HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

• Peer Motion
• On-line import
• AO

As a 3PAR consultant, I have installed systems for a lot of customers, municipalities, and other state authorities. I cannot speak for them, but the results are very good. The possibility/feature to move data across tiers (AO) has been a great feature, and of course the possibility to non-disruptively migrate from current storage system to 3PAR.

Deduplication on FC disks needs improvement.

I've used it for two years.

As a 3PAR consultant, I’ve seen some deployment issues with the broadcast-handshake procedure between 3PAR and the service processor.

I did find a bug in the system in 3.1.2 MU3. Deleted data on the 3PAR did not reclaim the deleted space.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

Initial setup is straightforward. The wizard guides you through the installation process, but I always install the 3PAR and SP via CLI to eliminate any deployment issues that may occur when using the wizard.

Implementing 3PAR StoreServ for clients as a vendor, we have the highest level of expertise, but it would be naive to rate my own level of expertise without any of my clients' inputs. However, I’ve been working with implementation, upgrade and maintaining 3PAR systems for two years with certifications and continuous information regarding anything that happens within the 3PAR storage.

Since our company doesn’t own any 3PARs I cannot respond correctly on this question. I consolidate, install, upgrade, and maintain the 3PARs.

Wait for the right opportunity as HP tends to do “3PAR bundles”. They bundle 3PAR storage and software licenses at a great discount, so never accept the listing price for a 3PAR, but that goes without saying.

As an IT consultant, it’s my job to compare different storage solutions. Many of our customers want our consultation where I evaluate and recommend different products depending on the business needs and demands. The other products that usually come in play are Dell, EMC, and NetApp. I’ve also seen some evaluations on a “new” storage manufacturer, Tintri.

I can clearly see a trend of implementing a full flash array instead of the traditional 3PAR hybrid solution. Why? Well, the cost of SSD is dropping steady and the $/GB is less than FC disks when using deduplication, which is to this date, only applicable on SSD tier. You will not only have lower $/GB, you also significantly increase the performance, stability, and durability. For a smooth start-up, make sure you have done a valid assessment in your environment before implementing a new 3PAR. Read about the different software that 3PAR can offer your business.

The thin technology and adaptive optimization features make the SAN appear bigger and faster than what it replaced, all the while using a third of the rack space. We also use Flash SSD disks for adaptive optimization, and this speeds up the performance up to 10 times what it was.

We are using a lot less power and space with this SAN compared to our previous solution. This SAN only takes a third less power and capacity, yet it provides almost twice the performance.

The only area I would say that could use improvement is communication on what upgrades should be applied. We have been told that the re-seller cannot perform, nor recommend, upgrades.

We have been using the product for about two years.

Installation was quite easy, and we were using the SAN very quickly.

None! We had a failed disk and have had replacements before we even knew! Rebuild times are fast!

We added a shelf online with no issues and the SAN was online during the upgrade.

Great, they are able to be reached quickly and without any issues.

Support know the product very well and will escalate any issue quickly within their tiers and without being asked.

We used an EMC solution before. The price, performance and features swayed us to HP 3PAR.

Setup was reasonably easy. We used a CD and a VM template to “birth” the unit. It was all wizard driven and intuitive.

We used a vendor team who were knowledgeable of the product.

Great! The product has exceeded our expectations.

The product seemed to be too cheap when compared to replacing our existing SAN. Therefore, we were hesitant at the features and performance offered. I believe we spent around C$80k for the system. Maintenance and proactive support was included, so day to day costs are really only power.

We compared EMC and IBM, but both cost more and lacked key space and performance features.

Compare all vendors carefully as there are a lot of features that appear to be similar but in actuality are very different.

I use this product in VMware Shared Storage. I work with VVoL, but I have a problem that is related to the update.

This solution has provided me with very low latency and high performance.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the native full mesh (multi-pathing).

I would like to have support for On-The-fly reallocation Data when using VVoL.For further explanation I must say When using vvol , you can have 3 tier in Storage .This tiers different in IO an Capacity feature.Usually tier 0 can support maximum IO and minimum Capacity and use SSD in this tier, Tier 1 between Tier 0 and 2 for Support IO and Capacity This layer is known as FC (Fast Class) nad Finally in tier 2 you Have only capacity and usually used NL disk for capacity .from that side in vmware Cluster equivalent this tier have a concept called Gold,Silver,Bronze that define in Storage Policy.You may want to first move a virtual machine to the silver group with disks; and then move it to another group, such as gold or bronze.This feature is based on the feature that the storage device provides and This feature is not yet available on the storage device, according to the documentation of HPE company will be presented in an update called T05 

Our primary use case is SAN for VMware hosts for hosted VMs for a K-12 education environment. Also, some space that we provisioned for security camera storage and backup targets.

We upgraded from HPE EVA and it was much easier to manage and provision LUNs, when necessary. Our EVA was maxed and was end of life. 

The 3PAR tool is cheaper to maintain with more storage available. 

The optimization features move chunklets or hot spots to faster drives. This way data which was getting hit most frequently was always on drives that could best handle the data, whether it was SQL data on SSD or rarely accessed file shares on the 7200 RPM drives.

The management interface is not intuitive. It is much better than EVA, but took some time to learn.

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.

• Generally, the resilience and the redundancy of the system.
• Speed has obviously helped.
• We do a lot of replication, as well, with our other 3PARs, so it's keeping that data synchronized.

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.

We started to initiate a business continuity project, to cover disaster recovery scenarios, and we decided to implement a 3PAR solution for the Remote Copy functionality from this area. We can share this with software integration and cover the business requirements.

We have never had problems, it's running well. The other point is the performance that the storage provides. We currently use 3PAR with full flash, and the performance is really amazing.

I saw recently saw that they will integrate the predictive software from Nimble with 3PAR, and I think that's a good move. With the next firmware release, software release, we will really profit from this integration. I think it's a really good idea that HPE is now integrating this as a possibility on 3PAR.

It will completely meet our needs, moving forward.

It's difficult to say anything about tech support, because it's running so well that we are not regularly in contact with support. I think we had some issues during the implementation phase. We had, I would say, two or three times where we contacted the support, which was really good. I have no complaints. The knowledge and the competence were good.

Because we are so happy with 3PAR, it's so reliable for us, for the moment we don't see any move to Nimble storage. It depends on the strategy from HPE. They will probably combine the two storage technologies; I don't know what will be the future.

We are trying to create a valued addition, because the project is still on, and we are looking at how it can benefit the business more. It's a new solution in place which we are looking at now.

At this stage I can't give you any feedback on that. It's too early.

No stability issues at this stage.

Scalability is the main purpose, that I can scale out with something, where I can keep adding more modules onto it.

Tech support is good. They're knowledgeable. The people with whom I'm dealing are pretty good. We go through the usual channels, but right now we have a partner in place who is helping us out.

We were running on some technologies which were going off the market, and we wanted to upgrade them. So we looked to put 3PAR in place, and we are moving into 3PAR now.

It was not complex. It's pretty straightforward. It took approximately two and a half months, the project which we have run through it. So it's pretty good. And now that our actual deployment starts off, we'll get to know the actual time lines on it.

When we look to work with a vendor we look at their reputation, and along with that is the way it can be scaled up. Also, the new technology innovations which can can be added to your portfolio must be excellent. That's where we started off moving into HPE.

At this stage I would rate it somewhere around eight out of 10, because there were some initial challenges in finalizing the design, etc. Now we are looking into the cloud solution as well, so we'll see how that goes.

Data optimization, i.e., basically we have an adaptive and dynamic optimization about the clear structure of the data and this is the most valuable feature that comes with the HPE 3PAR solution.

This product is scalable, i.e., when you have a need for the performance and to grow online, without having any downtime. It's really optimized for any application.

It's pretty strong; actually, it is five nines (99.999 percent).

You can scale as per the demand and definitely, you can start with a one disk enclosure and then go up to nine to twelve disk enclosures, without having any performance issues.

I'm really impressed with the technical support, the team is very effective and they do resolve issues on time.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

I would definitely recommend it.

The reliability, scalability and support are the important criteria whilst selecting a vendor.

We've been with HPE for a long time and we'll stick with it.