possible that storage switches over from one system to another without interruption of the VMs.

Automation of the failover allows the IT department of the hospital to improve the availability of systems.

From a personal point of view, what would interest me is a mechanism that detects file-rot, i.e. that detects whether a file or sector has become corrupt; for example, as a result of copying the sector to other locations from the original location.

On a file basis, this is implemented in ZFS, where for each file, some error-check is calculated and stored. Periodically, the file system can be scrubbed to detect corruption early, so that a corrupt file can be restored from backups.

3PAR is based on block-storage, so this feature would have to be implemented at block-level.

We have been using the product since the beginning of 2014.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used HP EVA previously.

The setup was fairly straightforward because we emphasized simplicity as an important purchase criteria.

Other systems evaluated were Dell EqualLogic, Hitachi, IBM, Netapp.

Don't buy either the oldest or the newest technology!