HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

What's relatively common in most SAN environments is consolidation of storage under a single management interface or pool. The ability to quickly scale and expand storage as required, and to accommodate whatever deliverables you're putting out there. I think one of the advantages of 3PAR obviously is its tiered storage, as well as its visibility, deduplication in the flash is a big component. Just being a holistic solution that you can rely on as a cornerstone to the foundation for your underlying infrastructure. You have that flexibility to use it for your virtual infrastructure, grow it out to accommodate other storage requirements. It's a single framework or platform that you can use to accommodate pretty much all your storage requirements.

One of the features we use is Peer Persistence on the storage, so that's part of our core DR strategy, so that we have two data centers, we synch and replicate the data between the two centers. Then in the event of a disaster, because we're a virtualized environment, we can fail the storage over, and fail our VMs over, and we can be up and running. We test it on an annual basis, and we completely can fail all of one data center into another data center, and within an hour and a half, we have everything up and tested and back online. That's been our DR exercise.

Although there's been a lot of technical advancement, one of my biggest beefs with HP's drive towards OneView as a management platform for this point is really around their licensing. It's been somewhat cost prohibitive. Obviously with the new release of OneView in the near future, the licensing model is going to change, but for customers who may already have a heavy investment in hardware infrastructure, who were not previously licensed with ILO Enterprise, for example, and did not have those rights for utilizing OneView, having to backtrack and buy all new licensing in order to be able accommodate that, in order to be able to manage their infrastructure, it kind of takes away from the whole simplification of having everything under a single pane of glass if you're now forced to have to go back and relicense initial investments to be able to take advantage of that technology.

That being said, I will state that it does look like HP understands and has recognized that, and I think that's really why they're trying to make the advancements and the changes that they are in terms of having that. They're pushing it to be that kind of single unified management infrastructure component, and knowing that they want to push customers towards that, I think they also recognize that in order to do that, they have to put some incentive there to make it worthwhile for customers to make that investment and change in their management strategy.

From my perspective it's definitely a stable solution, it's easily scalable. It's really like any other kind of blade enclosure, you buy your chassis, you add the blades as needed. Really no real hardware related issues. You're always going to get your bad spurts, regardless of generation, but I think from our perspective, they'll correct me if I'm wrong, it's been pretty stable.

We didn't switch in terms of the technology. We switched to the latest 3PAR technology. We previously used 7400s. We wanted to move from a managed services to self-managing, and the contract was coming up for renewal, so that was a golden opportunity to swing off and do our own thing.

Really understand what your needs and requirements and future expectations are. Every vendor has a product that fits in the same market space, whether it be Dell, IBM or HP. I think it's really about what your long-term expectations and goals are. With 3PAR for example, if a lot of your underlying infrastructure is HP, it might make sense to go that way, to maintain that consistency. From a management an usability perspective, the full integration components, everything from your Blade, your Interconnects, your storage, your management platforms. Almost all the major vendors now are doing some form of deduplication, compression, storage tiering. I think it really comes down to knowing and understanding what you're looking for. Sometimes it's more of a business related decision and politics than it is an actual technical merit. I would say really understanding what your workloads are, what you're looking to get out of any investment that you make, and then taking it from there.

It's a definitely an easy to use interface. It's also easy to learn. We're currently moving over to more HPE solutions, so it was an easy transition.

Ease of management at the device level. Having the volume sets is a lot more efficient than we do on some other systems, so it's easier to group by host. That was definitely better than the other systems.

One big thing I would like to see is to be able to promote a virtual volume while it's still exporting. That's something a lot of the arrays are doing, other vendors, and 3PAR is kind of the only one that's not doing it. It's kind of the only thing that is not there. Everything else is great.

We've been pretty good so far.

We have a few arrays. We have scaled up a little bit. It's been pretty easy to rebalance the arrays while we were scaling. I'm overall happy with that.

It depends on who you get, but sometimes they can be a little bit annoying, depending on the case, but usually they've been pretty good and pretty responsive.

We're a pretty big data center, so we have a lot of EMC and IBM products. We're kind of starting to spread out though. I like 3PAR, that's what I'm in charge of.

EMC definitely has a better support structure. HP is not bad, it's just that with EMC, the their relationship with the customer is a little different than HP's. That's really the only thing that separates it. Performance is performance. 3PAR gets the job done.

It's definitely on the easier side when it comes to storage arrays. It's definitely a smooth array. It was smooth to get up. Smooth to expand.

Know that the raw usable is actually raw and not a lot of arrays come with their usable being RAIDed already. Say it says 270 terabytes, that's raw, and it's actually if you use a RAID5 you got to take a 20%. So you have to adjust for that when you're planning size. Everything else is straightforward.

I think it's the direction in which they're moving in terms of flash storage and being able to take your legacy systems, integrate the old hard drives with flash storage and perform the migrations. Especially when including virtualization and trying to shrink your data center and improve performance.

HPE has been our de facto standard, and the benefits are the integration with the rest of our system, including solutions for system administration of having one interface with OneView and being able to use 3PAR with your storage and manage everything. The integration with virtualization as all that just brings down cost with administration, and to me that's one of the biggest things it brings.

Stability has always been there. Going back to my reliability comment that it's always been very reliable, we've never had any major issues. When there has been issues, it's always been preventative maintenance kind of things that are addressed pretty quickly. With the redundancy that you get in the system, we've never had an outage, per say. Something that you have to maybe go fix, but not a complete downtime.

We never buy just for what we need at the time, we always try to make sure we get the full lifecycle use of the product, and so with 3PAR, it might include having the expandability to add more shelves, or looking at the drives that are denser and things like that, so being able to mix and match parts and stuff.

The scalability has always been there as well, and like I said, in the old version of the BladeSystem, the c7000, that was around for like 10 years, so it's scaled very well. I've never had a problem with scaling.

We have technical account managers, and we call them to handle any kind of maintenance agreement or things like that, and have had very good support from them. If there's something that they can't answer, they're always willing to reach back and get the right point of contact. We've had very good dealings with our technical account manager and technical support.

There's been some cases where we have migrated systems from one data center into our data center, and done consolidations. Some of that requires backing up older platforms, older systems, and bringing them in. We had one scenario where we migrated a customer, and they were using old LTO tape drives, coming into a new system which didn't support that. In those kind of cases, we had to reach out to HPE for support. Those were things we could handle. Again, during those migrations, I can't say that there was anything that we missed our window. Everything worked out very well.

We did a trade study between 3PAR and some of the other ones like Pure Storage. I would just say one thing we saw that I think could be helpful is maybe looking at dedupe and how their competitors are doing it, and making sure that they stay aware of what those other competitors are doing as well.

It's consistency. And again, it's going through to HPE for everything. And I know that my blade, my DL and my 3PAR are all going to work seamlessly together.

What I like about 3PAR is just how easy it is to use. A lot of my guys don't do storage admin every day and yet they have no issues allocating the storage. From my perspective, it's really easy for me to be able to get in and do any troubleshooting with it and it's very consistent. It's a rock steady performer.

Upgrades on them are a bit tricky. For us to do a head swap on one is a full outer joiner storage frame, which is obviously not that easy to do in a production environment.

We have looked at various competitors, and we have swung away from HPE storage, and then back into HPE storage as well. We were looking at EMC for a while, we actually had some BMCs in our environment as well. Right now, they are running alongside our 3PARs, we do actually want multi-vendor storage for their environment, depending on what the demands are for the storage. We treat our 3PARs as our tier two storage.

Either go all Flash or at least a mix of flash and near line, you don't want to just get locked in with just near line or SaaS, because you're going to get locked in with slow disk and it gets really hard to upgrade after the fact.

It's very user intuitive. It's not really that complicated as long as you have the basic knowledge on how SANs work. It's easily deployable and costs verses other brands is good. This size is also a plus.

It's more about the redundancy. Their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers, the 3PARs are just a perfect fit for the company. They're easily deployable and it's easy to provision storage to the blade server when we need to. It just works, it's a perfect fit.

There's a lot of stuff you can do with the 3PAR. Right now, we're using it for what it's mainly designed for - the provision storage. I'm still looking into all the other features like Deduplication and Flash Cache.

If we see that deduplication can fit into our infrastructure, and if it will benefit the company, then we'd definitely look into that option. It would be nice to have it as a core feature included in the product initially at no extra cost.

Everything is straightforward.

It's outstanding.

As long as you check the start-up manual, you should be able to deploy it pretty simply.

We went with the HPE product because we really didn't have the need for such a big SAN. The company isn't big enough to warrant an EMC SAN. We're a midsize business, so the 3PAR was a perfect fit for us.

We're almost entirely HPE outside of the network stack, so it's nice to have one place to call for support.

When comparing the cost to the comparable EMC solution at the time that we purchased it, 3PAR was significantly cheaper.

It was almost 100% financial decision. They had similar performance, similar build specs, but the business relationship with HPE was much greater. EMC didn't put their best quote forward when we did our bake off, they came in and put in a really high bid. When they found out we were going to go with 3PAR based almost 100% on the cost, they came back and gave us a better bid, but it was a little bit late at that point.

The technical aspect really were comparable. The difference with the EMC product was in the way that they cashed to their flash. HP's is strictly tiered based on a optimization. The EMC product, could cash reads for any tier into the flash. There was a performance advantage there the I don't know that we would have gotten. However, it was enough to make the decision easy.

The performance that we get out of it.

We probably purchased too big an array for our needs. We're not even touching on the IOPs that it can do. That's been a great benefit; the support on the 3PAR has been really nice also.

It's very reliable and it was cost competitive with other arrays at the time that we purchased it.

Support in the European region. These are things we are addressing with HPE and they're fixing already, but that's been the biggest problem - getting support engineers scheduled for maintenance, replacing a drive, doing an upgrade. We've had scheduling problems with them. We had one instance where the engineer just didn't show up with no excuse.

Our support in the US has been phenomenal, no issues at all. But the European support was poor initially.

Nothing bad to say about 3PAR. It's been completely reliable. There's always going to be drive failures with any piece of spinning disc. Those are expected and they've been treated, at least in the US region, with really rapid response times, really great support. Support for upgrades has been painless. HPE is very proactive about doing that - they'll let us know that there's a new version and they'd like to upgrade the array. It's fantastic.

It's getting better in Europe, but it could still stand to improve.

I would recommend it over anything. It's a great array; the cost was very competitive; the performance is great.

Easy management is huge as is the scalability and the performance.

We're using deduplication a lot so getting a return on our investment there is a great. We're getting a lot of performance through that, so we're running probably a 1000 VMs on a 7440 that has done pretty well for us.

It would be nice to see reporting around percent of utilization on the performance side. It tells you what you're doing in the reporting but I would like to know what my array's capable of, versus what I'm using.

It's very stable.

I don't know if you can really fix this but to upgrade from 2 nodes to 4 can be a hassle because you have to re-balance everything. So you have to either do a lot of work or duplicate what you've got which can be expensive. I don't know if there's a good way to fix that though, other than start with 4 nodes.

I think we're getting towards the upper end of what we have and with what HPE would consider our array is capable of and what percentage of that would be helpful, so we don't have to try and guess. Because you know you ask how many IOPS an SSD can get and they'll say, "Yeah, 2000 to 3000," something like that. Who knows what you're actually going to be able to get out of it. Based on your IO size and things like that, being able to see a clear picture would be cool.

With 3PAR WE haven't had to use technical support.

We came from using Hitachi, so provisioning and that sort of thing is way easier with a small team. It's a lot easier to use, the SSMC and management tools for 3PAR than it was for any of the Hitachi tools that we used.

I'd like to be able to license different tiers of disks for different features. We have arrays that we could use for different purposes really. And so if I'm using near line drives for camera backup, I don't want to have to license them for things like dynamic optimization that I'm not using them for. If they're in the machine, now you have to license everything. So I'd like to see that. It might make things more expensive but I do like the model that Pure uses where it's just everything's included.

Get 4 nodes at the start. I would say that's important. Plan more long term rather than what you need now. Get the licensing and nodes you need upfront, makes it easier to expand later.

We used it in a casino BI environment, along with the BladeSystem 3000. It was a very good performer, and really no problems with it. It was rock-solid. Using it in a BI environment, we got a lot of IOPS, a lot of throughput with it, and very good performance.

It's a good performer. There's a lot of options coming out with the 3PAR and I'm very interested in looking at the old Flash systems too. In fact, I'm actually thinking of converting the 3PAR StoreServe that we have over to an old Flash system.

It needs to be cheaper.

We're just getting into the 3PAR world. In fact, we're getting ready to stand it up. We just got it. It's not yet running, but I've used 3PAR in the past as well.

It's very stable.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

It's a very expensive solution.

I think it's some of the software features. They've done a good job, and there was always a good class enterprise storage area network. 3PAR's always been at the top. That was a very good purchase by HP when they purchased 3PAR a few years back. That gave them a good enterprise platform, storage platform, that they are now building onto it.

In a converged environment, 3PAR is a very good product to look at. There's a lot of good competition out there with NetApp and EMC VNX, but 3PAR is right up there with them. It has features and performance.