HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

• Scaleable from two to eight controller nodes for High Availability
• Persistent fabric array ports
• Performance tuning
• Dynamic and adaptive optimizations
• Highly granular storage
• One gigabyte miniature disk concept called "chunklets"
• Striping of data across all disks available - wide striping
• Highly intelligent Gen3 and Gen 4 ASICs which acts as the brain of the 3PAR storage systems. This is not a regular CPU
• Very quick redistribution of data if there's a disk failure
• All the disk drives in the system are used for data, since parity and spares are at the chunklet level.

I cannot share the information on how it improved our storage estates, but in general, it has very good SAN performance compared to EMC Clariion, IBM XIV, IBM Storwize V7000 and its other competitors.

They have released a unified version of HP 3PAR, with a separate NAS server unit in the enclosure/rack. I would like to see a proper unified system (same controller serving both SAN and NAS solutions) such as NetApp offers.

We've been using it for three years. We currently have a 7400 (mix of disk drives), and a 7450 (full flash array, only SSD disks),

The performance is optimal, if we have planned everything properly well in advance.

These are mid-range storage solutions that can be scaled up to 700TB of space depending on the type of disks we use. It does have enterprise solutions that can scale up to eight controller nodes with 1.8PB of usable capacity. However, we have a 7400 and a 7450 with lot of provisioning done to ESX systems with thousands of VMs.

HP customer support, especially for 3PAR is excellent.

They have highly skilled technical support team. I would rate them 8/10.

We chose 3PAR because it has the best price compared to its competitors, and delivers the performance expected.

The initial setup/installation was done by the vendor. We needed to provide them with the necessary hardware and network information, (DNS, NIS etc). Their experience was very good, I have no complaints.

Pricing and licensing depend on the customer/partner deals and negotiations/agreements.

It has met our performance and stability expectations. 3PAR is one of the best in the market and it is evident that its sales have raised to 10x since it was acquired by HP. All cloud solutions from HP and many other companies use HP 3PAR storage on their backend for their cloud solutions.

The ability the use all available disks for different RAID requirements and also the replication is available out of the box. The ability to tune the volumes to spread across newly allocated drives.

Previously, we were with another vendor, and we suffered performance issues due to architecture limitation. With 3PAR, we were able to provide the business an acceptance level of performance which directly has an impact on user experience. We are able to keep up with application and user demands as response times are vital for the business to function competitively.

Better user interface compared to the current PC installed client. A browser based solution was introduced recently and improvements were noticeable.

I've used it for two and a half years. We initially did an evaluation with the 7200 unit. Having tested and being pleased with the outcome, we purchased a 7400 with two nodes, and subsequently upgraded to four nodes. The 7200 was moved to be used for disaster recovery.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It is quite straightforward, it is a completely different architecture as 3par is licensed based on the number of drives and after a point it’s capped, i.e. you only pay for the drives and support.

In-house, good knowledge of SAN architecture is required. All zones activity needs to be done by yourselves.

We would say two to three years.

Always purchase at the financial year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing, and also purchase the maintenance in advance. I purchased it with five years maintenance included.

I did evaluate five other vendors, one example Nimble, however, at that time they only had iSCSI model available.

3PAR is designed around the ASIC which eliminates the CPU bottleneck and RAID limitation in other vendors.

We would say 2-3 years. Always purchase at the year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing and also purchase the maintenance in advance, for example I purchase with 5 years maintenance included.

HP regularly organizes events which are good to go to as they announce new innovations and share other customer experiences.

Right now we’re actually undergoing an expansion of the 3PAR and we’re using flash gearing with AO which is kind of maximizing that flash storage with a spindle in combination. I think that’s gotta be the best productivity feature. The other one would have to be that thin provisioning features, those are great. I think we ended up with a four to one ratio on thin provisioning and the looping.

It’s very simple. You log in and it’s got a myriad of graphs and things that I can quickly put into a presentation for my upper management when I’m trying to justify why we’ve gone with a 3PAR, why we’ve made that kind of investment. Also, it’s really easy for me to bring in my lower technical resources into this 3PAR environment because I have to, I don’t have a choice, and kind of make sure that they don’t, we can manage security so that they can, they have enough rights to do their jobs without being able to cause a catastrophe. And again, that’s peace of mind is high on my priority list.

The biggest benefit is the flash the IOPS cannot be beat. I’m in a very ever evolving environment and I have now the confidence that I have the appropriate resources at hand that if a bigger problem or a new development project comes around, I can react to it quickly. And with a 3PAR, I’m able to move machines back and forth between a QA, a production environment, the QA environment being in my legacy storage seamlessly. I don’t even need a systems engineer for that, I can have my help desk resources do it. So that’s a real benefit for a shop with five people.

I don’t know, I think as we scale I’d like to implement replication features. We haven’t been able to test those out yet ‘cause we only have one unit but no, all-in-all I’m pretty happy with the UI.

We’ve had that unit for just under a year right now. I’m pretty sure I bought the first All-Flash starter kit in the US and it’s been a huge source of success for us. We’ve used it to stabilize our business intelligence infrastructure and extreme line some of the processes in our ERP.

Stability is one of my favorite features. Like I said, our BI infrastructure on Wednesdays at the beginning of that fiscal week is getting hammered. You get tired after a while of answering the phone and saying, we’re sorry, we know it’s Wednesday but you know, once we put that particular SSAS uh, implementation into the 3PAR storage we haven’t been down since. The only time we’ve been down in the last 180 days was for maintenance and it was a planned maintenance. That’s a very good thing, that’s peace of mind for any infrastructure manager out there.

We weren’t able to do it last year just for budgetary reasons but we recently doubled our footprint with the 3PAR and we probably have plans to purchase at least another shelf. It’s just an easy platform to grow and the 7200 is the smallest model, so for a small shop like me it’s gonna take about half a rack. It’s pretty good.

It’s great and yeah we have a great support agreement with HP and we leverage them, not just for support but for their technical expertise. Like I mentioned before I have a very lean team and none of us really have that industrial strength, big company experience. We know the basics of how to tune storage area network but it’s really handy to be able to call in an HP engineer and have that conversation without having to incur big professional services engagement.

We still have it. We have a Legacy Dell Compellent Array, it does great for file storage. It just really wasn’t meeting the mark for our infrastructure and once we put this 3PAR on our SAAS implementation things really stabilized, and performance really didn’t become an issue anymore. We have a somewhat weird fiscal week in that on Wednesdays it’s the beginning of the fiscal week. All of the finance department needs to get their data, all of our stores and our retail customers out in the field come in and they’re really mining through the sales, the labors, the costs, try to figure out how did they do the week before. So on this day it’s like a perfect storm for our implementation in that everybody’s getting a big bulk of data at the same time. Using the 3PAR flash array we were able to stabilize that environment so that I really can get their data on demand.

I think it’s a common theme for people in my position. I have an older array, it’s the generational investment coming up and we looked at a number of different models, different competitors but you know a big name like HP and a product like 3PAR and at the right price it was just all-all the stars aligned. We are an HP shop but I would have to say that it’s simplicity. In a couple of days we had this array running. We were able to test it out on multiple production level systems and kind of decide where is the best bang for the buck in utilizing that flash storage.

We were looking at Nimble Storage which was pretty close. I think the big differentiator there was the features set is pretty similar but I really like the approach of HP and I like the big name brand because the rest of my infrastructure is HP as well. We’re primarily an HP shop so given that I have such a lean team I only have myself, a system administrator, a network administrator, I can’t afford to have a lot of complexity in the way that my storage arrays are configured.

In terms of a rating from 1-10, I’d say a nine and I’m not gonna give you a ten until I have at least two units mirrored over my data centers. I think that’s gonna get me a ten, but bottom line is simplicity. With a lot of the competing arrays you really need to have a team that-that’s really eager and motivated to go and configure this array and try some of the obscure features. I just don’t have time for that. I need this thing up, I need it running, and I need it now, and with 3PAR we’ve been able to achieve that objective and keep our cost per terabyte in line.

My one recommendation is we started pretty small, we only bought the all-flash starter kit which is 8 SSD drives and no additional shelves, no spindles. That is a great unit however most of the features that really leverage the power of the 3PAR require kind of that blended approach of the spindle drives and the SSD’s. So buy the flash starter kit and buy some spindles as well.

For high-performance computing, we're always interested in innovation. The 3PAR solution, for example, with dedup and the chunklet concept is a piece of technology that nobody else has, and is a great advantage to our data center.

So the benefits from using 3PAR, for example, is that with the chunklets, we can get performance and features that we've never seen before. So, for example, a traditional customer will buy a storage array and deploy their files on the storage arrays. For us, for high performance computing, we buy multiple arrays and we distribute the loads across all the storage arrays. With the chunklets feature, we have the ability to distribute as much of the load as we have storage arrays. So, for example, if we want more performance, it's just a matter of buying more storage arrays and the load will distribute itself.

So one of the topics we always discuss with the 3PAR engineering team is the ability to have 3PAR run on standard hardware. Pretty much software-defined storage. That would be a really nice feature for us, because we always are trying to get the workload as close as possible to the CPUs. And in order to do that, you have to go software-defined.

The stability of the 3PAR and the DL servers is very reliable. As a matter of fact, when I was talking to HP sales, I was recommending to actually buy the servers with only 90 day warranty, as opposed to the three year warranty, because the servers are so reliable that they almost never fail, and we feel like overpaying for support where it's not needed.

We have 15,000 hard drives today across all our storage arrays. We have not reached the point yet where we don't see the 3PAR devices not being able to scale for us. The innovation, like flash introduction with 3PAR, is actually gonna accelerate the fact that we can get more performance and more capacity in the near future.

Technical support for 3PAR is very good. One of the advantages of using the 3PAR product is that devices are calling home. So what that means is that HP support will know about a problem before we realize we have a problem, which is a very nice feature, considering the fact that when HP can provide you feedback on when things gonna fail, how they will replace it, and it's always done within 24 hours.

The problem we had was scalability, and we tried a numerous amount of vendors, and HP, with its product portfolio, did a great job being cost effective and allowed us to scale to the point where we could run our business more effectively.

As a high performance computing environment, we needed storage and servers, and we're using 3PAR and the DL server family from HP. We double capacity every year, so we are looking always for scalable solutions that are cost effective, and HP has been a great partner so far for us.

So in our high performance computing environments, we are I/O bound, which means that we process about two to three million files a second. In order to process that data that quickly, in the past we had to buy a lot of spindles, the traditional hard drives. With flash, we don't have to buy that many spindles anymore. We can save money by just buying the capacity, and the performance with flash is tremendous. And the device we're using for that is the HP 3PAR 7450.

The partners or the vendors we worked with in the past are EMC, NetApp, and IBM. We actually had their hardware in for testing. Some of them we actually bought, based on what we thought was the right thing to do, considering the performance we saw during our tests. But in the long run, the support we got from those vendors wasn't always what it's supposed to be, and the performance also was sometimes an issue. The advantage with HP is that when we have issues, HP always brought in their engineering team. We could discuss with them the issues we have, and they were always fixing our issues in a decent amount of time.

When we look at products, we're always interested in knowing what the other vendors and other customers are offering. Unfortunately, in our world, in the high performance computing world, we're not like a traditional corporate IT environment, where feature sets are really important and performance and latency need to be predictable. In our world, it's all about performance and latency, and if you can get the features with it, that's great, but the features are not really driving the effort.

So the criteria we use for our products is always about performance, latency, and cost. The reason for that is as a high performance computing environment, we want to get the most of our hardware. The tests we run against the hardware are typically tests that most people don't run. It's heavy duty, long amount of time, and HP was the most reliable in our tests, and also the best performing.

Considering the amount of issues we have with it were pretty much zero. It's a very good price. There's a lot of innovation going on. There's a lot of support, but there's always room for improvement, so…

The advantage of using the 3PAR, even at a smaller scale, is that you get all the features from day one. So if you're a small shop or a large shop, either way the features are available to you and it allows you to scale really easily, to the point where you could start with something small and end up with something really large, without having to change your model and architecture.

I would say one of the most valuable is the ability to dedup on a CPG level. That's one of the newest features that has come out most recently and has enabled us to get a ratio of about 7.1 to 1. That's one of the things where we really were going for with it. One of the main examples for that is we were able to save a lot of money on we've converted from an older F400 to a 7400 SAN.

We were able to save money by not buying more physical drives for storage and more cabinets, things like that.

Oh, that's a great question. I would consider having better integration with VMware. It's on a license basis and VMware does communicate with the SAN, but right now the capabilities are only that it shows you what the deduplication savings is or what the thin provisioning savings is. It doesn't actually show you on a volume level what you can do, how many extra VMs you can get on there for example. If we're only using 20% of the available storage, it still sees like it's full. I would like to see a better integration of that. We actually had a bunch of different solutions. I wouldn't say that we had any specific one. Well, storage is about performance for a lot of people.

We had an accident where when we turned on deduplication and we had it active for some of the virtual volumes that we had in our environment, it did actually cause a problem that HP had not heard of previously and had not yet documented that was fixed in a release 2 weeks later, and a software patch 2 weeks later. We did have an outage related to that specifically where it's not dithering us from doing it using dedup long term, but that was actually the cause of that. Other than that, reliability has been fine but that's a pretty big marker as far as having a problem.

We had to aggressively work to upgrade through the ranks of HP support in order to get to a tier that would really help us with this problem that could really understand this problem. It took us several hours to get through that. Of course we're relying on the thousands of concurrent connections we have at any given time. That was an issue. I have no complaints there, whatsoever. You can add controllers, add drives as much as you want. It's pretty much unlimited how far we can go with it. I mean HP did the setup work for us. Therefore, it was very straightforward. The only thing they really wouldn't do is the wiring which is understandable, so we had that taken care of and could not be happier with that part.

This was actually a revolution of getting us into the cloud because one of our clients demanded that we start offering a cloud-based solution. This is when we went out and started really looking for solutions that would empower a cloud level enterprise.

For us, it was about reliability. Our SaaS solution, our clients depend on and our clients' customers depend on on a daily basis, so that was number one. NetApp was a contender, but honestly we mostly looked just at HP 3PAR.

Specifically with flash, I would say don't believe the hype of other vendors that say they can save you money by deduping and that was their go to strategy. With 3PAR, they can do the exact same thing and it's a lot more scalable on an enterprise level and you'll pay about the same amount of money. Don't apply the latest technology, even though they say it's vetted and tested. Just in case, dedup was a relatively new feature.

We deployed it believing in the reliability of the 3PAR and it ended up being a problem for us. Wait until a couple of cycles have ended. Let customers that do that vet it for you and that's just typical sound practice. It's really invaluable. We heavily rely on online resources to do that research for us and the reviews are critical. We'd like to see things that other people in our same caliber are using. When we explore a new solution for example, we say, "Okay. Can you give us our position, equivalency in that customer? Can we talk to them and see how their real life experiences has been with it?" That kind of thing, online reviews very, very important.

The most valuable features of the HP 3PAR solution for us I would have to say would be around thin provisioning and being able to provision big and then see what the utilization is like. And ultimately, the biggest thing, if you could draw a line from all of these features here down to one common thing, it's really the ability to change your mind. Now, as a service provider, you have to be able to change your mind, because your customers will, and if your customers change their mind and you can't, then you're kind of backed into a corner. So, you know, with the HP 3PAR and all of the dynamic-ness of that, you're able to change your mind at pretty much every layer of the technology stack.

So a key example of how the HP 3PAR has benefited our organization would certainly be from a reputation point of view. HP 3PAR is globally well known as a very high end, if not the best storage offering. But in particular, again, drawing back to that performance requirement it also has a reputation around performance and it does deliver on promise. We make big promises to our clients around performance, we have to be able to back that up with a technology that will actually support that initiative.

In the future releases of 3PAR, in terms of the overall roadmap, now I have been to the CDN booth and obviously can't say too much about that. But, HP's roadmap tends to align very well with our expected roadmap, for lack of a better term. And in terms of where we're wanting to see the technology go in order to accommodate the needs of our clients HP has a roadmap that aligns very well with that. So I would say I don't have any particular requirements that I don't think HP already have on their roadmap without saying what they are.

The stability of 3PAR is unquestionable. From day one, we had had not to bag the LeftHand product set, because it has a place in the market, but we had had some issues with that when we really pushed it probably too far. So when we moved to 3PAR as soon as that became apparent, and never looked back. You know, there's been no issues with 3PAR throughout the way through, and I say, the ability to change your mind and change your rate levels, change the way you're deploying the storage, that means that you don't have to break it just to make it what you want it to be.

So the scalability of 3PAR, bearing in mind we operate cloud platforms in New Zealand is far beyond what we need because our market is fairly small, and so being able to scale to multiple petabytes on a single SAN is great to know that it can do that, but it's not something we've had to worry about in terms of an overall capacity limit.

We engage quite heavily with HPTS, as we call technical support, and when it comes to implementing new technologies or birthing a new 3PAR, then we don't do that alone. We work closely with HP to make sure that it's all done according to best practice.

So before we went down the road of looking at the HP 3PAR, we were using another HP product, LeftHand, which was doing the job fine, but as we started to scale and started to see the demands of the client base that we were attracting, we knew we needed to make a change.

So prior to the HP 3PAR, we were using LeftHand products. That was really local disc in the servers themselves, which doesn't scale particularly well, certainly not back when we started, there was not a concept of a virtual SAN.

The initial setup of the 3PAR environments, I would say is very straightforward, when it comes to a new technology. Not so much now, because we have five 3PARs in play. But when our first 3PAR arrived, we spent a month trying to break it, and we do that with any new technology that we're not comfortable with and not yet confident in terms of our own use of the product. And so getting that implemented and trying to break it for a month, you know, we couldn't break it, and so that was good. But that's kind of our model.

Other than HP, we've been talking to, I wouldn't say working with, but we've been talking to both Cisco and Dell, more so with Dell over the years. But we've really failed to engage to the level that we have with HP. HP have always been incredibly engaging, incredibly communicative, with regards to not only the product sets that are available, where they're going. And the entire ecosystem around these product sets is really what adds to the ultimate value. Anybody can buy a hard drive and stick it in a machine, but, you know, being able to support that long term, understand where that technology needs to go, and then get it there.

So most recently, we have implemented the all flash or the entire flash-based 3PAR 7450, and the roadmap towards making that decision was really around performance. We've always kept a couple of keywords close to our heart with relation to our branding, and performance is one of those, quality being the other. And so the all flash environment has enabled us to deliver on promise with regards to performance.

The most valuable features to us are the automatic failover, the peer persistence, and that ability to be able to be confident that if we have a data center outage, that our business will keep running. Those were the features from a business perspective that were the most important to me.

Some of the benefits that we're facing in using 3PAR, I did mention before, are around the ability to patch our systems quite easily. We can easily failover. We know that if there are any issues, we can continue to provide services. We recently had a power outage in Aukland, which tested our data centers, our mechanicals, and electricals in the data centers. It also helped us understand that if we did have a problem in one data center, we could easily file between the two very easily.

The stability of the system has been great. I think we've only had it since October. We had not had any problems. It's been great, at the moment.

It's working for us on scalability, I think. We're still to see how we go. We've got some issues at the moment on scalability. We need to grow our data quite significantly. We need to find something that is more scalable.

The technical support has been absolutely fantastic. The whole project, when it went in, was really a joint partnership between HP, VMware, and the University. Everyone worked really well to make sure it got in on time, on budget, and was successful. It was a good project.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we had a lot of issues in our data centers. We needed to increase our resilience and make sure that we could have our teaching and learning and research continue while we might have data center outages or if there was any problems.

The whole project seemed straightforward to me, as I was the business owner. I didn't see a lot of the technical issues going on in the background. It might have been a bit more complex for my team, but it was fairly straight forward. They managed to migrate 650 VMs without any outages. It was a Greenfields's solution. We didn't have any resilience for a number of our faculty machines. We had quite a number of data center outages because of some physical issues in the data centers. It was highlighted that not having resilience for our faculties, for their file services, and for their research, and for their cost material was not appropriate. We really needed to be able to put something in place so we could increase our resilience. It's also helped us to increase our security and all sorts of other aspects, and have all sorts of other benefits, not just resilience.

It needed to fit into our current infrastructure. We needed to make sure that whatever we put in place had as minimal effort required regarding staff work load. We wanted to make sure that it didn't need any manual intervention in order to failover. The peer persistence that the 3PAR has was also important to us to make sure that we had replicated data, and we could access it quickly and easily. Recovering quickly and little data loss were the most important things to us. We had a few vendors on our short list. The reason we chose HP was it fitted those criteria very well. I would rate the 3PAR system fairly highly because it met our requirements of what we needed at the time. We're quite comfortable using it. We're seeing less stress from teams around issues that we have had in the past.

It just depends on what your requirements are. You've got to match your requirements to the system you need. Very important, we do reference checks. We do make sure we get all our requirements. We do comparisons. We've got pretty strict procurement requirements and we stick to those.

We're a big user of the adaptive optimization environment, so we have a tiered storage environment. We have SST, which is about five percent of the total environment. We have the 10K drive, which is about 25 percent of the environment and the remainder is the inline storage as drives being four terabyte drives.

We have an awful lot of data sitting in our environment. We have about 1.2 petabytes of storage sitting on the 3PARs at the moment replicated. We'd really like to get into data compression to do duplication on those devices. At this stage, we can do that on the SST in the environments but we can't do it on the remaining storage. We'd really like to be able to see the storage data being migrated across those tiers and do duplication as much as possible, not just on the actual SST layer itself. The other features I want to look at, at the moment is the storage federation, we'd like to start clustering out our devices so we can spread it across more storage arrays. I'd just say, it's been a very good choice and it's been certainly one of the foundations stars for a very successful project for ourselves.

Once we put it in and got comfortable with the product, it's been extremely stable.

Technical support is very good. We have a product support agreement on those systems, so the HP support teams are constantly monitoring them and reporting back to us the state and health of the systems. Yeah, it's a very good service from a proactive point of view, so we are hearing things from the support vendor, rather than us going to them constantly to say there's something wrong or we need some attention.

We went through a very exhaustive testing environment and selection process to make sure we were getting the best platform to support our metro storage cluster. We have achieved all the goals we've set out to attempt, so I can say with some confidence that it is a carrier grade class piece of storage and from the point where we put it in we've run without fault, without outage and we're very pleased with them at the moment.