HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The speed of the Flash Array is better than what we had with the previous products. We like their blades better than the Cisco Blades. It is easier to manage.

We're using Peer-to-Peer for two data centers and having that fill over instantaneous is what we really needed for disaster recovery.

The thing that we're a little bit bummed about is they're not so quick to get it with the latest version of VMware and we're also using an older version of OneView; so to get to the newer/later releases, it seems like it's a two week process for two different data centers. If they could streamline that process, make it a little quicker, maybe so that the customer can do it, instead of hiring somebody else, then it would be helpful.

So far, we're very stable; we've been using it for a couple of years now.

Its scalability is really good because we're only using a third of the array's storage that we have, so we'll be able to keep that for several more years.

The technical support team is very good. We've gotten a really good response from them.

We needed a faster storage and more capacity, so that's why we upgraded and switched from EMC to HPE.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

We did look at Hitachi and they were a close second to HPE. However, it was just that, we were more familiar with HPE because we already had some of their C-Class Blades.

Manageability is an important criterion while selecting a vendor. Also, for system administrators like myself, it is important to be able to understand the solution right off the bat.

Probably, you should purchase the CS700 all-in-one storage, so that it's easy to implement it that way. Don't try to do it yourself.

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.

The speed and the storage optimization are the best features. I realized that instead of mixing with the traditional hard drives and flash, we could go with flash. We made an RFP, and found that for more or less the same cost, we could get an all-flash solution.

• We removed a lot of the restrictions of our old storage solution so we would have better performing applications.
• We didn’t have to worry about storage anymore.

We are waiting for the compression to use on a daily basis. We have some deep ticket issues that I know about related to this. Otherwise, we are fairly happy with the solution.

We have some issues with it, but HPE has been very good. Their partners have been very good in working with us and slowly inching us out of the curb.

We are fairly small. We are at the moment 800 virtual services. For us, it has very good scalability; but we are very, very small.

It's not me personally, but some of the technicians are pleased with the support. They have pulled back what have been problems. We are comfortable with their support.

The previous solution was getting old. It was getting harder to replace with lifecycle handling, so we knew that we needed a new storage system.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. We migrated since we are totally virtualized on VMware. We changed all the storage to the 3PAR within a few weeks. Without any downtime or anything. It was very, very good.

We made an RFP that was open to everyone. We evaluated an old flash solution that was better than the traditional solution; but you can't buy an old flash solution if you're going to buy as big as a traditional solution. So you have to have the optimizations that 3PAR has. Otherwise, you're not in business. It gets too expensive.

We had offers from EMC and from IBM, but our HPE partner came up with the best offer, so they won the RFP.

If you want Sun or old fashioned good storage optimization technology, then 3PAR is very, very good.

It's dynamic and easy to manage. It really meets our requirements.

We are in healthcare and we do a lot of imaging with huge amounts of data. If and when we need more storage space, extending 3PAR is easy. It has made everything more simple.

There aren’t many things to improve, but better monitoring would help us get a better look at everything we are doing. I would like to see more monitoring and graphs. It's not easy to pick up the correct numbers. Graphs would make it easier to measure performance. It could be that we don't know everything yet. There is a learning curve. I don't think we have seen the whole potential yet. Maybe I would give it a 10 rating soon.

We have had the solution for approximately 5 years.

It's stable. There haven’t been any problems. If something goes wrong, HPE support helps us.

Technical support is easily 9 out of 10. It's really good.

We weren’t using a previous solution, but we did upgrade from HP EVA. Once we starting using this solution, there were some problems with the performance. We tried to see what the reason was. The system was slow. It has been fixed, but at the time, it was difficult to get an idea of where the problem was. This problem was resolved.

I was involved with the installation, but I didn’t do too much. We had HP EVA and we upgraded to 3PAR. It went smoothly. There was a lot of old data that had to be moved to the new tool, and there were no problems at all.

Our shortlist of vendors including Fujitsu. We have something from them. However, I think it benefits us the most when we stick with one vendor, which is HPE. We try to stick with HPE and HPE tools.

All of the products with every vendor have their strong points. The strong point for HPE was that we had used HPE before. We were able to transform from the old system (EVA) to 3PAR, and that was the main reason at that time we switched. Now that we've been using it, we know a lot more.

For me, the most valuable feature is its flexibility. You don't have to pre-plan everything. With more traditional storage systems, you had to decide on the size of your RAID groups and what RAID groups you wanted. A lot of customers don't know that upfront. The nice thing about 3PAR is you can set it up and just let the system essentially tune itself.

Since 3PAR is self tuning and it optimizes itself to a better level of performance, then that translates to the application level and the business users can get their functions done quicker and more efficiently.

I think it needs to become even more automated, especially with all this new hyper-converged functionality, which is really easy to upgrade. It should also be self-healing. The upgrade process is still quite clunky for 3PAR. It receives an alert from itself and then tells you what to do. At the moment it's not that intuitive.

I've been working with 3PAR for about four years now.

We've had very little problems with stability.

It can scale as long as the customer's got the budget.

Technical support could be better. The guys you get on the phone generally are not very knowledgeable. It can often take a while to go through several levels of support to get to the solution.

Initial setup is relatively complex.

I think the license structure is quite transparent and fair.

I'd say are the main two qualities vendor must have is good product and good technical support. Obviously, they must also have a reasonable price.

3PAR is reliable. Although it takes a little bit of time to get set up, once you get set up, it runs itself. The other nice thing about it is that, the 3PAR scales from small to large nicely. Not like other vendors where you have to have several solutions for different size environments.

The 3PAR is a way for us to manage our SAN fabric and have a way to do that in this very complex environment in which we operate. The 3PAR's been something we've relied upon for a number of years and continue to do so.

Our particular function works to coordinate with our capacity teams to define the requirements and then they come to us and say they need this amount of storage attached and so forth. From a technical standpoint, I'm not really well versed in that particularly. Internally in our company it's more about defining how we need the storage set up so that the teams that implement the storage necessary for applications meets the customer's expectation, or internal customer expectation.

I was trying to get into the StoreServe this morning; couldn't get into the basic hands-on lab. Technically, I can't address anything as far as features, support, or anything like that which might be helpful.

It's scalable just based on the physical placements of the hardware and the white space involved on the floor.

We have teams that work with the fabric directly and do all the fiber channel setup.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition I don't get involved.

We can deploy new servers and new solutions pretty quickly. If systems are stopped while the record picks up that they're starting to fail, we can add more resources to them quite dynamically.

It's a lot more automated and a lot easier, which provides us with a better business continuity solution.

HP has what they call the OSS, operation support site. I hand over all my BAU to HP to manage and fix, but they don't go down to the 3PAR level. We can't afford to fall back on government money to take the time to identify issues. OSS only provides high-level support, and it would be an improvement if they drilled down more.

3PAR deploys just fine for us.

It's stable generally. When we had problems, it was due to an omission in our manual process and not in the automated process. It's quite techy, so you need to make sure you have someone on your staff or an outside expert to provide advice.

It scales just fine.

We pay for proactive support from HP, but I wouldn't rate it 10/10. It's not as proactive as I'd like, though I'm not paying for the highest level of support. Sometimes, it's takes them 4 hours before they start doing things.

The initial setup was a bit complex and took much longer than we anticipated. We have 5,000 users now, but it took us two years to be able to get there.

We implemented it in-house.

Spend as much as you can on HP support for the product. Don't rely on it being all in-house.

Easy manageability, and the speed is very quick.

Less downtime, unlike our previous solution.

That’s hard to say because it’s pretty good for us. The areas that we would suggest for improvement, HP is already looking at.

It’s excellent; no complaints. I’m very impressed with it.

I’ve already scaled it twice and will scale it again.

It’s also great. We’ve not really had a problem with it in over a year of use.

We chose HP to improve on the latency because we knew we needed something that could solve our new needs. Our last system, Dell Ecologic, was very bad and was down a lot.

Setup was straightforward.

We looked at EMC and HP. 3PAR is using some very high quality software, so we chose HP. Dreamworks uses HP, so we figured it would do us just fine.

Look for something that is expandable and reliable. 3PAR is great.