HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The main features are good pricing, very good options, and ease of use. From a management point of view, the reports provided by the management console are very good.

We are pretty happy with what we have. One small disappointment was when we invested in an HPE 3PAR 7440c two years ago. We had heard that it was supposed to be a long-term system. Around a year later, when they answered our RFP, it was for an HPE 3PAR 8400c, which was already on the market. The HPE 3PAR 7440c system was a bit old. I would appreciate if they made more of an investment in the “c” series.

We are wondering what we should do for the next purchase, because we want to invest for five years going forward to protect our investment. I know that we have the support for new, huge capacity, so on the technical side, there is no pressure.

I would like to see a bit of improvement from the new managed interface because they have this Windows client which was used in the past. I don't remember the exact name of it, but it worked fine.

The new web-based interface for reports is great for some parts of the monitoring. But for day-to-day usage, it’s not very user-friendly.

This solution has been in production for a year and a half, and we have installed everything on it. It’s 99% stable. We had some crashes, but they were due to technical problems. All companies have these kinds of things happen.

The scalability of this solution is pretty easy. When we did the initial sizing of the solution, I estimated our business needs at the time. Approximately three years ago, the estimate was about 700 TBs in total. We had two sites, so I sized it with all of the documentation and with staff feedback to have it grow in size to 1.5 PBs per site. That comes out to 3 PBs in total.

We have had very extensive growth due to some medical applications we use, such as DNA and image analysis. We are up to 2 PBs for each system. This is our maximum capacity, but it's our problem because we scaled it up too much.

I have used technical support and they are pretty good, responsive, and quick. Many companies outsource technical support and then you have a very process-by-process situation. Overall, the technical support is okay. We've had some problems, but we can survive.

When I arrived two and a half years ago, they were using multiple Windows solutions. They were using NetApp for all of the file services and we decided to separate. We decided to keep NetApp for all these file services, but I suggested that we use FlexArray in order to virtualize our NetApp tool with a disk from HPE 3PAR.

They also had a lot of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). They were customers of Hitachi for 10-15 years. They had multiple systems. My goal was to consolidate everything on those boxes. Currently, we have one storage box per site. There are almost 2 PBs for each site and we have storage arrays to perform the deduplications and backups.

Since I already had experience with storage solutions for almost 15 years with IBM and Hitachi solutions, I did an RFP to find our next provider of a storage solution. I made a request for features. As a public institution, we are primarily focused on price, and the competitive price was one of things I really appreciated about HPE.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was really, really straightforward and easy. Because we are one of the biggest customers of HPE 3PAR solutions in Switzerland, our problem was that the consultants weren’t with us during the installation. The installation was just done by installation wizards.

When we did some auditing, we requested a highly technical guy from HPE to come directly to us. They sent us someone from another city and he did okay, given our large environment. For our environment, installation wizards are not so good. We needed to fine-tune the installation. For basic environments, for perhaps 70-90% of installations, the installation wizard should be okay.

We received four replies on the RFP, and HPE beat them all in terms of price.

You need a good service contract. HPE has a solution called Datacenter Care. If you are a big, critical customer, then you should get this type of contract.

Most valuable to us are the capacity, the scalability, and also the reliability.

The benefit of HPE 3PAR flash storage is the scalability. It generally has good reliability.

The SSD disks mainly did well performance-wise. Now that the cost of the system is reduced, it's more financially viable as well. We did have firmware problems with them over the years, but generally we're fairly happy with it.

We've been with HPE for about ten years.

Stability is pretty good, but we had a fiber channel previously, and we found that was a bit more reasonable than the HPE.

Scalability is very good. The 3PAR is very modular, so we can just install more modules as we need.

I give technical support a 9/10. If we have a problem, we log a call and they come back to us within half an hour. It is pretty good.

We were previously using HPE SAN, but we then went to the P4000, and now we're looking to upgrade our data centre again. So we're quite happy with their solutions and the help. We think it's one of the best ones out there.

The initial setup was complex. We had the HPE consultants in to work with us, and we had a few issues initially. But we managed to get them resolved.

We looked at IBM, Dell, and HPE. We went with HPE because we have used HPE storage solutions before. We have also used HPE network server equipment and we found them to be good quality equipment. Additionally, we found that working with them was quite a good experience.

We currently use the P4000, which is iSCSI. We will go for the fiber channel next time, which we have been comparing with the 3PAR.

When choosing a vendor, their reputation, and obviously the quality of the products, are important. HPE is pretty consistent with these.

The most valuable features are the scalability and the support, because you need to keep the business running.

I am not sure that there are benefits over other solutions. It's just that we've always used HPE. I think it comes down again to be more about support and the scalability.

I would like to see a lot more monitoring and reporting out of the box.

It is very stable.

We've scaled it up quite a bit. It doesn’t have any problems.

Technical support is getting better.

I used to use HPE EVA. We needed to switch because we couldn't expand anymore.

The initial setup was complex. I was one of the first customers to get their StoreServ 7400. It wasn't a good experience at all. The guy who set it up didn't really understand the technology that he was building. He didn't have build documents. The solution that I was initially sold wasn't correct so the workloads failed. It was a nightmare.

I looked at things like Tintri and another company that I forget the name of now. They didn't have the support model that I needed at the time.

I think that it's a more mature product now, so you’ll probably have a better experience; but certainly do your homework on your actual workloads and what you need. We initially got a solution which died all the time because we were trying to get too much output.

Most valuable to us is that the 3PAR is very easy to use and has good response times.

It is a very responsive system with no latencies and high performance.

I would really like to see it be more efficient at reclaiming storage when deleting something, instead of just being thin at the start.

There were some bugs, but after the latest update, it is acting more stable.

Technical support is excellent.

We have many different types of solutions. Since HPE is one of our partners, it was natural to evaluate their products and buy from them.

Initial setup was straightforward.

We looked at some of the bigger vendors like Dell EMC and IBM, of course.

This tool is directly attached to the ProLiant server. It has very, very low latency.

The solution hasn’t benefited the entire company. It's a special solution that has provided benefit for part of the company. We have global data instruments around the world. This tool has allowed us to decrease the data import time from nine hours to just one hour.

I would like to see fewer licenses.

This is a stable solution. We have used it for three years.

It is the end of the product. We had to buy all of our 3PAR products in 2012. At the time, it was a new product. It wasn't viable. It is now running out of disk space.

We have used technical support. They are on time and very good. They provide good solutions.

We did not have a previous solution. We had a service provider, which had IBM solutions. I needed a solution for a particular application, and HPE 3PAR was one part of the solution.

I was involved in the installation. We have problems every time. Sometimes there are three parts to one problem.

For example, I had to get help from the engineering team in India. It took a year to solve this issue. There was new documentation in which the installation requirements for the disaster tolerant systems changed. That is one of the installation issues.

We didn’t have an alternative at the time. Our client could only work with 3PAR. There were no other products in the world which could do that in 2012. I don't know about solutions that are available today.

I have experience with HPE since 1996. I'm a member of "Connect". I know HPE better than I know IBM.

Some HPE solutions are very good. In terms of performance and digital equipment, they have very good knowledge in some types of IT.

HPE tries to be visionary, but I don't think they are. Perhaps they have the right products today, but the whole world is changing.

I could help a colleague who is making a decision by showing him our HPE solutions. I could explain what we have done and why.

• The most valuable feature to me is its reliability. After that, it is the architecture, and the rest of the HPE sort of products, like the blades and the storage.
• You've got the best of breed from a storage perspective, and a proven solution that integrates well with the HPE c7000 or the BladeSystem infrastructure. You have a solution that has been tried and tested by HPE as an overall solution.
• It enables us to use a virtualized layer. Until we deployed our 3PAR, we had pretty much everything as physical servers. With 3PAR, we are in the process of completing the virtualization of our services.

Small companies are interested in simplicity and a very granular licensing model is something that poses a number of challenges.
From the cost perspective, (usually this licensing model is geared towards revenue generating…) it makes it expensive but also from the admin point of view it ends up being cumbersome and difficult to manage. We had a number of issues when ordering an upgrade to existing array due to this licensing model.
Using a small number of bundles or just a single licensing model (like Nimble for example) will make the product more appealing and simplify the process of organizing an upgrade.

Stability-wise, I think it's very good. Support-wise, I think it’s debatable based on some issues that we had with it.

I think the scalability is one of the factors that caused us to select 3PAR.

Technical support was average, and bad handling some incidents.

We were using direct attached storage. We moved to Sun; and then we decided to implement 3PAR.

The initial setup was complex. I would say it was flawed because we had issues.

For the storage, we looked at Talent, which is now Dell. We also looked at Nutanix and Tintri. The main reason we chose HPE was that we already had an HPE infrastructure; and it felt like it was the best solution for our needs. The product met our requirements at the time.

Reliability is very important in a vendor. We also look at the breadth of offerings because we like to keep things simple. Rather than choosing a varied mix from a multitude of vendors, we like to go with a small number. I have a small team and it's easier from a management perspective, as well as understanding and supporting the product in the best way possible.

It all depends on what you need, and how you can justify the cost. It is not a cheap solution. It depends on what you have. If it's a brand new setup, then there are other paths you can take, and it's worth researching them. If you already have HPE deployments in-house on the server side, not the storage, I think 3PAR will definitely make a very great addition to your portfolio.

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 quite fast, easy to manage, and easy to extend. Adding new shelves or new platforms is easy.

In our case, 3PARs were easier to implement into our existing environment. Also, we had problem with storage space so it was the easiest way to expand.

I'm happy for the moment. But I would like to see them implement the new types of RAM; the NVRAM that is being used in the server environment. This would make storage quite a bit faster. It's not slow, but it could always be faster. Maybe this can also be available partially in a storage environment.

For example, if you have a DSQL server or something similar. Most companies have the lock database on the local server. In our case, we have everything on the 3PAR and it would make sense to have faster storage. We would like to see some innovation. There's room for improvement.

We have been using 3PARs for a year.

We have never had any stability problems.

Scalability is always a matter of price of course, but you can put in new disks with no problem at all.

We used technical support to do updates. They're good and very fast. They were very helpful.

We used EMC before but it was quite old, about 7 years, and it was time to change. There wasn't a good solution from them at that time. The ability to scale to size was important to us when choosing a vendor, as well as the speed. We want our solution to be future-proof to an extent.

I was partially involved in the initial setup. It was complex because of our environment. We have 10 or 15 different systems in the background so it wasn't easy. We thought it would be easy, but in the end it was quite complex.

There isn’t only one solution on the market. We already had the EMC systems. We were not limited to flash providers, so we also looked at Nimble and Hitachi and others.

At the end of the day, 3PAR was the most valuable. It was the most valuable solution. It was quite fast and it wasn't too expensive. Additionally, we could have an active-active scenario. That was for us the most important thing.

I would say go for it. You should at least give it a chance.