HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

Scalability is the most valuable feature for us. It also has a great price point for cutting edge technology.

Because we buy so much storage, we have a lot of headroom that we may not use for six-12 months. So what we'd like to see is the booked-capacity piece which has recently been introduced at HP Discovery London.

We'd also want tighter integration between NetApp and HP.

We also had stability issues with older versions.

It has deployed without issue for us.

We've had no issues with instability.

It scales just fine.

We get great support with self-logging directly so that HP contacts us for quick fixes. But we get disc failures frequently, although there's no interruption to business because that's the way storage arrays are designed to work.

At my prior employer, we used EMC and NetApp, which were stable platforms and environments. A lot of it comes down to how you deploy. 3PAR is also a great product, but you can still deploy it incorrectly.

We used HP best practice and we consulted HP. We got it right and it works well for us because of that.

• EMC
• NetApp
• Whiptail

The storage team tech lead chose HP over these.

We need performance and this provides it. We also need affordable prices -- both at sales and post-sales -- and maintenance.

In terms of technical support, our local HP team supports my requests and I know we can turn to them to understand our issues.

In terms of the technology itself, it's not much different from other technologies. But what sets it apart if what happens after the sale -- maintenance and support.

We also need speed, and this provides it. We have strict SLAs, and 3PAR allows me to put the right people together very quickly.

I'd like their technical support to be better. If we need to go to level three, there isn't always someone locally and it can be time consuming to get someone with the right skills.

We installed it 12 years ago, moved to NetApp, then back to HP because of the maintenance costs.

It works 24/7. Our core business are our hospitals and clinics, which means we can't waste time on data center or service issues. So the real value is the 24/7, constant stability.

We've been able to implement it in both small clinics and big hospitals. It's scalable so we can manage it from the same data center with protected investments.

They support my team. We get second-level support from our local partner and third-level support from HP directly.

It was a straightforward migration.

If it is a first time investment, it's no problem. If it's a migration, then you need to take care of the migration risks as well. There should be no data loss because migration is risky.

The most valuable features are the reporting and replication. With the reporting, we get needed information about how much and where we're consuming storage. Reporting also shows us our replication as we replicate between volumes.

It's helped us with data redundancy, which makes our system run more efficiently. Also, the interface is user friendly, but it requires a little training to know all the different functionalities and options.

It could improve in the virtualization of the storage. Also, it needs better reporting on other vendors' technologies, such as VMware.

We don't have problems with deployment.

It's stable.

It scales without issues for us.

There are several valuable features, including the easy-to-use application and straightforward end-user tools. That's been helpful for me and there's nothing complicated to learn. The reporting and charting are also actually quite good. I use the reports when I want to see performance, like how the discs are performing and how the AL is moving data to and from tiers.

I think it leverages our investments of using this multi-tiered storage approach. We have SSDs, we have SAS, and we have inline SAS, so we're able to have a lot more teams running in one environment rather than having to build separate environments, and understand which applications need high performance and which don't need high performance. 3PAR does that thinking for us using it's adaptive optimization. It's been successful for us. The technology is sound, they used 3PAR quite heavily in our organization. It's been a quite good experience.

It needs better statistics and configuration. The system allows too much human input. It's automated enough, but it wants you to determine some of the settings. If you do them wrong, you can make a very good system perform badly. If you do it well, you can make an under-permissioned system perform very well. There should be more best practices that they suggest, not "okay, what do you want."

I'd also like to see better real time performance rather than charts and graphs you've got to go in all the time. It'd be nice to have something running all the time, like a real tool from which you can actually see performance of what's actually happening rather than having to go in all the time and generate them. Real-time notifications, real-time performance statistics. They have those, but they're all command line and I can't keep the session running all day on some screen. You have to go in to get them and you can't really provide a thumb display for customers to see.

Deployments haven't been an issue.

It's been quite stable. There's been things that have broken for us, like discs and some other ports, but the system still works.

It's been quite scalable. Since we bought this one in the summer, we've expanded twice, so it's quite scalable. Now it's over 200 terabytes and 176 discs, I think. The maximum is 250 on this one. It's not the biggest 3PAR, but it's quite powerful actually.

Technical support has been very good. The guys on the line are knowledgeable even at level one.

The initial setup was straightforward. I don't think it was too complex. We've used other technology that's much more difficult to use. I haven't had 3PAR experience before, mostly Dell and Hitachi and some other EMC.

We evaluated Hitachi and we chose HP because of the price and ease-of-use.

Plan what the I/O needs are. You need better statistics before you buy something. Really plan to see what the loads are.

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.

The most valuable features for us are the flexibility and expandability of the platform itself. Also, there are regular updates with the software which bring out new features. The licensing policy is such that it brings us some additional revenue if we ever needed it. It's quite clear what kind of license we're purchasing.

It's simplified our management and increased the speed of our applications. We're able to use different solutions on 3PAR. It's become easier and faster to do.

We'd like to remove some of the barriers to integration with Microsoft. Having the same level of integration with Microsoft as with other applications would be an improvement.

We went with it quite recently.

We are fortunate that they haven't had any incidences yet. It just works.

We are not too big in terms of scalability. But we're quite scalable in case we need to scale, but we haven't had to yet.

They were quite professional and were able to fix some issues that we had before. We also have service contracts with partners, which provides us some assurance in case something happens.