HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

Flexibility, in regards to the different disk tiers in the 3PAR, is the most valuable feature.I can manually move data between the different tiers (NL, FC or SSD) or I can let AO do it for me. Thus I do not need 100% precise planning in advance.

I can play with it real time, all day. There's no need for a very dedicated planning for the future because I always can change it.

Stability could be better. We have had it 3 years and we had three down times.

We scaled up in the past and we will scale up again next month. The last time the previous system engineer did this. I don't have experience with scalability.

The quality of technical support was inconsistent. I did not always find that they dealt with our issues on time.

There were HPE EVAs before and they were at the end of their life.

When looking at vendors, the most important aspect is openness; that they really talk open and are not just marketing.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

I don't know if other vendors were evaluated. It was before my time. But, there are still better products. I would like to have an HPE XP7.

Go and play. We have a lot of offices and backup sites so they can really get hands on. That's the benefit.

The most valuable feature is its tiered approach to data structuring. We can quickly move data that's stored on slow disks to faster disks if the demand arises. That's good value for our company.

We've recently embarked on a large-scale convergence project where we've consolidated about 250 physical servers to virtual servers. Those virtual servers are hosted onto 3PARs 7400 systems, which are located in two data centers. They give us high availability and real-time access to data in both locations. In terms of the value for business and the value for us, it's given us the facility to have a business continuity plan, which we never had before.

Data de-duplication is something that's lacking in 3PAR. We use HPE StoreOnce systems as part of a backup solution. StoreOnce systems, they use a SAS disks, which are spin disks. They have about 80% de-duplication ratio, which from a backup perspective, that gives us tremendous capacity to back up to disk; not to take to disk for 12, 24 months. When you compare that to 3PAR, 3PAR doesn't have de-duplication and this causes storage issues.

Technically that's not true. 3PAR has de-duplication on the SSD drives, but because it's a mixed drive chassis, the large proportion of data that we have comes in the first class of the SAS disks, which will equate to maybe about 70 or 80% for top data. They're not de-duplicated. I think that's a feature that HPE need to work on quickly.

3PARs are very stable. We've been using 3PARs both in the UK and our headquarters in France for maybe four years now and we've not had any issues with the system, so they're a quite a reliable system.

Scalability depends on the situation. Whenever you try and provision these converged platforms, you've got to have an element of planning in terms of where your business is going grow for the next two or three years. It's interesting. We planned for 20% data growth on a 3PAR infrastructure over three years. What we found was we had closer to 20% data growth per year.

So if you look it from a data scaling perspective, we've reached the limits of our 3PAR 7200s in Europe. Thankfully for us, we've got 7400s, which gives you a lot more scalability in terms of storage. From a memory and processing prospective, they're perfect. So we have no issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good for the 3PARs you get. We've bought a 5-year support plan and we get to speak to the 3PAR technical support team in Houston, Tx. They're quite responsive. The 3PAR support plan, as well, is a reactive support plan, so we've got people from Houston who are looking at our systems and they inform us whenever a disk is filled. They send disks to be swapped out. They can be swapped out by our team or they can be swapped out by an HP person that turns up and does the job for you.

We're a large company of many, many small companies and we've realized through global projects that have an autonomous approach to IT departments, for example, where it doesn't work. That's exactly the same when it comes to the architecture behind your IT environment. We had to look at centralizing all of our systems, all of our platforms, so that we could offer a meaningful level of service to business. Without centralization, we couldn't guarantee the service of any of our platforms around the key business applications that the business expected us to deploy. That's how we knew to centralize all of our systems and platforms and host them on converged systems.

Initial setup was very complex. These systems are very complex, but if you buy a converged system from HPE, the converged system is part of the package and HPE provides you with the technical expertise to come out and build the converged systems for you. They're built and tested at the manufacturing plant. You can go and visit the manufacturing plant and see them if you want. Some people can. Then they're sent to your site and HPE sends experts to build the 3PARs on site and assist you with the build.

We have a global HPE agreement and it depends on the sort of size of projects and whether or not we issue and RFP when we got to other suppliers. If we do issue an RFP, then we're not tied internally to working with HPE. We can work with whoever we think's best for the requirement. But because we have such a good close working relationship with HPE and because they attend industry events, I'm always key to recommend to some of our peers and our colleagues around the world that they should be looking at this or that particular product.

3PAR's good from a medium-sized to large-sized enterprises. We're probably a large-sized enterprise company, but we have also small companies around the world where we wouldn't recommend the 3PAR for those sort of situations. We'd recommend applying a platform converged systems solution.

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 us, the most important feature is reliability. It must be tough because we work in a hospital and we want it to be solid. It must work always, always, always.

We count on that it works and it's always on; at a quarter of the price. The price and the reliability are key for us.

We need faster disks, but their solid-state disk takes care of that. But they are expensive. I think the solution is to spend more money.

It is really stable actually. We never have unplanned downtime. It is really on call for us. We upgraded from the HPE EVA systems to the 3PAR and I think it's better than our last EVA system.

We have had to scale up a couple times now because our imaging is growing about 30% per year. We cannot plan it; we have to upgrade it. The scalability is really good. We just put in more hardware and it starts to run.

Technical support is not so good. They don't understand us and we don't understand them. We had quite simple questions and tend to be transferred somewhere else.

Actually, it was HPE old technology. We really didn't switch anything. It's HPE already just old hardware, so we just upgraded.

I was not involved with the setup.

We didn't consider any other vendors because we did an upgrade from old HPE hardware. We can trust it. The whole process works very smoothly. No downtime; that is important for us.

We like the system, so I can suggest to a friend that 3PAR is okay.

The great value is the integration with the hardware and the software which really has great features that they develop over time. The system we bought back in 2012/13 and installed in 2013 is no longer in the system we are using now in 2016. This is because the software evolved so much and features were added to the system we purchased three years ago. It still adds new features that which we can leverage on the day-to-day use and make the storage investment more profitable and the storage resources more efficient.

The things I keep asking for are certain features which are now available but not to all the systems that are on the market. Sometimes they say we don't think the hardware you have can sustain this feature. We don't let you try it if it probably can't sustain the feature. There are other features where they say they don't support it on this type of spinning media, we only do that on flash. We don't have flash on our RA, so we are out of that. We get so many other features just by a software update, like transparent frame level between sites which is a huge thing. There's nothing really to complain about.

We introduced this solution into our system in early 2013. We were one of the first customers in Germany and Europe who really received the new 3PAR 7400 storage systems. We transferred all our data from our previous system which was the HP EVA system to the 3PAR system. We did that not by means of the online import, but rather the MPX solution. This solution transferred it over the wire, at wire speed transfer, block for block, the data from the EVA to the 3PAR. Over a weekend, we had all the data for virtualization which was the MRV sphere, the file services on top of Windows storage. We were able to transfer into the new system so we can break down the old system, erect the second new system then have everything merge across the sites again, like we had before.

There is no doubt that the 3PAR system is the most stable system we ever had in the storage space. When I look left and right at other systems we had and others still have in the university, we never had any unplanned downtime. We never lost any data. It really does the job the way it should be doing it.

There might be some mishaps, but nothing that's out of the ordinary, like losing the website for three days in a row. There's nothing like that. Of course, you have to do all the work to maintain the system. That's hard work, and you have to do it, but the system really rewards you for doing that.

In terms of scalability, we did careful planning on that in the beginning. I don’t think we will outrun the system within its natural lifetime. Once it gets replaced by the next generation of systems, whatever those might be, it might be 3PAR, or it might be something software defined. We don't know because that will be in 2019.

The support at HPE is not great, but it is good. We have some fights about it. That's basically at the stages where we have a way to think how it should be done. Then HPE has a supported way. Then HPE has a way that will also work. Basically, our way is the way that will also work. That's kind of our fight, but at the end, we settle for the best of both worlds. They're typically deliver what they promise. There's no worry about that with 3PAR. On the StoreEasy side, it's a little bit more of a challenge because half the product is HPE, and the other half is Microsoft. You have a lot of components that play together and if you get to the line where it is stitched together, sometimes you have just these problems. Is it Microsoft? Is it HPE? How do you get that together and then run into all the troubles you are with having multiple vendors included into that, even though you purchased a product from HPE.

I think it is a complex setup. We didn't set it up ourselves. We had an HPE partner come in to set it up for us. Then we only dealt with the maintenance in running it. The hardware maintenance is done by HPE. Other than that, we do it ourselves now. I think that's fairly reasonable. Have somebody set it up professionally, explain to you how it should work, and then you can take it from there. That's the way it was in old-fashioned IT. This is transforming with all the cloud stuff that's going on, with all the automation. I think that's really getting to a different level going forward.

We looked at all the major competitors at the time when we chose it. We looked at the EMCs, the NetApps, the IBMs, and the Dells. In the end, it turned out only one, namely HPE, not only for storage but also for server and all the other requirements we had, was able to bring it to the market at a price point that we were willing to pay. For the 3PAR, of course, the transparency between sites is valuable. That used to be the huge feature for NetApp. At that time, they weren't able to deliver it in the way we wanted it. Also HPE had to wait about half a year to be able to deliver that. It was just a software update, some more setup, and then we were up and running. I think with NetApp, it would have been little bit of a harder journey.

In terms of choosing a vendor, there is a mix of capabilities. You need to find someone who is proven in the field, in general. But if you want to go for latest products, we bought a 7400 even before it was announced. There is nothing in the field. You have to have good partners with whom you can work and with whom you can speak. It only becomes apparent over the course of a project how well of a partner you chose. If you have a product where you spent several million Euros, there's nothing that will work on the first instance. There's not anything that will work, but there are some things that won't work on the first instance. Then every partner shines. You have to ask how they get these problems resolved.

We have been an HPE customer for over 20 years. HPE consistently delivered on target. They are always in a bidding process. They can never be sure where they will get the next project because they run against the Dells, the Lenovos, and all the others. You have to have the right portfolio, you have to have the right features, the right product, the right services around it, and you have to deliver it for the right price. That's basically it.

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 data deduplication is one valuable feature. Another thing is the fast storage possibility and the whole clustering mode. Because we have a dual data center set-up and we wanted to have a high availability solution, we chose HPE 3PAR.

This has helped our organization with fast storage and the whole administration which is handled quite automatically. In this way, I can save one full time equivalent (FTE) a year in my team, so that alone is a great benefit.

I would like to see a more stable deduplication because with the deduplication we have right now, the percentage that we can save is not as high as we hoped for. The second thing I’d like to see is a more scalable and faster storage possibility without the main licenses increasing in cost. Now that we are in a full flash set-up, we want to go to a set-up where we can use flash and slower disks. While that set-up possibility exists, there is a whole license step-up that has to be done. It takes too long to do all the licenses. The license and the flexibility towards licensing needs improvement.

The stability, “knock on wood”, is okay. My feeling is that this solution is rock solid stable.

We are on the verge of the next step up. We implemented last year and now we are going to double the capacity. Based on how it’s going so far, it will be an easy step up.

We rely on our partner for technical support. They have a direct connection with HPE for the support. So, at the moment, we have no issues.

Before we were using the EVA solution and HPE LeftHand. We had a large IOPS problems with our ERP system. They weren’t stable enough and they did not have a proven record for us. Our ERP system has a large database, lots of IOPS, and these solutions couldn’t handle it. That was why we changed to HPE 3PAR that has a full SSD solution that could handle the IOPS. The main competitor was NetApp. We chose HPE because of the stability. We know HPE, we have a multi-year contract with them. We looked at several reference cases and those convinced us to choose this solution.

When looking for a vendor, stability and a proven track record are the things to look for. I would absolutely recommend it. When you need fast storage, high capacity, and deduplication, it's a good solution.

It's probably the most cost-effective, value-for-money system for the mid-market.

Besides from being cost effective, it's got a low-cost disk, upon which you can load any of your imaging stuff. Then, there are also the higher-cost disks, and the SSDs, which are phenomenally fast. SSDs make our systems work significantly faster. I've used SSDs before when I was a customer. Previous to this job, I was the infrastructure executive for a much larger company and we invested quite heavily in HPE 3PAR.

In the next release, I think I would like to see lower-cost SSD features. I would prefer to spend a little bit less there so I can afford to actually move my entire 3PAR system into SSDs.

The stability is pretty good.

The scalability is very good.

We have used technical support. Sometimes we used HPE's technical support out of India and it is quite difficult to understand them. I think that HPE needs to look at that. Besides that, the technical support is relatively good.

Before this solution, we were in a situation where the disk capacity we had continued to grow. When I joined the company three years ago, each system had their own stuff so we invested in 3PAR. We were just using all internal disks. I've used one or two other disk systems, but I don’t recall the names. We also used HPE's EVA, which I don't think was necessarily the best environment. We also used their XP environment which was very good. EVA was not as fast as it should have been. I think it was too costly. When we chose this solution, we were looking for the most value for our money. We had a short list of other vendors, but I've been buying HPE since 1982, I think, so it didn't take long for me to think about HPE.

I don't do this sort of leg work, the keyboard stuff, because I'm an executive responsible for other matters. However, I have a technical background, so I know quite a lot about it. The feedback I received was that it went very well. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.

I have heard of a solution called "Clear" or something like that. If you look at them, trolley-for-trolley, or pound for pound, I think that HPE 3PAR is probably the best system around.