HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

Cost per disk storage, uptime, and ease of upgrade.

It runs all the time. I've never had a problem with it. Upgrades have been flawless. We've had controllers die in the middle of the day, and it was no big deal. We've had shelves die in the middle of the day with no impact to our end users whatsoever.

I think they just released Flash Cache. It is the new SSD where you write all your caching information to flash disk, and then it writes it down to your nearline or your flash disk. We just bought all new flash cache for that purpose. So that was one of the features we were looking for.

I don't know that you could improve on the 3PAR very much, other than maybe the 3PAR management console. It's kind of an old school console, it's not web- based. It's a fat client that you have to install. It would be nice to have a web- based version that I could go anywhere to, versus having to go back to the 3PAR management console.

Stability is top-notch.

Scalability has been really good. We've constantly added shelves and disk space to it from the beginning. I think we started out with a 12 to 13 terabyte system, and now we're up to a 60 terabyte system. It has grown exponentially with us over the last few years.

I have used tech support and it’s good. You get some people who are more knowledgeable than others, but for the most part, we've never had a problem. We've always gotten the answer that we needed to sort the problem out.

We knew that we needed a new solution. We had to move from some old EMC equipment. We had looked at what they had, their price offering versus what we could get at HPE for the same dollar, and this solution was exponentially better.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was very straightforward. The HPE engineer came on site, sat down, showed us how to do things as he built and designed it. It was very good.

We had looked at Pure Storage , Hitachi , and a couple others. However, 3PAR gave us the best bang for the buck.

Go with it. It's a beast of a storage system. We love ours.

When looking for a vendor, the most important thing is support.

They work reasonably well. We've only had a couple of problems with them, and HPE knows about the problems.

On certain of their features that we have to use to migrate data, it tends to go off for about 60 or 90 seconds toward the end of the work.

The stability is pretty good.

It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling. Application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

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.

It handles the structure of our system easily and provides us with really good performance. We have the older systems and not the new ones with the 7400. They all mesh together well and we've been able to move data from the old to new easily. It's also easy to code.

We use all of HP's services, so HP is a big partner of ours. Staying with HP for storage means we don't need to switch partners.

I'd like to see just a little bit more virtualization so that as I work on the front end, I can make any necessary disc switches. I'd also like to see expanded correspondence systems.

We had no issues with deployment.

We've had no problems with firmware, so all of this is really done smoothly without interruptions.

We've always been able to upgrade easily and now have three or four kinds of upgraded systems.

We switched because HP is stable and reliable.

We needed HP specialists to help stand up the 3PAR systems. It was a little tricky. After that, things were straightforward.

Scalability is the most valuable feature.

We had unexpected capacity growth. We informed the integrator what was going on and they were able to work with HP, forecast what we needed, and install it overnight without any downtime.

I'd like to see future versions have improved protection and optimization, such as whether we're using the right disks properly for the assigned workload.

No problems or issues with stability. We get notified from HP when the updates come out--really simple, quick, and easy with no downtime.

3PAR has been extremely scalable.

Customer support is excellent.

I think we’ve only had to call once for understanding the update process, but I've never personally had to call.

We didn’t have a solution in place, so we went through an integrator and got a recommendation.

Initial setup was complex because we didn’t have any previous knowledge. It's been two years since, and I think it’s essentially a simple setup and we just didn’t have any prior experience.

When deciding on a storage vendor you need to look at IOPs and scalability.

I would recommend 3PAR; we tell everyone everyday. It beats Hitachi and EMC (Clarion) hands down. We would recommend them over all those solutions.

• Separated multilayer and specific SAN Storage operating system (Informos)
• ASIC based operation
• High end feature in mid-range scale
• Wizard based configuration console
• Scale in scale out forward
• Storage virtualization technology like chunklet

Increase provisioning time and reduce configuration complexity based on chunklet technology. It supports advanced virtualization services on storage operations and virtual computing infrastructure.

Common data center standards for temperature, humidity, firefighting etc.

I've used the Inserv 7000 series for two years.

Many points were needed for the initial system on first time setup. We had some non-predictable random issues during initialization like non-probable Inserv serial numbers etc. Time was needed for the chunklets restructure to take effect.

Very dependable system structure to each node on healthy clusters.

Based on our experience and the documentation it looks easy.

9 out of 10

9 out of 10

We used to use the EVA 8000 series but they have just two nodes in that series and it is unsupported for active clustering, HA for controllers and nodes. 3PAR is also more cost effective on hardware, and has less performance issues and more scalability.

Complex in initial pre-requirement and finding the serial numbers and the necessary information for setting up the system.

I did the implementation myself.

When comparing the cost with the features and performance, this solution is a good choice.

Yes, we compared this series to the EMC VNX series based on feature/performance/technology and cost.

It has a large basket of advanced features to integrate storage system into the service layer, good performance on provisioning and SAN service.

The CPG, Dynamic / Adaptive Optimization, the CLI, and more importantly the way it's licensed as you are not "tagged" and held hostage when you're at 1TB, and another, and another, and another. The licensing is a brilliant approach to the fiscal tourniquet of scalability! Oh.. I also like the service processor and how it's out of band and monitors the SAN, how it does the updates - neat little component.

Scaling and performance. Easy to add shelves, easy to move data around while everything is hot, move data from tier to tier, expanding a LUN, there are so many ways it's just amazing how much it's helped! The snapshot and sending them to different tiers by using the CPG makes life a bit easier!

Removing a LUN mapping from a single host is a bit odd, worse a single host in a host set, it needs 10G ports for IP based replication (needs to be 1 or 10G). Keep working on the SSMC and allow for GUI management to be cross platform.

Around 2 years

I have deployed several and found the SmartStart CD to be intermittent. Also, during the install when the SP locates the array, the network based multicast can't find the storage array and you have to go to console / serial cable. Not too big of a deal, but you then have to configure settings manually.

Never as of yet. It has been rock solid!

We can't hit it hard enough yet. As I said adding shelves and drives all is pretty nice and straight forward.

Early on, I had some strong opinions about the transition to more of HP support. I raised concerns, The HP team in Alpharetta, Ga lead by Brad Bates took significant steps, listened, and made adjustments. Buying a product is one thing, post-sale is what keeps customers coming back and maintains longevity.

Thus far, pretty impressive. I met the actual teams of people and after the initial "hiccup", I had a chance to see the HP Lab, meet some of the people that enjoy what they do. It's important for everyone to understand that IT people work inverse hours and when we make changes it's evenings, weekends, and holidays. Senior level - tenured members of most companies are "off" while HP found a way to keep solid individuals available to be available.

Funny you ask - let's just say a "no named" array that had redundant controllers completely torched nearly every ESX datastore where it "gutted" the data inside of it, but left the shell. Yet, the support person on the phone called the update "successful on my end". Sure, the nodes made have updated, but the data was gone - you be the judge! I have used solutions from many, many storage vendors.

Pretty straightforward - even though HP says "self installable" I highly recommend a qualified person with a great deal of understanding of virtualization, zoning, etc. Could a person with no experience using storage do this? Eh...maybe getting the array on-line, but I would not recommend it (nor would I for any vendor).

Well, I am "that vendor team", but I am also a user as well. So, if I am allowed to rate my experience - 25 years of IT, nearly 15 years of storage - we can do pretty well!!

The usual EMC stuff.

Whether you are new to storage or advanced, this is the most amazing piece of hardware I have ever had my hands on, built, and used. The thought behind much of the detail of how it works just seems incredible. Think about this, you have drives that sit in multiple RAID arrays because of the CPGs and how the SAN is always moving chunklets around to keep hot spots from occurring. If I could meet the founders and shake their hand, I would love to and let them know thank you. Thank you for giving me the chance to have fun with my job and have access to such hardware. I would also thank HP for taking a datacenter class piece of hardware and re-aligning it to be competitive in any space - just brilliant!

I want to build a MetroCluester in VMware.

The speed is very good.

This solution only provides active-passive replication, as opposed to active-active. Competing products also provide active-active replication.

Adding support for Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) would be an improvement.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for more than seven years.

3PAR is a stable product.

This solution is easy to scale. It is done online.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE Nimble.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple.

The installation and configuration are quick. You can complete them in one or two hours, which is fast.

The deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We are always using the latest version because I upgrade every year.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.