HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The implementation of it was amazing. It's easy and it's come a long way. The platform we had before was about four years old, so the technology's always going to be better. We didn't take that for granted. Overall I think that the ease of understanding what we needed and then procuring it and getting it, and then how quick it was to get it installed. It's just amazing.

It's really taken away a few headaches that we had. It's one of those things you know it's there until you get something that's built for what we want to do, it was matched to what our requirements were. It's provided huge turnaround for us.

I'd like it to be quicker.

So far, we've had no issues.

We know it's there. We made the decision to purchase it with the view for growth, and we know we'll just plug another array or another stack pretty quickly.

One of my engineers might have called, but I haven't.

It really came down to relationships. At the time it wasn't just going from EMC, it was also going from Cisco to HPE Networking. We went through a pretty good process, where we talked about our needs and requirements, and also comfort levels of technology change. Some of my engineers were a little reluctant to move away from Cisco. But HPE came and sat down and just said "We'll do whatever it takes. What do you need? What are your concerns?" Just worked with us in real detail: able to understand what our concerns were, where we were going, and making sure that the engineers were made comfortable. But also making sure, which was the last part which comes across the line, was that the technology was what we needed, was enough for growth. Whereas Cisco was just a "here's a quote, sent it to us" which I think for me swung me over to HP. The commitment to the customer.

Think about the next 10 years, where are you heading. Personally, I say HPE's a pretty strong organization. They send the right messages, saying the right things. They seem like a very digital company which is all about customer, and that stuff matters to me, whereas some of the competitors, they don't have that mindset. Cisco definitely doesn't have that mindset. I really think long-term about. Sure, Cisco had a lot more features, but we didn't really need them. So, that made the decision easier. For me, when I think about HPE, think about longevity. You want to invest in technology, you're almost investing in the company.

We have a HP 3PAR C7200 storage array with a small portion of it being Flash. Even though it's a small percentage of our total SANs usable capacity, the applications that we run off it have greatly exceeded our expectations. I can't even fathom the performance increase of having an all-Flash array. Using HP's Adaptive Optimization including the Flash storage, it's great to see if one of our applications is under heavy stress to see it move to the Flash to increase performance for the end users. This, compared to our last standard SAN setup, has easily increased the performance and accessibility of our on-site applications ten-fold.

For the end users: This allows us to deliver content to them faster, access their files faster, load apps quicker, and increase stability of them, all to boot! This was a very imperative piece as we have an extraordinary first year of full 1-to-1.

For us (IT): Having the access to this technology has been amazing! This allows us to do so much with our virtual infrastructure. We can monitor things more accurately, move things around with no performance decrease, and, let's be honest, seeing all those IOPs is just fun!

Overall, having the Flash availability with a HP 3PAR Storage setup has been night and day from our last solution, and I can't wait to really start pushing it to it's true limits.

• The overall quality of the product is fantastic. Advanced Optimization is one of the best features I never thought I needed until I actually used it and saw it in action. 
• The overall speed has been great as well. 
• Create vVols and assigning them to the hosts is streamlined and easy. 
• The ability to delegate and control every aspect of the storage array has allowed us to split the workload safely. 
• The 3PAR StoreServ Management console has also given the console the fresh look that it really needed. 
• Also, their support has been fantastic every time I have had a question or a problem they have been able to help me every time the first time.

The management console could use some work. All the functionality is there, of course, but it can be hard to find some features or do certain tasks. I feel like to get to some features, I need to dig through many sub-menus then tabs in those sub-menus to change a simple thing. Their StoreServ Console (optional) Makes this better, but it still isn't perfect. I would love to see some better help documentation on the StoreServ console other than just writing out the tooltips in a document. I would also like an easier way to re-assign the shelf numbers as they cannot be set statically at least in the build I'm using.

I would like to see more integration with VMware as the plugin currently is good, but I would love to see a ton more functionality with it such as adaptive monitoring. I haven't used HP's OneView software, but I would really like to see something like that built-in with the base product other than purchasing this at an additional cost just to manage all my HP products in one place. I'd also love it if HP started branching out and integrating some of the more well-known solutions into their products by default, such as Veeam and SRM. I know that from a sales point, that might not be the most revenue-generating mood, but it would definitely make a lot of SysAdmins happy.

We have a large population of students and we have gone full one-to-one this year. We are striving to deliver content to them as seamlessly as possible to encourage a learning environment where they can get to everything they need without having to think about it. This can be quite a challenge just by the sheer diverse volume of data that the students use. Everyday is a new challenge that we are more than happy to tackle head-on.

Most importantly for us, this product provides us with flexibility, it has a tiered architecture, and was easy to adopt into our IT infrastructure.

We built our data warehouse around it, which now operates much more efficiently. We have a smaller footprint, thus saving us physical space and costs associated with larger structures.

I'd like to see more and better documentation on how we can get more out of it. This is lacking right now and I feel like we can do much more with our investment. Both documentation and education on how to best use the product would be nice.

We've had it for three years.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We don't have any problems with stability. The way we've configured it gives us a lot of resilience.

It's extremely scalable.

The setup and configuration were pretty straightforward. We were able to quickly adopt it and to get the ball rolling.

A third-party proposed the solution to us and we bought it.

We did evaluate other options as we were going through a third-party supplier, but I can't recall specifically which other vendors we considered.

We use 3PAR to separate certain parts of our infrastructure. For example, we can decide which portion of our data will be stored on SSD's and which will be stored on disc drives. We have a flexible contract with HP in order to do this, and it's been a huge advantage for us.

It makes us more flexible because we can extend our storage size easily. But the most important advantage, again, is our flexible contract with HP. It's a technically wonderful product, but it's also wonderful because of the contract. We have no CapEx and no long-term investment on the contract because we're paying just a monthly rate.

We're satisfied with the existing solution, but we are still having discussions to improve something.

We're not missing anything in terms of hardware, but the firmware could be improved.

We've always deployed them without any issues.

It's a stable solution and there's global support from the entire HP worldwide organization.

It's very easy to scale.

We have a very close relationship with our account manager and they offer us technical support.

3PAR is less costly than our previous solution. We were able to migrate from EVA to 3PAR.

Of course it's complex, but with HP's help it made the setup easier.

We didn't evaluate other options because we've been with HP for many years now. We have 25 locations worldwide and we needed a global flash-storage solution. HP, also a global company, was the right fit.

With our previous EVA system, we couldn't shift data between different tiers online. We have multi-tiered storage and can move them online between SSD and global SAS. With 3PAR, we can quickly move our large volumes and check or test something, and if it's not faster with SSD, we can just move it back.

We have zero downtime with 3PAR. This saves us a lot of money as the business stays up and running.

There is only one thing I would really like to see, but I'm not entirely sure if this is actually 3PAR-related or not. I'd like real-time reporting. We can get reports, but it's difficult to monitor the system in real-time, which is critical, for example, when something is running slowly. It takes us hours to find out what the system is doing.

Also, real-time reporting will tell me who the "top talker" is at any given time. This is something we go to Brocade for to use their fiber channel and open grid. The first thing it shows is the top 5 talkers so you know that one of those is mostly likely causing the problem.

I think that 3PAR will eventually have the fiber channel feature, increasing its cost. I don't see us buying the license for that, though, as we've already spent a lot of money on 3PAR licenses.

We've used it in production for one and a half years.

We haven't had a single problem yet. I'm quite happy with that actually.

It's not good and kind of stressful when you're at the first level. Sometimes we have a hard time explaining what our problem is. We have to escalate the issue to someone who really knows what they're talking about.

The initial setup with different tiers and adaptive optimizations was very easy after seeing the DQE. Migration of our data that first time was also very easy.

The pricing is fair, but you have to pay for every little feature, which is something I really dislike about HP. You buy the software, then the hardware, then the OS license, then if you want more, you have to pay more just to put your data on it.

For example, if you want to replicate data, you have to get the replication license. You can't just replicate data and I can't always get budget approved to do that.

We're really happy with 3PAR as it performs very well despite a few failing discs, which is normal. Upgrades went well and we haven't had any outages. We'd recommend it to others.

The most valuable feature for us is the ease of 3PAR's scalability. We have 330 different organizations within our company; we do anything and everything. That's why scalability of 3PAR is so important to us.

It provides us with on-demand service. For example, if we win a contract but don't have access to a service facility until midnight, we have to be able to "flood in" suddenly to keep the services running without any downtime. We have to be able to keep the systems running instantaneously and don't have the luxury of, say, a three-month provisioning or a new-chassis swap. So with 3PAR, we're able to provide on-demand service.

It needs to provide better customer visibility of what's going on. For example, having access to a customer's ticketing system if only on a real-time, read-only basis could be a perspective that's extremely helpful. It's important that we have clear and open lines of communications with our customers, and 3PAR doesn't provide that yet to meet our needs.

I first got involved with 3PAR in 2006.

We have a large number of HP storage products and 3PAR is by far the most stable. We do have a couple of clusters that have normal, standard discs, and these are so stable. We wanted something high-end, and that's why we went with 3PAR. If something goes wrong, we know it's not a hardware issue, but rather the software configuration that's running on it.

I'm normally used to reaching the point of a system where you just can't expand it any further and need to do a step change, swapping out a base unit or something like that. With 3PAR, that problem doesn't exist -- you just keep adding to it and capacity grows in a nice, linear fashion. If I want to add just a terabyte, I don't have to add 100 terabytes. Expansion of 3PAR is very, very smooth.

From an ownership perspective, I like the technical support HP provides because they're better engineers. The tech support structure is also not as clunky as with other organizations and there's a better spread of skill-sets amongst techs. So overall, technical support is pretty good.

If you speak to your techies, as opposed to your managers, and ask them how easy it is for them to use and understand 3PAR, they'll say it gets a 10/10. The techies get it and they love it.

We can deploy new servers and new solutions pretty quickly. If systems are stopped while the record picks up that they're starting to fail, we can add more resources to them quite dynamically.

It's a lot more automated and a lot easier, which provides us with a better business continuity solution.

HP has what they call the OSS, operation support site. I hand over all my BAU to HP to manage and fix, but they don't go down to the 3PAR level. We can't afford to fall back on government money to take the time to identify issues. OSS only provides high-level support, and it would be an improvement if they drilled down more.

3PAR deploys just fine for us.

It's stable generally. When we had problems, it was due to an omission in our manual process and not in the automated process. It's quite techy, so you need to make sure you have someone on your staff or an outside expert to provide advice.

It scales just fine.

We pay for proactive support from HP, but I wouldn't rate it 10/10. It's not as proactive as I'd like, though I'm not paying for the highest level of support. Sometimes, it's takes them 4 hours before they start doing things.

The initial setup was a bit complex and took much longer than we anticipated. We have 5,000 users now, but it took us two years to be able to get there.

We implemented it in-house.

Spend as much as you can on HP support for the product. Don't rely on it being all in-house.

The compression it offers is probably the most valuable feature for us. We're able to reduce 16 terabytes of data by a 2:1 ratio, giving us the ability to put a lot more onto the 3PAR than our previous solution. Our files include a lot of large videos.

We have about 250 users on it and it's not messy. We're able to tailor it to our needs, including the GUI, which makes it easy to use.

IT is always evolving, but there are no improvements that I see right now. There will be a lot of new stuff, I'm sure. I'm interested to see what happens in the future.

We have no issues with deployment.

It's highly stable and has 99.9999% uptime.

We just got up as much as we need. We had no issues with scalability.

Our prior solution was end-of-life, and this was about six or seven years ago.

It wasn't the most straightforward setup. It would be better with an easier setup.

We looked at EMC, Nimble, and Pure Storage, but 3PAR is the market leader.