The primary use is our new datacenter. We're using it to increase performance.
It's performing really well.
Having moved over from a LeftHand, which was seven or eight years old, there's a massive boost in performance. It has definitely improved the speed, the responsiveness, of all our applications, which is always good.
Just generally the management - which I know, they introduced a few new tools yesterday, here at the HPE Discover conference. Generally, the management of the multiple systems that we have. That's really the only problem, always having to go to all these separate tools to manage everything.
The stability is so far so good. It has been pretty seamless. We've used it now about eight months and it's been stable since then.
We planned for scalability so we bought four enclosures, which was overkill, but it's planning ahead.
We switched mainly because of the end users, the customers, the guys that use the systems and the applications. They're the ones who start screaming when things are slow. We used to have that problem, where things were slow due to the storage bottleneck. But now we're finding other bottlenecks, so it's good.
It was straightforward. I was in the datacenter with one of the HPE engineers and we went through everything. He was knowledgeable, he retired about a week after he set it up. So he had a lot of experience.
We did try a few other vendors during a trial period. We simulated failovers just for fun, just to see how quickly they respond. Some of them had issues getting parts to us immediately.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are
- reliability
- availability of parts.
I give an eight out of 10, from working with it and using the features, but also seeing what some of the other competitors have out there. One of the big ones is Pure Storage which I was a big fan of. So, they were the competitor to the 3PAR, as well as Nimble, which was obviously acquired.
It came down to costing as well, in the end. But to be fair to the 3PAR, it wasn't comparing like with like. It was comparing an all-flash array with a hybrid 3PAR array.
Try to decide quickly. Have your criteria and stick to your criteria, rather than trying ten million different solutions and taking years to implement. That was the biggest issue we had, the fact that there are so many different vendors out there. If you're trying to create a proof of concept, it just eats away at time. At the end of the day, there are a lot of nice things with the 3PAR that made us select it. Try not to waste too much time trying everything.