HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

The most valuable features are integrity, performance, and stability. It's a very good solution for the right price.

It's a better solution because we can operate faster than before.

If we could do more things online for the business, it would be great.

The stability is good.

Scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

We knew that we needed a new solution because we couldn't do what was needed for the business, so we needed a new and better solution. Beforehand, we were using the HPE EVA solution.

The setup was straightforward, without any kind of problems. We installed it very quickly.

We compared it with other products outside of HPE such as EMC CLARiiON. We chose 3PAR because it's a good product.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is the way that we can negotiate things. It's very important for us.

If you buy 3PAR, you will have a good and stable solution for your business.

• The ease of scaling.
• It's ability to provide different endpoints with different amounts of scalable storage.
• The way that it integrates with different HPE systems, such as the CLX, which is a cluster extensions package.
• The ability to migrate workloads from one data center to another.

The greatest benefit is its uptime. Also, performance and flexibility are very good. It runs both virtual workloads, as well as, native presentation workloads for both Windows and Unix environments. That's the main benefit. One of the other benefits is the way that it does consolidation and deduplication inline with the flash arrays.

We rely on WORM, so some sort of WORM feature would be good. We have to use other platforms for that. It would be nice to have that on the table right here.

We've had no issues with stability. All failures have been handled seamlessly within the platform. We've had controllers fail and they haven't impacted performance or stability at all. All very good.

Scaling is really easy. We can do online scale-ups adding more capacity and adding controllers without impact to the serviceability of the system. It’s all very good.

Technical support's been very good. The dedicated help desk for the 3PAR platform has always been very good. We’ve used them for troubleshooting where certain things don't happen the way that you'd expect them to. Sometimes this is our perception of what we feel we should do and not necessarily a shortcoming of the platform. It's just something we'd expect them to do.

We were using a legacy EVA system. It was just a natural choice. We needed to maintain the CLX packages that were also available for the EVAs. So when we wanted to refresh, it was the natural solution because it supported that and it was more up-to-date technology.

I was involved in the scoping of the solution. We were able to consolidate down from some of the old arrays very easily. In terms of implementation, I can only defer to the amount of time that it took, because it only took a couple days after the issue.

We were looking at NetApp and EMC.

When picking a vendor, the ability to execute on time and deliver on time is most important.

• It's fast.
• You can mix cheap storage with expensive storage.
• It's very reliable. It's a system that is 100%; no failures.

We have approximately 100 companies renting servers and storage from us. We are using HPE 3PAR to achieve a hybrid IT solution, combined with Asher.

It helps us earn money.

I want an easier solution for provisioning new servers. Currently we need to go in, set up a server, give the server names and functions, declare the number of gigabytes the server has for storage, and so on.

The stability is very good. When we buy flexible capacity from HPE, there are HPE personnel that are drifting the solution for us 24/7, 365 days a year.

It is very flexible in terms of scalability.

Technical support is very good.

We have three EVAs that we were using before we took 3PAR.

I would advise colleagues to buy the flexible capacity that HPE provides with 3PAR.

When we selected HPE, our most important criterion is that they cooperate well with us.

The 3PAR is very reliable, flexible, scalable, stable, and is a high performance storage solution that is easy to administer. It meets all the requirements we have for storage systems. We used to have HPE’s XP solution. That was a little bit too costly. We also had the EVA systems on the 3PARs and the mid-range suits our work very well.

It is difficult for me to say where the areas of improvement are because we haven’t been able to test all the features yet. At the moment, it’s OK for us.

I would like to see it cheaper to increase the cost effectiveness.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is good. We are using and administering all the solutions. Technical support comes into play when we have problems and it doesn't work, but not for the solution setup.

The initial setup is rather straightforward.

We needed to invest in a new solution because we moved out entire data centers.

I used to be at HPE, so we had to take HPE solutions. We are very confident with them. Now in the new company, we are going to set it up exactly as it was in HPE.

We made HPE come faster to the market with a solution that is market proven. We didn't want to have any additional risks.

If a colleague was looking for this or a similar solution, I would recommend they use it.

We find the adaptive optimization and dynamic optimization to be the most valuable features.

This has not improved my organization at all. It has had a direct effect on how we see our storage solution and how critical it really is and how availability is a priority. This product ran great for 6 months until we had our 1st drive failure. After that, it started falling apart and we have had nothing but issues ever since.

We did oversubscribe our drives in regards to IOPS capacity with no alerts of such. This caused us to lose another drive a couple months later, which brought a HUGE performance hit to our business until the drive was rebuilt. Shortly after it was replaced and rebuilt, another drive failed, which completely crippled our business until it was resolved. We were down most of a day because of this.

Since then, I have had too many tickets open to count. I still currently have a ticket open with them that they do not have a resolution. They know the issue. It is 3rd-party firmware on the HBA card in the controllers, which is going to be released in some unknown future release.

We have just received another unit as a PoC to set up Peer Motion so that we can try and update our current production array for a completely different reason, which we have been waiting several months for. We have no confidence in HPE technical support or engineering to update our current production array without any type of outage.

We have replaced FC drives, NL drives, SSD drives, HBAs in controller nodes, and SFP connectors. The onsite CE’s that came out to service the unit have been great, but I find it ridiculous that I can’t run for 1 year without an issue.

Only room for improvement would be to just abandon this product line and start with another.

We have been using this product for 1 year.

Suprisingly, we had no issues with initial deployment.

We have not had problems with scalability.

They will dedicate resources to help resolve issues. That part was impressive, although to actually get a resolution at times we had to really push.

Technical support is hard to understand at times and we always had to escalate to level 2 or 3 or engineering. I have even had escalations to Lab still with no real resolution.

Previously, we used Dell EqualLogic and switched because of some minor instability issues that we had, which, looking back now, were pretty petty. We actually pulled them from storage and powered them up to resolve stability issues with the 3PAR array.

The setup was fairly straightforward, once given the proper documentation and we had knowledgeable people onsite. Our initial HPE people that we had out to help show us best practices and usage were ridiculous. The HPE person we had out that did the physical installation, unboxing, racking, and initialization of the array was good.

We have experienced absolutely no ROI. We have lost money due to these arrays.

STAY AWAY. They will give you a book for an invoicing quote.

We evaluated several other products and we were over sold on these arrays. At the time, we looked at EMC, Dell Compellent, Nimble, and IBM. At the time, HPE sales sold us what appeared to be a superior product, but that was really not the case and was a mistake.

The reliability, scalability, and performance of HPE 3PAR are the most important things for us.

Now we have a reliable solution, divided over two data centers. The peer persistence solution provides us with a viable disaster recovery solution. We can do failover to the other site without interruption; and we can also do upgrades without interruption.

We have only had it for one year. At the moment, I don’t know about areas for improvement. Everything we need is included.

We have it now for more than one year.

It's very stable. We did an OS upgrade three weeks ago. It went very smoothly without any interruptions. It was great.

It is very good on scalability.

The technical support is very good.

We had the HPE EVA solution. We had performance issues with it. We needed another BI solution. Now, we are very happy with the performance. Also, when we needed to upgrade our storage system, we had downtime with EVA. Now with the 3PAR solution, there is no downtime. It goes very smoothly.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. Of course, we had help from the HPE specialists, but it was straightforward.

We were obliged to look into other vendors; but we tried not to leave HPE because we have many years of experience with them.

We have had nothing but a good experience over the last year. I would advise colleagues to go with HPE 3PAR.

The most important criterion when I choose a vendor is reliability. Reliability is very important to me. When there is an issue, I need to be able to count on the vendor.

To me, the deduplication features and compression are really helpful. The all-flash integration is valuable. It's high-density storage, so the total cost of ownership of the solution is good for a company.

It's easy to manage. There is less need to manage the storage and we are more able to focus on the business.

Product improvement is a matter of the orientation of storage solutions in the market. Product improvement will follow the market trend and HPE will follow market trend about storage solutions.

It's I think a five-9s (99.999%) solution, so it's very stable.

It can be scaled to more than enough capacity. So, it's okay.

Technical support is useful and helpful.

We did use previous solutions, but it's a matter of quality and it's a matter of economics and that was the choice.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We looked at Dell EMC and HPE. We chose HPE because of the product portfolio that they keep alive and evaluate and improve. The one we chose includes all the features and capabilities that the company makes.

I suggest to sometimes be disruptive in the choice of storage solution and don't always focus on the continuity. Sometimes discontinuity may help. When picking a vendor, reliability is important. Stability is important as well, but in the matter of looking at the future.