HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

The service and the support, as well as the technology. Yes, there are plenty of technical features that it offers, which we would expect from HPE. One of the reasons that we use HPE is because they tend to provide a quality product with all the latest advances in technology; so, its storage level, things like deduplication, all-flash array, real-time replication.

In addition to that, it's just as important that the ongoing support and monitoring of the system is proactive, and also the account management side. If we have particular challenges with either the specific design and build of the array or we need to upgrade, we feel like we have good support from the people who own our relationship to help guide us through that process.

It's a very critical technology component within our service offering. The storage sits central to everything else, such that it needs to be really robust. It needs to be highly available and it needs to be secure as well. All those things are very important. Because we're a service provider and we offer multitenancy, we need to be available to do that in a way such that we can host multiple clients’ data on the same storage system and in a secure fashion.

I suppose I’d like to see more security in terms of encryption on the device without it impacting performance. For all I know, that might exist. It’s something occasionally we get asked for. Our understanding has been that there are challenges around introducing inline encryption to a storage system because it increases the performance overhead.

Initially, some years ago, it missed a few important features. Until reasonably recently, one feature that was missing was the asynchronous real-time replication. In the last year or so, that's been introduced. I think that's taken too long. That was a little bit of a step back.

We've been using 3PAR for about five or six years.

Overall, touch wood, we've never had a major failure. We found it to be very, very stable. I think there are some challenges when it comes to upgrading the firmware on the system, and making those incremental updates. Apart from that, it's pretty rock solid.

I suppose that those types of highly scalable environments that perhaps larger service providers need; we don't really push the boundaries of the product in that sense, too much. There are some step changes you have to make, I suppose, as you grow, which you'd prefer not to. You have to invest, maybe, in more enclosures or those kind of things, whereas you'd like it to be a bit smoother.

From a financial point of view, which is probably the main challenge there, HPE are providing solutions for that in the terms of flexible capacity, where they help part share the financial responsibility and give you a more linear and smooth scaling of the system, and help you fund that.

Before 3PAR, we used the HPE EVA technology. We’ve always used HPE.

We have looked at EMC as an alternative to HPE 3PAR, but in terms of servers and storage, we are very much aligned with HPE and have been for over 20 years, so there are a lot of reasons why we use them.

One of the reasons we selected 3PAR was a similar reason that HP first acquired 3PAR: It's used by the world's biggest service and cloud providers. They're particularly focused on the multitenancy elements. It provides virtual domain technology that allows you to securely separate different customers' environments and where they store that data. You basically create multiple virtual SANs within a SAN. For a service provider who's doing multitenancy, clearly that's a big advantage for us.

The most important criteria when selecting 3PAR was the multitenancy piece, because we get a lot of questions from our clients around how we securely segment their data; if we can prove to them that our administrators can only log into their specific domain within that shared storage system and we can provide an audit trail.

Absolutely get the design of the system right. Work very closely with the right pre-sales technical teams. If you don't, it can be expensive to try and rectify that after you've bought it.

The features I like are the reliability, the cost, and support. It is quite an expensive kit, but the support we get and the reliability is what we pay for, and that's important to us.

The scalability has improved our organization. We can add to it, and we can future-proof it in that regard. It's flexible in that we can grow it or shrink it as our business demands require. It allows us to be flexible. Since we do have peaks and troughs in our data storage, we need to be able to either add, take stuff away, move things around for projects, and that's just what they can provide.

I would like to see, obviously, regular disks and more storage on them. I would like to be able to fit more data into the same amount of space or smaller. That's always where disk storage is going to go. They continue to innovate on the disks, bigger capacity disks in the same amount of space so we can get more storage for the same amount of room of physical space.

The stability is excellent. It has been very stable, and we do give the storage quite a good workout. It's busy all the time, most of the day, 24/7, most of the weekends. Our account manager says it's one of the most worked three-part storage devices he's seen. We do use it a lot. It's been perfectly stable, and we have, “touch wood”, not had any particular bother with it.

We absolutely have used tech support, and they have been great. They're very good. Luckily we haven't had many issues, but when we do, we contact tech support. They're usually very good at getting back to us, because it's automated tech support. They will actually call us, and tell us there's a problem before we even notice it ourselves.

We were using an HPE product, and that basically folded, as it got quite old. We went and looked around in the market for what is current, and HPE came along and said, "We can do that. Our replacement for this unit is now the HPE one, and this is what we recommend." We got some consultancy from them just to go through our requirements and our needs. They did lot of graphs and showed that it was right for us. It was recommended to us by them.

We considered Dell before HPE. We chose HPE due to its reputation. We had a relationship with HPE previously, and actually they were able to come in and recommend, and actually spend time with us to sit down and ask what our needs were, analyze, project and give us both sets of figures of what we need, how quickly to fulfill them, how long it would take, and that sort of thing. They were able to come in and do this. Other vendors really just tell us, "Here's what you'd like." That certainly won't do as we need to have some details in pre-sales. This solution does fit our needs very well. It is flexible, and we get good support with it. It's stable, and it works, and so I'm happy with it.

When looking for a vendor, look for reliability, backup, support, and reputation. It's got to be someone we know who has a good reputation in the industry. We do go with some newer sort of vendors as well, but we like HPE for their reputation. We know their stuff is good because we've been using them for years.

The most valuable features are the functions and the flash disks. They make our storage system much faster than previous systems.

The benefit is that it's one big solution and then we have all of the flash functions.

I would you like to see compression included in a future release. That’s what we are missing.

The stability’s fine.

Scalability is extremely fine.

Technical support is very good.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of lifecycle management. It was time to lifecycle the product.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup, but I think it was pretty straightforward.

My organization is a government authority, so we issue requirements and solutions, and the best price wins, when comparing the functions. Any company offering this type of enterprise flash array storage solution in Sweden could have made a bid.

Look at the vendor’s support and the setup; the benefits. HPE is great.

In a word, performance. It was primarily brought in to replace our EVA with something that was more capable from a performance perspective. We did not order solid state in our original configuration and we were looking for something which could grow with us, that could handle unpredictable VMware workloads better, and that didn't have the bottlenecks of a traditional monolithic array. Since that time, we have added solid state to accelerate the performance further.

My 3PAR array is too old to support File Persona, and I would love to be able to do that, but that's something that we would need more powerful controllers. We've got the first generation, so at some point we will get it, but we've got to wait for a refresh cycle.

3PAR stability has been there since day one. It's one of the platforms that has just been a joy to work with, because it changed the way that we are able to protect our entire environment. Being a telecom, we've got really good high speed links between our two data centers and we are able to do with 3PAR in a Peer Persistence configuration, and that's a feature where it clusters the two 3PAR rays together with seamless failover for LUNs from one array to another.

Now I've got disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery of a traditional replication technology. So Peer Persistence for us is kind of nirvana. It's been a great solution for us.

It started out just with VMware, then they added support for our Windows clusters. Most of the things we run on the blades are things that we can do this with. So if we have a blade fail, the great thing about a blade is the server profiles, move that to another blade, spare, in the enclosure, it comes back up in the same server running again, and if we have a storage failure, it automatically switches over in the backend, and our users never know.

We've got plenty of room to grow. We're about three or four years into our 3PARs and we've still got more than at least about 50% of our drive shelves open, so we have a lot more room to grow. With each generation of drive that comes out, we can install bigger and more capable drives in it, so we haven't hit any scale issues there.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

We were using HP EVA, and before that we were HP HSG. So when I first started we had two small HSG arrays that were primarily behind DMS and maybe a couple of other systems, but we had a very small amount of data on a san. VMware changed all of that. So we had all of this data running on EVA and we were staring to hit some limits, and the EVA didn't have good telemetry to let us know where the edge of the cliff actually was, so we were teetering right on the edge and about to fall off when we got the 3PARs in. So that kind of saved our bacon.

When we were evaluating potential replacements for our HP EVA storage array, we looked at Tintri and Tegile. We ended up doing evaluations for both of them.

Our company purchased Tegile for another project. Internally, my security officer didn't like the NFS of Tegile. That was kind of a no-go for internal use. Otherwise it has really great features for virtualization. That was really appealing to me as a VMWare administrator. We talked with them after a VMUG meeting and brought it in, did a proof of concept on it. It didn't perform as expected in our environment and we found out after the fact why. We would have needed a second active controller and a second disk shelf to get the full IOPS we were expecting out of it. That kind of killed our evaluation. It had good features, it had good reporting, which was one of our big criteria moving from the EVA. We wanted something that was going to let us know how it was performing. That was really strong, in Tintri. It's also been three and a half years since then, so that product has changed a lot also.

3PAR installation was an easy one. We had really good consulting services that came in and walked us through that process. We've done a couple of field upgrades and those have gone smoothly also, so 9/10.

From a storage perspective we've looked at some other vendors, but once the 3PAR 7000 series was announced with its capabilities, it made the most sense, being mostly an HPE shop.

I really love that platform. It's rocked for us. It's, like I said before, it's near nirvana for our environment, because we are trying to do something where we want to avoid disasters and have seamless fail-over, and I don't know of another solution that can accomplish that in our environment.

• High granularity
• Easy to use
• Convergence with the HPE/VMware ecosystem

3PAR's ease-of-use has really improved our functioning because it requires less administration and less tuning. It really just works.

We need something with less performance and lower cost to fill a gap in our customer solution offerings. We'd like to be able to have something like branch office storage, which is still capable of interacting with enterprise systems like 3PAR 8400, for example, in terms of replication, backup capability, peer motion, etc. Specifically, we need lower end 3PAR devices. Sometimes, we need 3PAR for the same cost of an MSA2040 to replace it.

There have been no issues with deploying it.

We had some issues with power down recovery and boot disk issues. Other than that, it's a stable solution.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

3PAR made its success by scaling down enterprise systems to the mid-range level, which was not typical for the storage market. Although no one cares about inventing something cheap, HP did it with 3PAR and succeeded.

But my advice would to try it! It's cool.

It's reliable and it's fast.

They are constantly moving and will address an issue instantaneously. If somebody has an issue, HPE is very responsive because the 3PAR is one of the flagship products. I haven’t had any issues and they’re very on top of making sure that we follow through with code upgrades.

The 3PAR is very reliable. Most of our performance complaints went away after we put the 3PARs in. We also went from a 4 GB to 16 GB fibre channel, so it’s simple to manage and easily serviceable by our technicians.

We have had no issues with our 3PARs. We like them a lot.

HPE support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HPE stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set. I would also advise that users follow best practices with the 3PAR.