HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use a lot of different products by HPE, with 3PAR being one of the biggest. When we look at Synergy, we see how we can integrate. We have our 3PAR SAN. We see how we have our physical servers and how we can remove them and bring everything together. 3PAR will always be our back-end and it will always be our storage back-end.

If we can start leveraging some of this cool, new technology into how we deploy servers and how we give our DEV teams and our production teams exactly what they need in the shortest time possible, then that will define our business.

It is easy to use. The OS and the UI are straightforward. It's all manageable inside HPE OneView and it is attached to HPE Synergy. It's a unified experience. It really sucks going through 10 different systems and trying to fit all of them in. It takes too long and it is confusing. In fact, being unified is what it is all about. Being unified is the biggest win and the biggest draw.

We would like to see more Nimble integration, now that HPE owns Nimble. We would like to see how they come up with solutions to integrate Nimble storage and all-flash storage into our existing 3PAR traditional spinning disk. We would like to see what kinds of benefits that would give us. Perhaps we could add more cache.

It is extremely stable. We don't really have any problems. They release updates pretty frequently if there are any major issues. We've never suffered a catastrophic failure. It's been pretty enterprise grade, rock-solid for us.

The scalability is awesome. We just recently upgraded to a new system, and we now have the capacity to scale up. Essentially, the sky is the limit. We'll never get that big because our company is not that big. However, if we wanted to, we could easily scale.

We have used technical support. Usually, they're pretty good, but there's some room for improvement there. Typically, if we have a SevOne, Class A, super high-priority issue, production-down issue, they're pretty good. There are a lot of different cooks in that kitchen. There are a lot of different people and a lot of different, moving pieces. If they can get that integrated a little tighter, that would be even better. But overall, technical support is pretty good.

We were using BlueArc. It is not as resilient and not as robust. It is not as enterprise-grade as an actual HPE 3PAR system is.

When selecting a vendor, you want name recognition. You want to know that you're getting the best of breed. You want hardware services because it's not just about the hardware. The hardware can be awesome, but if you don't have the service to support it, manage it, and maintain it, then it's kind of pointless. HPE brings all of that together: Hardware, service, and support. It's all there.

The installation was actually pretty straightforward. Everything is well-documented, which is another big plus. HPE has always been there for us through each step.

We've looked at Dell, but we've always been an HPE shop. We don't really have any plans of changing that.

I say try it out. There are a lot of test drives of all their solutions. Look at the UI. See how well you can integrate with your existing systems and talk to the HPE guys. They are willing to show off all their technology and all their solutions.

We are very interested to see what HPE starts to offer in terms of integrated Nimble all-flash storage solutions. We’re also curious if HPE are going to introduce anything to augment an existing 3PAR system (ie; are they pluggable modules or expansion hardware that can take advantage of new Nimble-powered low latency, fast access flash storage?). And if they do have these types of solutions roadmapped, we are very interested in seeing what the average and peak theoretical transfer speed/access time improvements are!

The most valuable feature is being all-flash. We have an all-flash SAN. It has been great having production systems be much faster than they were previously. The UI is nice. It is easy to work with.

It has been easier to provision storage and it has been faster using it.

I would like to see compression and deduplication. I know that future versions of the software will have compression.

Stability got off to a rocky start. It has been much more stable after we went through some best practices guides. We ran into some issues where we had to work with support and high level engineers to get through. It was not something that was readily apparent, but we were able to overcome those issues. Had we followed the best practices guide from the beginning, it might have been avoided.

We have scaled it and the scalability is great. You have to add everything in pairs though, so we're at a point now where a small addition would require some extra overhead. In general, we've been able to double the storage and get better availability out of it. It wasn't too crazy.

Technical support has been helpful when I've been able to reach them. We would try to submit support cases online and that didn't work. I never heard back from them. I finally figured out there was a phone number to call. Everyone likes to do everything online if they can, but the phone number has gotten me through to support.

Our SAN was outdated, so we needed to get something new. We evaluated some different vendors instead of sticking with our typical one. We ended up switching over to 3PAR. We were using EMC VNX. This decision took place before I came on-board, but I believe the short list was HPE was EMC.

When selecting a vendor I look for support. That is ironic, given my previous answer that indicated otherwise. Support is a big deal. If you need help, you want to be able to get it.

I was not involved in the installation. I wish I would have been involved. I inherited it.

Read the best practices guides.

The performance and the support are pretty good.

Performance. We used to be with NetApp. The overall performance is much better with this solution.

Maybe they could have better alerting. We've had an issue where we had a flapping network link, and it didn't tell us that was happening. We only saw symptoms of the issue. I'd like to see better reporting for those types of issues. Even though the support is better than NetApp was, there are still some improvements they could make in their support.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is good.

I have used technical support and it usually is good. Their support is very hands-on compared to NetApp. Sometimes we have issues where they, just like any other vendor, point fingers at either networking or the hardware. We've encountered that with them, as well. Overall, support was good.

The old system was outdated. We were having performance issues with it and the support wasn't great. It was just time to shop for a new the solution. When selecting a vendor, I look for support, performance, and customization.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward.

Our shortlist included Nimble and 3PAR. One reason we changed was because we have local support.

I still think it is the best solution out there. HPE will help support issues or even upgrades.

Cost per disk storage, uptime, and ease of upgrade.

It runs all the time. I've never had a problem with it. Upgrades have been flawless. We've had controllers die in the middle of the day, and it was no big deal. We've had shelves die in the middle of the day with no impact to our end users whatsoever.

I think they just released Flash Cache. It is the new SSD where you write all your caching information to flash disk, and then it writes it down to your nearline or your flash disk. We just bought all new flash cache for that purpose. So that was one of the features we were looking for.

I don't know that you could improve on the 3PAR very much, other than maybe the 3PAR management console. It's kind of an old school console, it's not web- based. It's a fat client that you have to install. It would be nice to have a web- based version that I could go anywhere to, versus having to go back to the 3PAR management console.

Stability is top-notch.

Scalability has been really good. We've constantly added shelves and disk space to it from the beginning. I think we started out with a 12 to 13 terabyte system, and now we're up to a 60 terabyte system. It has grown exponentially with us over the last few years.

I have used tech support and it’s good. You get some people who are more knowledgeable than others, but for the most part, we've never had a problem. We've always gotten the answer that we needed to sort the problem out.

We knew that we needed a new solution. We had to move from some old EMC equipment. We had looked at what they had, their price offering versus what we could get at HPE for the same dollar, and this solution was exponentially better.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was very straightforward. The HPE engineer came on site, sat down, showed us how to do things as he built and designed it. It was very good.

We had looked at Pure Storage , Hitachi , and a couple others. However, 3PAR gave us the best bang for the buck.

Go with it. It's a beast of a storage system. We love ours.

When looking for a vendor, the most important thing is support.

I think the biggest thing about it is it supports mixed workloads. Instead of having to have different arrays or anything to support different workloads, you can actually support them all within 3PAR and you can, which I think is one of the key things. The other thing is it's virtualized and the performance on it is good.

I do a lot of research when I'm trying to find an answer to something, and I want the documentation to be clear. Tell me what's supported. Case and point, we just announced Direct Connect with 3PAR 8000, which we didn't have before. If you look at SPOCK, the information there was not clear and it looked like we actually had a big debate going. The support on it is very limited for Direct Connect, and it just wasn't clear. The feedback got sent and I think they cleaned it up, but I haven't checked.

If you have a bunch of mixed workloads and you have an environment, it'll support most customers' solutions. You can get a lot more storage in a smaller footprint, so for your data center, power cooling, and OPEX, it's a good solution.

The most valuable feature is definitely the way they've taken into consideration the tiered storage aspect of it. They've added a newer gen now; they were adding the faster A6 and whatnot to accommodate more workloads. That's been really great for us. The tiered storage solution they used was a lot more beneficial for our company. We have a lot of data storage that's just cold storage but it conveniently pulled back into a SSD, as well, so that helped us quite a bit.

With 3PAR, we got more insights. We could see where data is going; overall better performance as well from that standpoint. For the ProLiant servers, I don't know what to say about the series. I rack them and throw them in there. Once you put them on a rack, as long as you don't mess with it, they just run.

We haven't overly stressed it to say whether there's any stability. Once we expand it and do any replication, that's where we're going to see the stability but on basic operation of 3PAR, it's stable. You would expect that there's no quirkiness. I'm not seeing glitches in the UI, I'm not seeing too much in there.

The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. I find it amazing that I paid for extra for support for the 3PAR and I wait on the phone for 30 minutes. For that extra support, when I'm paying for the premium support; so it's US-side support, US-based support, I should mention. If I call the regular number without the extra support, I talk to someone instantly.

It's, "What care plan are you on? What care plan are you on?" That's the question of HPE, "Are you on the SA plan?" "Are you on this plan?" You got to dig through this matrix of plans to figure out which phone are we going to call. It's absurd.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only complexity we've really had for the initial setup was actually with HPE, in scheduling. We have to have an HPE person on site to put the 3PAR in so they can vet it and all that stuff. Getting him coordinated, it was a wreck. The first time.

We did look at EMC instead of 3PAR for a little bit. We chose 3PAR because I've dealt with LeftHand before. Then, HPE bought LeftHand, namely 3PAR. I dealt with their storage stuff previously a little bit. I like what they were doing and how they were doing it.

It was just one of those things. I knew it. I was comfortable with it but it wasn't necessarily a front-runner until we started looking at EMC and just how convoluted their solution was to get there. The price at EMC was expensive. We had all these tertiary software you had to purchase just to get to run normally. There's still that with the 3PAR but it wasn't as steep of a cost. I wasn't paying for this huge EMC name.

They work reasonably well. We've only had a couple of problems with them, and HPE knows about the problems.

On certain of their features that we have to use to migrate data, it tends to go off for about 60 or 90 seconds toward the end of the work.

The stability is pretty good.

It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling. Application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

All Flash Only

• Designed as only flash with the xx50 designation. This array was never intended for spinning disk or hybrid use.
• We have never seen a disk or other hardware failure in over two years.
• Average latency is less than one millisecond.
• 3PAR ASIC is the heart of the processing power built into 3PAR arrays and it is built specifically for its role.

Common Provisioning Groups (CPGs)

• CPGs allow for versatile, yet powerful configuration and use of disks that help us to define both disk performance and availability.
• There is no need to pre-carve space. It auto-grows and distributes as it is defined. Factor in wide striping, the fact that this is all flash, and the performance and reliability are even better than the other models of 3PAR.

Data Reduction Services

• The 3PAR and the ASIC really help the CPG to leverage an increase in performance as well as data efficiency.
• Dedupe is applied to all items inside a CPG. There is no need to manually configure per volume.
• Features are all inline and there is no post-processing window. The ASIC really shines on faster write speeds with the Zero Detect Algorithm. All zeros are ignored, resulting in much faster writes, not just space savings for blank data.
• Thin provisioning
• Thin clones

Native Veeam Support: Provides ease of use for backing up and restoring with the additional integration with Veeam.

VMWare 6.x Vol Support

VMWare Fibre Channel: Reference platform for v6.

Scale up, or out: It does both on demand unlike other arrays that leave you stuck with a single alternative. 3PAR Active Mesh Architecture is quite robust.

We were quite hesitant on the array size when it was pitched as our replacement of an aged SAN.

We were guaranteed we would get much more space than the physical capacity. (Make sure you get it in writing.)

In reality, their safe numbers were extremely safe.

We were expecting 2:1 as a rule of thumb, but in reality, we ended up sitting at greater than 8:1 across the entire array with all compaction/reduction features factored in.

I would really love to see HPE add some cloud analytics. So many other Tier 1 SAN vendors have enhanced cloud analytics and flashy visuals. While HPE has the StoreFront and it is better than nothing whatsoever, other competition offered “shiny” reporting and analytics engines.

I have used the product for over two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Its performance and capacity have been even better than expected.

The code updates have been exceptionally smooth compared to our previous SAN vendor. This includes no outage windows and really short upgrade durations.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. This device can scale both up and out. It is exceptionally versatile.

I recommend that you always procure the higher support offering with an enterprise product. It will pay for itself.

We went with Proactive Care Advanced, before HPE was offering Datacenter care.

The Advanced Care provides proactive interoperability reports from a dedicated technical account manager. They provide further recommendations on your current configuration if it is not compliant with HPE best practices.

Our previous solution was retired due to capacity and performance issues.

HPE really addressed our issues with their recommendation of the 3PAR 7450 for our specific needs.

It’s actually less expensive per Gigabyte than a conventional array when looking at the true cost of ownership. Not to mention the performance is six times greater than the competitor’s device.

The entire setup, from rack and stack, to configuring the array, was shockingly expeditious.

It took longer to rezone my fibre switches than it did to get the Common Provisioning Group (CPG) configured and begin storage with vMotion VMs.

Remember, you are charged per disk with a 3PAR array for licensing. Make note of this when considering future capacity. A smaller number of higher capacity SSDs can be less expensive than multiple smaller capacity disks.

We evaluated EMC, Nimble, IBM, NetApp, and Pure Storage.

• Make sure that you are trained on the nuances of 3PAR technology if you select this Storage Area Network.
• There are many useful features and you need to leverage them to lower the total ownership cost while easing the management of the device.