HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The replication is important to us for our cross-campus and cross-site replication. So the recovery manager to be able to take capacity free snaps and use those for dev tests and stuff like the adaptive optimization where we can move things between different tiers, retuning and rate levels on the fly, the pier motion stuff moving when doing disc array migrations between models, moving the application online with no down time.

Obviously, our performance was key. The ability to see real time statistics and do historical analysis on performance metrics, post base per-LAN and be able to see what's going on when something's going wrong.

Ease of administration, cutting down the time to do things when we do migrate arrays, looking into the stats and making sure we've got, the applications are performing like they're supposed to.

I'm interested in their new stuff around, in the road map around, in line dedupe on the array, compression back up protection stuff over and above what they've got already, integrating into application aware snap shots. That's the sort of stuff I'm looking for.

Very stable, haven't had any problems.

Scales well.

Obviously stuff goes wrong from time to time but the support is good.

We were previously using a different solution. We did a detailed paper analysis. We flew out to the guys in San Francisco, to their labs. We had a look at their storage and what they were doing, their software stack. We were really impressed with that.

Straightforward from bringing the array on-site to plugging in and getting the first LAN provision was less than a day.

We ended up with EMC. We had the 3PAR guys on there. Overall, I think it was the best solution for us.

It pretty much does almost everything we're looking for. I think they've got a good road map for the future.

Recommendations to peers - It really depends on what you need. If you're looking for something that can scale well and protect your data across multiple sites, we've got visibility into the performance metrics. That's the sort of stuff I'd look at. Do they have a vision for file and object based storage, is that coming? How does it integrate with back up products and archiving.

The best feature is how easy it is to use.

We are able to replicate our Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) easily from one 3PAR device to another.

With our old SAN storage, it was either too complicated to do LUN replication or not available at all.

We've used it for three years.

No issues encountered, and we have deployed two F400s, two 7400s, and one 7200.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

For the most part straightforward. HP had an engineer available onsite for one week to help with setup and any questions that we had.

So we actually go with a three tier solution. We have near line, we have fast class, fiber channel, and we have SSD, the flash. We began making an entrance into introducing flash. That was really as part of a 7400. So we acquired a 7400, took our F400, put it into DR, and with that 7400, we've now been able to actually grow and increase based upon the needs.

So we've been able to look at the data, look at the growth and the need for the SSD, as needed, and we moved things around. We're starting to introduce AO, but realistically, we didn't have to initially jump in and put everything into all flash. I know the sales force wanted us to, but realistically, at the end of the day, we wanted to take a more cautious approach, and it's paid off for us.

One of the biggest benefits that we just experienced was we actually went through an Oracle E-Business Suite R11 to R12 migration. Three-quarters of a terabyte database. Oracle came in, said this should take you somewhere around 24 to 36 hours. Realistically, at the end of the day, it took 10 hours, and a lot of that had to do with the 3PAR back end storage system and our ability to transform the actual virtual volumes and the IO, the rate configurations, within minutes. We had one instance where we took the entire 750 gig database, that virtual volume from fast cache to SSD in six minutes.

Actually, during our migration we had a very choreographed timed execution of needing to transform virtual volumes from one level, from one tier to the next. AO wasn't necessarily getting us there. It would need to see and predict, and these were ad hoc, one off, it's going to happen this one time workload, and never happen again. And so one of the things that's been thrown out is, hey, could you all give us some ability to actually choreograph that, to actually be able to lay it out and then trigger it fly by wire in a way, but have it pre-laid out.

We've actually had a number of drives fail over a three year period, and actually before that, we had on the MC and other systems we'd see drives fail. The drive failures, however, and the way that the predictability comes about and the disc is actually evacuated on a 3PAR, and it's done, you know, preemptively, that's been a game changer for us. Rather than watching an entire raid volume go offline or become poor performing or unstable, we don't have that. Mechanical devices are gonna fail. Ideally, they don't impact your business. That's been one of the big things for us.

Overall our ability to add storage increase the IOs, on demand and as needed, I can't ask a whole lot more based upon the choices that we made. There are of course more scalable aspects of 3PAR out there than what we have landed on, but based upon what we utilize and the choices that we made, we're still well within. Of course, the beauty of storage and a business is that anytime you build it, they find ways to fill it up. And so we've continued to stay on top of that.

With the insight that we get as far as disc usage, we are actually able to more properly calculate our capacity though with thin provisioning. So we're not just stamping out storage and saying, hey, it's wholly dedicated, we have no idea kind of what our growth is. You know, it's wasted over here and needed over here. We don't run into that. It's used through the thin provisioning capabilities across the platform. So that's another aspect of scalability that I think, you know, you don't necessarily find in other systems.

You know, realistically, we have probably seen more upgrades, former firmware updates, insertive updates, good solid response. When, Heartbleed and a couple of other issues came out with open SSL, we saw within a month timeframe that we were getting updates, being notified, okay, here's the level that you need to be running at. That's not necessarily the case with other vendors. It's been really good overall.

So originally, we were actually running on EMC CX700 and VNX 5300s. The back end was front ended actually with AIXP5P6 series systems. We were needing to realistically bring our ERP system forward. Poor performance dictated that, you know, we can no longer really continue to do business the way we were doing business on that platform, so we looked at others, including EMC, Hitachi, IBM, and actually HP 3PAR was late to the game and came knocking.

The biggest part with 3PAR is overcoming your pre-existing mindset. So coming into it originally, the whole idea of chunklets and not having dedicated storage groups or, you know, raid types, it took time to understand operationally what what you could really do with it. And so in that sense, I would say that there was some complexity. From a services standpoint, they came in, they knocked it out, they got it installed, and we integrated into the environment. We started migrating.

They've made advancements in migrations, that, you know, I've seen now. It would have made life easier for us back then, but they've listened and they've, you know, made improvements.

Realistically, we ended up choosing HP. It was the more expensive solution at the time, but given the need for the performance, we also looked at a three to five year roadmap and the ability to continue to grow and the ability to add additional storage tiers within the same frame, that played a big part in it for us.

In comparing HP 3PAR against really EMC and some of the others, the ability to kind of maximize the actual storage. So thin provisioning, the ability to use all disc realistically across the storage system from an IOPS perspective, rather than your traditional monolithic, to where you're isolating storage groups and raid groups to particular LUNs and that's all the disc they have, so your spindles are limited, you move away from that.

At the same time, our ability and our need realistically to transform the raid or the stripe size, our IO kind of dictated that at times, or our lack of knowledge of IO, and that was really, came along as a third item, is the tools that were native in the 3PAR InServ store gave us the ability to look at the IO versus Navi-analyzer and others, while the capabilities there, we were either inhibited from a performance standpoint, or we weren't getting all the data and visibility that we needed.

Don't be afraid of the price tag, number one. If you're willing to really set out a roadmap and know the investment and what you're able to give back to the business, look at what you're able to give back to the business. In our case, we had individuals during close, close would take up to 18 days. It's now down to 10 days. We had individuals that would literally kick off reporting FSGs at night and go home and then check back on them. They might fail, and they'd have to try and kick them back off. They couldn't run them ad hoc during the day. They had to only run them during certain times because the system wouldn't sustain it.

Now they can do that any time they want. So don't just look at the price tag of the infrastructure. Look at what you can actually give back to the business, see how you can actually facilitate the business's strategic direction.

I think peer reviewers are priceless. Realistically, you can get all the marketing hype, but at the end of the day, seeing how somebody has either pushed the boundaries on a product, looked at the product, and used it in ways that a development team could never- or a product team could never actually envision, and see it either live or die, you know, how it performed, those are the things that you get out of community and from peer reviews, that you're not necessarily going to get from your traditional marketing.

Finding a group of individuals that you know is important, that you know the context of their background, because with any data, especially on the Internet, you have to understand the context of where people are coming from, what their knowledge level is, how truthful they're really willing to be. And so having that trusted community is very important.

One of the things that I really liked about the 3PAR solution, going back to the architecture, is its unified architecture for their entire suite of products. Companies like NetApp and EMC, have a very broad spectrum of products, but as you go through their portfolio, the way that they're managed, the way that their team would have to interact with our product, it differs. So I was looking for a platform that would allow us to scale, because as we know, data is not becoming less and less. It's increasing. So if some day we need to increase the SAN that we have right now. I feel very comfortable that if I was to choose another product within the 3PAR suite, that my team could get it off and running off the ground very quickly

Flash as a solution for us was very obvious. Reason being, as I mentioned before, we're very data intensive. For the longest time, disc has been our bottleneck in our processing service, in our processing capabilities. With flash, we have no concerns. So it's been a very, very great and positive experience for us

We've seen a huge improvement in processing times and coming from a traditional SAN over to the HP 3PAR all flash solution, we saw about a 90 percent reduction in the processing time to some of the batch processors that we were running, which for us is very, very huge.

I would like to see a little bit more of automated reporting. As an IT director, I would like to get a better view, high level view of how the environment is performing instead of having to go and ask my guys. That would be my only future request.

Oh, it's been incredible stability. Here's an anecdote. The solution we were on before was a dual controller solution which is kind of a misnomer because the way that the system balances itself, if you have any controller that's running a bit higher than the other, say, 50, 60 percent, and one controller goes down, well, that one controller now has to take the additional load from the other controller. So what we realized at one point was, we had a controller that had to do down for maintenance, and during that maintenance window, we had some performance issues, because the one controller had to pick up the load for the other controller, and it caused our environment to run slower than we would have liked

With the 3PAR solution, it's a four controller system, a four node system. It load balances very well. It actually does it automatically for us. Something that my team had to struggle with actually, with the EMC solution. So for us, it's been great. We've been doing maintenance upgrades on the solution with little to no impact at all on the environment. So it's been very stable for us.

I would say it's very scalable. I mean, we're not at the point now where we've had to increase the size of our SAN. But from what I've seen on paper and my discussions with the HP engineers, we're very comfortable that we're in a good spot for the next three to five years, with the solution that we selected. However, we know that if we need to move to a higher tier of a solution, that we'll feel comfortable in bringing another product in because of the flexibility the seamless transition from one platform in the 3PAR lineup to another.

The feedback I've received from the team is that they've been very responsive, very attentive to the questions that they've had. Very responsive to any problems that we had initially rolling out. I mean, problems just a little bit of growing pains and try to understand. It's a little bit than where we came from, but over the past few months, we've been running with the solution, it's been great.

We were previously using EMC. We looked at EMC, obviously, with the XtremIO product. We looked a little bit at NetApp. We haven't had a previous relationship with them, so we didn't look too deeply into it. And then we also obviously looked at HP 3PAR.

In the business that we're in, we deal with a lot of data. I like to think of ourselves as big data before big data was big data. We've been around since 1925. Obviously, there weren't computers back then, but a lot of the work that we did do as far as collecting performances was done paper based. In the last 25 years or so, we've since moved over to computer technology. In the last four or five years, what we've really seen with the advent of a lot of online musical sources, especially things like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, we're seeing a larger influx of the amount of information that we're having to digest or ingest as an organization we do processing on.

So one of the problems that we have is the throughput or the IOPS that was available to us through traditional storage array, we had a traditional tier SAN storage array and we knew that with all the new tech-all the new data that's coming in, we had to ensure that we were positioned well to be able to handle the increasing amount of data that was being sent to us on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.

The HP solution to us made a lot of sense. When I was at HP Discover last year and I saw the keynote about the $2.00 per gigabyte, that intrigued me very much so. Flash has been around for awhile, but as everyone knows, it's been a very expensive technology. For a company like ours, we really strive to drive value to our members. We've considered a not for profit, meaning that for every dollar that we collect, what's not used for operational purposes goes right back to our members. So obviously the lower we keep the cost, the more money we give back to our members and the greater benefit we provide to them. So that was one of the most intriguing things about the solution.

The other thing that really drew me to the HP 3PAR flash solution was the architecture of it. Being an architecture person infrastructure person, it made a lot of sense to me. XtremIO is a great product. but again, it was a great architecture, but a different approach to solving the same problem that we sort of had to address with the HP 3PAR system.

Performance is very important to us. Like I mentioned, we get a lot of data, we do a lot of data processing for a company of our size, and of course, costs and value for our money is very, very important to us

There's always room for improvement. You know, maybe two years from now we'll be seeing flash costing, 10 cents a gigabyte or something like that. But, no, we've been extremely happy with the solution. My team that manages it and as well as my customers, being the business and the application developers are all very excited about what flash can do for them, for their workloads.

What I recommend to other people looking at all flash solutions, I would take a look at not only the company that's selling it, but the background of the technology itself. There have been a lot of flash startups, a lot of flash startups being purchased by big name companies like Cisco, EMC, etc. So don't let the big name fool you. Do your homework. Make sure you ask the right questions, and look at the history of the product. Talk to some of the customers and get their feedback and see how they're doing with the solution.

I think there was one, I wouldn't say gotcha, but one thing that we kind of had to know going in to take advantage of some of the technology that the people had. Like the in-line de-duplication was the block size. So by default, when you deploy a Windows server it formats at the sort of 4K block size. Take advantage of that, you have to use 16K or higher, so if we had thought of that ahead of time, it would have, we would see benefits more sooner. But now that we're well into our deployment, we have obviously made that adjustment. So I would just say to make sure that people look into that before they deploy.

I would say peer reviewers are very important. You know, sales people being sales people that are trying to sell you their product, that's their job. But when you want to talk to the customers and get feedback from the people that are actually using it, the people that spend their hard earned dollars, that are actually supporting the product, I think that is very valuable in itself, and it's very important to me.

I normally go about finding info by networking, talking to some of my peers; when I do deal with sales people, I ask them for references. They obviously give you curated references, but, you know, ask the right questions and ensure that the people they're talking to are generally being honest, and they generally are. They don't want to mislead you, so it's good to have that relationship beforehand, and even afterwards, reaching out to speak to people.

Disk-utilization tier-ing (3PAR Adaptive Optimization)

The organization was able to consolidate disparate storage environments into a single chassis with multiple connection types, utilize the different disk tiers across all software/hardware connected platforms, all the time providing the fastest disk to the most utilized portions of storage as determined by the controllers.

While there is direct module integration with different Hyper Visors on the market, the actual software of those integrations do leave some feature integration off requiring both management interfaces. The greater this integration becomes the easier to manage the environment it will be.

I used it for three years.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

HP technical support for 3PAR is excellent once you have navigated the call tree.

I utilized HP Lefthand devices and EVA SAN’s (Models 5000 and 4400)

The initial setup was complex in that requirements were not communicated well through the VAR and some parts needed to be sent back (PDU’s were of the wrong type) and the VAR assumed a Virtual Storage manager would be used, but a physical manager was both requested and required, which created an installation delay while the correct equipment was shipped.

It was implemented through a vendor team, originally out-sourced by HP, then followed up by HP in-house technicians.

The implementation did not have an ROI to calculate as the products being migrated off of were end of life.

• Dell Compellant
• EMC VMX

I like the adaptive optimization and that it functions as virtual storage and I don’t have to go in and carve things across spindles.

The biggest benefit is the ease of administration, since we only have one administrator – me. If I’m not there and others need to be able to allocate storage, I can give a step-by-step guide for my company to follow to do that; whereas if I had an EMC product, for example, we’d need two administrators. We’re an agricultural co-op so we have to run a very lean IT shop.

In future versions, I would like to see Peer Motion become bi-directional, and also able to function over the normal data ports and not require extra ports. I thought I was going to like storage v-motion, but I’m running into problems where Peer Motion doesn’t do what it was advertised to do.

It works as if we have a disk on that is currently our destination, and we wanted to put that on our source 3PAR. We have to tear down our Peer Motion and rezone a bunch of stuff, changing how courts are acting on the 3PARs, and rebuild a new Peer Motion configuration. Because of this, it’s a lot more cumbersome than what we thought it would be.

None. It's an easy system to get installed and up and running.

It’s very stable; rock solid.

It meets our needs. I don’t foresee a point where we won’t be able to meet our needs with 3PAR.

Excellent. We do have critical support, but for us, the cost of critical support is well worth it.

Two pieces. First, the 3PAR people (backend support) are kind of hit and miss, and it depends on who you get. I’ve had some great people and I’ve had others who seem to think it was their mission in life to frustrate me. As I understand it, most are based in Colorado but others are based in India, and it’s really hard to communicate with them at times.

We have what’s considered a secure site, and 3PAR can’t just remote into our SANs, and their technicians seem to take issue with that sometimes. However, the hardware people, meaning the field service engineers, are excellent.

Well, we had an EVA, which is another HP product, and our storage usage was growing so fast that we weren’t going to be able to expand that to cover what we needed.

It was very easy to set up.

We looked at Dell, HP, NetApp, and EMC. There are two big reasons why we chose HP:

1. The 3PAR product is a lot easier to administer because it’s a virtual storage that aggregates all the disks together; and
2. There were two virtual products for what we were looking for, but we liked what it did in terms of optimization better than Dell.

Support and service is a big one for us, we needed good support. Also, we had to make sure pricing was good. For our purposes, it’s the best SAN that we have found. The things that keep it from being 10/10 are things like Peer Motion and the back end service.

Unless you have a very specific kind of load that requires a super high-end array, which 3PAR is not designed to be, I would recommend you look at HP, as there’s a very wide range of what HP can cover.

• Ease of Use
• Performance
• Stability
• Tiering

Stability has been the greatest benefit of the solution.

Stability is great.

Scalability is good as we have grown the area several times without an issue.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I would recommend the solution to anyone, but check into your environment.

The biggest pro is the overall performance. Provisioning is easy and fast. With NetApp, we needed to run scripts, which was a much slower process.

In general, it’s been such a good fit for us, as it's fast, easy, and flexible.

Our biggest one was the overall performance. Our SQL servers are performing better now, and because it’s easy to provision, more team members can provision who weren’t comfortable doing so before hand.

It’s been very stable. In comparison to what we had before, it’s a 10/10 -- incredibly stable.

It’s very scalable.

Pretty good. Up there with a 10/10 so far. The few issues we had were resolved quickly.

We were using NetApp. We were seeing overall poor performance.

Straightforward. Wasn’t overly complex.

Major players, such as EMC. We felt HP was a better fit. We weighed it out and HP fit our needs better than EMC.

We were looking mainly for IOPS. We have a lot of SQL, so IOPS was important to us. We also wanted tiering to move things in-between tiers easily.

Come to the shows and get demos. Get your hands on it.