HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

Primarily, we use it for SAP storage. At this moment, we are running an ERP system on it. 

SAP is our mission-critical app.

All-flash is positioning our company for growth. We need to improve our systems with better hardware and systems. That will happen in the next three to six months.

It is easy to use and understand. It is also very stable.

I would like the documentation easy to find. There is a lot of documentation, but sometimes it is hard to find. You have to do a lot of searching to find it.

Before you could go on the HPE website, and download every driver that you wanted. Now, you need to have a service contract, or something else, to be able to get the drivers. Sometimes, you just need a simple driver, because your machine needs to restart and reinstall. If the machine is not under warranty anymore, it's hard to get the driver. That is a setback when compared to other solutions.

We are in the Caribbean, but we are Sint Maarten. Sint Maarten is French and Dutch. We are on the Dutch side. We speak Dutch and English, but because we are in the Caribbean, the way the system is set up with HPE in Latin America, a lot of times when we contact support, we get a Spanish-speaking people instead of an English-speaking people. I find that is a problem. When we are dealing with support to send somebody over, for example, we make sure to always put the emphasis on, "Make sure you send somebody who is English-speaking to us."

The product is really stable. The main thing is the solution is easy to use, and my administrators don't spend a lot of time on maintaining or troubleshooting issues because of it.

We never have a problem. The system runs. One of the main things is that we are in the Caribbean. The amount of power outages that we have compared to the US is more than 60 percent higher. The 3PAR can handle that. A lot of systems, when power goes out and it come back, they just don't work. We never had that. The 3PAR was one thing that always used to backup. I had problem with other servers, but not with the 3PAR.

It is very scalable and simple. The moment that you understand the product, it is straightforward to use. That is one of the most important things when it comes to our administrators. They don't like complex things.

Because we are in the Caribbean, sometimes our waiting time for a problem is a bit longer than when you are in United States.

For the solution that we were looking at an ERP system, and what we need to do with it, 3PAR was one of the best. On top of that, the company used to use another product called, LeftHand. After LeftHand, we moved over to 3PAR. When I saw the performance from LeftHand compared to 3PAR, it was a very good improvement and the way to go.

Speed is what we are all looking for right now. Before, people could wait for data, but now, the moment they wait five minutes, and are not typing, that's the minute they say the system is down. In the past, we used to have a different way of storing data. Since we moved over to the 3PAR, where we have two different sizes, the replication and accessibility are much faster.

The initial setup is straightforward. The moment that you are ordering a product, you pay for your support. When they come, there is communication going on between you and them. They check what is available for you. They send a person over, and that's it. After that, once the engineer has left, you have a working product.

We used HPE support, who are special for implementation and installation. When we order a product, we have good support from them. They come and install it for us. Then, we pay for the support after that. We use external support too.

I can't complain about the support. Usually, they send somebody over because we are in the Caribbean. When we install a new product, they have to send a person over, and they are with us a week sorting the system. The fact that we're doing it together is always a very nice experience, because it is hands-on. I find it really good. I'd give them a 10 out of 10 for that. For the last, I will say six to 10 years, we have had three different engineers from HPE, and they were all awesome.

We used to get somebody from Houston, but now, they switched us to somebody from Barbados.

We have seen ROI. We have less of maintenance. Our administration has been cut down by a lot. The people who used to administrate other databases are not buy improving the system. 

3PAR has increased our performance by at least 40 percent.

The solution has reduced our time to deployment by at least 60 percent, because there is less maintenance and time to spend on the storage.

Our licensing cost are $32,000 annually.

We are a fully HPE shop since 2000. Since then, we never really went over to a different vendor. We were approached by Dell EMC back then. They wanted to change up our whole server room and data center with their product. However, we are happy with HPE.

I don't really know the other products out there, but I love this product.

We are not running SSDs drive yet. When we move to SSDs, I think it will be much faster.

We are not yet using the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity offering.

Biggest lesson learnt: if you have a good product, you have less maintenance.

We're currently running two 3PAR 7200 storage units in high availability. We have three workload tiers. We have Nearline, FAST class, and SSD. Our primary ERP system is an Oracle JD Edwards running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 that is all on SSD. Then, we have other workloads for our barcode. Our engineering solutions are running on FAST class, and then most of our traditional file and print, storage, and workloads are running on Nearline SATA. Also, have two 4200 LeftHand SANs in the environment. I put very low priority VMs on those two LeftHand SANs. They are minor application servers. They don't need a whole lot of performance. However, the LeftHand SANs are now seven years old. The 3PAR SANs are now five years old, and I have to replace everything in 2020, and I'm looking at HPE SimpliVity, Nimble, and potentially 3PAR as the storage architecture for that environment.

Our JD Edwards, which is our ERP system, that is critical. Also, our barcode scanning, because we do a lot of barcode scanning out in the shipping and manufacturing warehouse. Our accounting system is part of the JD Edwards too. All of that is on the SSD. We're currently evaluating whether we upgrade to JD Edwards 9.2 or if we deploy Microsoft Finance and Operations. If we go with Microsoft Finance and Operations, that'll be totally in the cloud, and I'll be able to carve a third of my storage requirements out because it will no longer be necessary to run an on-premise ERP solution.

My directive when I was hired in 2016 as a direct IT manager versus an outsourced IT manager, as I was when I started in 2014, is anything and everything I can take to the cloud goes to the cloud. If I do that, it reduces the need for all SSD on-premise, and that's actually what I'm trying to get to, because I'd rather utilize Microsoft Cloud, Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. I want to utilize that cloud for my performance, whereas on-premise traditional file, print, and storage doesn't really need SSD.

In the deployment of virtual servers, I can have a new VM up and running in 15 minutes, run the patches, then done. I routinely fire up base images that I have for my servers: Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016. I routinely fire those base images up and do all the updates, then prep them again for cloning. With 3PAR, we definitely have the performance to do that. Those images I do keep on SSD just to have that performance to deploy a new VM.

It has improved our throughput. We went from a 1G backbone on our LeftHand SAN, and also the IBM SAN was not redundant, but we put in a 10G backbone with 10G fiber which truly increased our performance. 

The high availability is awesome. 

The reliability: In five years, I have had one drive that has failed, which is not so much 3PAR as much as it is HPE. I have depended on HPE servers since it was Compaq servers. 

One of the things I like about the Microsoft operating systems are Microsoft's built-in backups. It's not elegant nor real pretty, but it just works for a single server or single VM. What I would really like to see from HPE is backup built-in, not snapshots nor replaying snapshots, but true block or file level backups integrated into an HPE platform program.

Today, I'm using StorageCraft, where I can have a VM recovered in 15 to 20 minutes. I run a continuous restore point on three of my primary domain controllers. I run a continuous restore point against my primary Microsoft SQL server. So, I always have that continuous, but it's taking up so much storage space that I keep running out and having to add. I need something better, as I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe having Arcserve Backup or Seagate Backup Exec more integrated into the hardware solution.

in the last five years, we've only had one drive failure. We have run out of space on our Nearline storage, because our Nearline storage was set up for the Remote Copy groups. I'm actually going to be working with an HPE storage architect next week to redistribute the ARC copy groups. Most of that is low tier that I'm not worried about for high availability, but for our SSD storage and FAST class storage, the high availability is there. I have a six node cluster that we are splitting to two sites on one campus. If I have any failure, everything fails over in a heartbeat, then nobody will hardly notice.

In the past, I've been comfortable running HPE servers for more than 10 years. However, I no longer find that to be cost-effective, especially as a customer, because running something that long obviously induces too much risk. Now, I'm on a three to five-year replacement cycle, and the current environment was installed five years ago. I have to get it replaced next year.

3PAR technical support has been outstanding. When I ran into some issues with my Nearline drives last year, they helped out with that. Every time that I have had to update the OS or firmware, I opened up a case with 3PAR support, and I get somebody right away. Then, we schedule time and are able to do live updates with no downtime. This is huge and critical for me.

I told the company that they needed to invest in 3PAR. They had one IBM DS 5600, a SAN that was huge, but was only eight terabytes, at the time. They were trying to go with the two LeftHand SANs to replace the IBM, but the LeftHand SANs IOPS could never succeed the IOPS from the IBM SAN. Then, the reseller that was helping them was let go and new management was brought in. That management decided to outsource IT to the company that I worked for. I was a huge HPE partner at the time.

3PAR has increased our performance over our old IBM SAN that was put in around 2009, prior to my time, which was 1G fiber and all SAS drives. The performance of the 3PAR, with its SSDs and controller nodes, was vastly superior to that older IBM. The HPE LeftHand SANs were all SAS and SATA, so the 3PAR SSD performance was just off the charts.

Anything new can be complex. There were some things in the initial deployment that I was not happy about. One of my directives was, "However, it's configured, ensure that it can never be overprovisioned." That one key thing was overlooked.

This is why I had to have a support call last year, because it actually became overprovisioned and I had to move some stuff around. We're still sort of in that with the Nearline storage, and that's why I'm having another architect work with me next week, so we can redo some things. I've had to move a lot of what was on the Nearline storage over to the LeftHand SANs. If I hadn't had those LeftHand SANs just sitting there with 20 terabytes, I would've been in serious trouble. That was my one point with the deployment team, everybody thinks, "If you do this, you do this, and do this, you'll never get overprovisioned," but I've been doing this long enough, and going back to Compaq StorageWorks, if you're not careful on how you have Remote Copy groups, your redundancy setup, thin provision, thick provision, lazy zero, and eager zero, then you will get overprovisioned at some point. You will lock up on a SAN tighter than a drum.

I was actually outsourced as the IT manager. Starting in February of 2014, I was selected to lead the management of all the company's nine locations in North America, Europe, and Canada, working with HPE at the time. After we selected to go definitely with 3PAR, HPE helped do the whole design, and I approved the design. It was actually deployed in August of 2014. Everything was deployed to my specifications.

We have seen ROI. 

For the entire six node cluster and the two 7200 units plus the Brocade Fibre switches, we financed it through HPE Financial. It was $850,000. We leased that and paid it off in October of 2018.

I have to renew support in October for the existing solution. That will cost me roughly $50,000 this year, which in the grand scheme of things, $50,000 is not that much compared to paying $850,000. However, it will be the last year that I'll be able to get direct support from HPE. Therefore, product has to be replaced in 2020.

I worked with the team from HPE. We looked at their solutions, and selected 3PAR. We also looked at Dell EMC and Nutanix. At the time, when evaluating Dell EMC and other SAN products against 3PAR out-of-the-box, 3PAR just was vastly superior to anything else.

Working with the HPE team back in early 2014, they proposed the design. As it turns out, the SAN that we deployed in 2014 was the largest 3PAR SAN in the state of Wisconsin.

I just have a long history of HPE. I've tried Dell EMC and IBM before. IBM sold its server products to Lenovo. I always come back to HPE, especially the ProLiant brand, just because of the reliability and consistency through all the generations. You can look at a ProLiant 1000, never having seen one before, but if you know a Gen 9 or a Gen 10 today, if you could find a Proliant 1000 that was still operating, then you would know how to go in and configure it.

It is this type of consistency that keeps me with HPE. Dell EMC is all over the place. Lenovo has reliability issues.

Look at HPE's roadmap for 3PAR, SimpliVity, and Nimble. Do your research, then pick the right one that works for you with the future that you envision.

I'm highly interested in using InfoSight going forward. One of the things that I have always tried to do is get to where I had just one dashboard for everything from managing from the desktop up to my Internet perimeter security. I want to look more at Aruba Networks and Cloud services to see how that might be able to help me integrate my WatchGuard perimeter security. I'm looking at Commvault and switching to Commvault for my backups, because eventually I just want one dashboard that shows me everything: servers, storage, switches, access points, and security perimeter points. That is the platform that can get me there.

That's one of the reasons why I'm at the conference is to check out HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity.

Biggest lesson learnt: Don't be absent during the design phase.

It is our primary storage. The entire company runs off 3PAR. Right now, we are in a VMware environment. All of our virtual machines are stored on 3PAR, along with all of our EMR applications, practice management solutions, and email. All of our virtual machines are running off of 3PAR. Our file server is on there too.

The product has heavily improved the way our organizations functions. Before we got the 3PAR, we were running an HPE Generation 6 server as our storage server. It was slow, and we were getting low on space, so we weren't able to expand capacity that easily. Since we went to 3PAR, it has fiber connections connecting all the cabinets together. Therefore, data access has been tremendously better, especially when we have to constantly recall, all day long everyday, patients charts or when we are doing scheduling. We see over 2000 patients on a daily basis, so we have to have speed and reliability. By implementing 3PAR over the old, regular file storage server that we had before, it has drastically improved our patient care.

Reliability is its most valuable feature. We have multiple cabinets with multiple failure points, so if there is one failure then we don't have worry about it. It is easy to replace a part of the cabinet when we are up and running. We can replicate back over, then we are good to go. Our uptime has to be there, so we can continue seeing patients. That is the biggest part of the reliability that I am looking for.

I would like an easier user interface and setup to help with deployment. There were many areas of the setup where I was like, “Why don't we do it this way?” Therefore, some of the things in the user interface could have been more refined, so you don't have to click in 5000 different places to accomplish one goal. Less clicks means more efficiency.  

I feel like there is a big training gap. Obviously, the HPE engineers know all about the product and can come in and do the setup with ease. However, once they hand off the product to the in-house IT group, there might be a learning gap there. E.g,, I have to call them now every time I have a problem. 

I feel like they should've spent more time with us. They were only onsite for two days, and I feel like there should be more outside training to explain how to use the product.

It has been pretty stable. We have only had one major issue. It was because of a redundancy that we had set up. HPE sent us a new part, then we swapped it in and were back up and running.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with the solution's availability.

So far, we have not had to scale up. However, that day may be coming, and we actually provisioned our 3PAR to be scalable in the future. So, I think the scalability is pretty good considering HPE helped us design and implement it in a way where we can scale up when needed.

So far, the technical support has been good. We had one major failure and the technical support team sent us a part within four hours. Then, we had the new part, and it was everything was back up and running. We were able to talk to a 3PAR specialist to walk us through how to get everything reconfigured. So, there was virtually no down time.

The previous solution that we had was about 10 years old. It was an HPE Generation 6 server. We had some management changes, and it was time for a refresh which we hadn't done in many years.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There were a lot of different things that had to happen which was the reason why they had to send out the HPE engineers to help us. 

My philosophy is if you have to send out an engineer to do it, then it is probably more complicated for the end user.

Softchoice helped us procure the equipment, and HPE sent out 3PAR specialists to help us configure and deploy the product. Our experience with Softchoice was great.

It was pretty easy to deploy the product to begin with because HPE helped us do it. They sent product specialists in. So, deployment of this particular product was definitely easy-breezy.

We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice.

3PAR has increased our performance.

The product has definitely improved throughput. We are able to more efficiently see patients because all of our medical records and practice management software seems to run faster. Uploading images and charts is a lot faster. Recalling information in the exam rooms is faster. The overall throughput of data, going back and forth, is so we can more efficiently see patients, and it also helps increase our patient flow. We can see patients a lot faster, getting them in and out a lot more quickly.

Spend your time doing the research on the product and learn the system.

So far, it has been pretty reliable. It has been a set it and forget it type product, which has been great, except for when there are some minor issues. However, the issues that we have had were resolved fairly quickly.

We are flash and standard disk combo, or hybrid. Having flash though does not mean that we have faster performance. What it does helps us with is being able to see more patients, because we're not having to wait as long for applications to load or waiting for the data to get sent to where it needs to be.

Biggest lesson learnt: Why didn't we do it a long time ago?

We use 3PAR for everything. There is not much we don't use it for. Most of our storage is on 3PAR at this point. We run SAP, VDIs, and all of our server infrastructure on it for the most part as mission-critical applications.

• Reliability
• Speed
• Stability
• Easy to expand
• Easy to maintain

The solution’s deduplication functionality works great. We are getting about a 16:1 dedupe ratio on our VM workloads.

It is good and stable.

The availability has been great. We haven't had any outages from the 3PAR itself. Although, we have had two or three outages from the techs coming onsite and working on it, then causing an outage.

The scalability is good. Our storage is small. We don't have petabytes. We have an 8200 right now and only have 16 drives on it. Therefore, we have a lot of room for growth.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Currently, we are using all-flash, and with the dedupe, it makes it cheaper for us to deploy than other systems.

The call-in support is fine. 

The onsite techs have caused outages. However, this issue has been fixed as HPE is now outsourcing this.

We were running out of capacity on our 3PAR 7200, so we bought a new one.

The initial setup was straightforward. The seller came and installed it, setting it up. We had just enough money. It wasn't that big of a deal to start creating LUNs at that point.

We used a reseller, High Performance Technologies, for the deployment. Our experience with them was okay. 

They are not a good fit for what we need now. So, we have moved onto another provider.

The solution has increased our performance.

The solution has improved our throughput, as jobs and servers run faster.

Our licensing costs are all lumped together with everything else, so I don't know the breakout.

We looked at 3PAR, Nimble, and Pure storage.

Look at both the 3PAR and Nimble, then see which one is best for your needs. They are both reliable systems which work great. They just run.

We have had 3PAR for a while. So, it has reduced time to deployment by about 10 percent, which is the same as our older platform.

We use the product for virtualization environment. 

I am impressed with the product's online upgrades. 

The engagement of the tool's vendor is costly. 

I have been using the tool for five years. 

The product's support is both good and bad. 

Neutral

The tool's deployment is straightforward due to experience. Initially, it was difficult. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. A stable and performance-oriented product. 

This solution helps to store data for high-loaded and high-performing systems like business communications systems and telecommunications.

It fetches quick responses in milliseconds which can be within 40-50 milliseconds.

The tool has low storage and low performance. This can be solved by adding more disco to the solution. The product’s pricing is also suited for enterprise businesses rather than smaller ones.I would like to see better performance, UI, and compatibility with other products in future releases.

I have been working with the solution for ten years.

The solution’s tech support is good. You will get a dedicated account manager.

The solution is easy to deploy.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. You need to properly assess your needs before buying the solution since there are chances of overpaying. The type of configuration that you choose can make the price go higher or lower.

We primarily use the solution for storage.

We are satisfied with the solution. We deployed 3PAR in the national and international markets. It's not bad, the solution.   

It's not a very good solution. We found EMC and other storage solutions can help the client a bit more in terms of reaching their target, having the flexibility they need, and offering better backups and integration.

It's not high-end storage. It's not as strong as it needs to be. You need to have two nodes, or two controls to be able to effectively protect from data loss.

It's not really a complete solution. It has some limitations with software integration as well as backup and restore integration. It does not protect the data stored on 3PAR. Some products should be protected with another brand if there's a level of security required. 

With 3PAR, there is remote copy software which isn't very good. It should be improved also. Many times we have had data issues and we have had to re-initiate the application and reconfigure. 

HPE is not present in Algeria. They manage support through the delivery partner that actually can provide some assistance. Right now, we have spare part problem. It's not present. We have to wait, maybe, a couple of weeks or more than one month to have a replacement get shipped in and we're usually reaching out about that. It is a big issue for the customer if we lose one server, or the blade is down. It means the service can be down for one month, and it's not a good idea to share this information with customers. 

Before 2015, HPE had some sort of setup with DHL or FedEx. It was very good. On top of that, they had an HPE engineer to manage the support. However, since then, they left. They closed the office and they manage everything now indirectly in the country, via other countries. If we try to measure the performance of HPE outside our country, it's very good, however, here, we have had a bad experience with them and so have our customers as well as local customers.

I've also dealt with Dell EMC. We have Huawei OceanStore Dorado, PowerMax, and PowerStore as well. We have all the kind of storage. I can confirm that 3PAR is not a high-end solution. It can be classified as the mid-range, not high-end. PowerStore is likely the best out of all of these. The controller is really high-end.

We don't really handle the setup. It's done at the factory and delivered. It comes with data sheets to help customers with a few things, however, for the most part, it is pre-setup to spec. Once it is delivered it can be configured as necessary.

The pricing is expensive. I'm not sure if it's the region that causes such high prices, however, when we are bidding, we rarely get very good discounts to work with. It's not competitive. 

We are a reseller. 

Whether or not this solution would work for a company is all about the situation. If HPE could improve the level of the support or if the company has a certain level of support available to them (instead of relying on HPE), they can likely manage. It's a good idea to secure some spare parts in advance while making a deal. However, relying on the HPE SLA with the worry of indirect logistics is going to be a problem for a lot of companies when it takes so long to get parts. I

Our company has a contract with the client - not HPE. Therefore, it looks bad on us when we can't deliver on the parts or service when the fault lies on the HPE end. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's not bad, however, there are significant areas that need to be improved upon. 

I am a solution architect, solution designer. Depending on the customer requirements and type of setup, some use the latest versions while others use previous versions.

The solution is used in production environments and cloning environments. We have cloned it multiple times to get better optimization of the storage usage in terms of deduplication.

HPE 3PAR has all the common storage features like cell provisioning and deduplication. Usually the solution is chosen by the customer as they have a preference, or the setup is already in their environment.

If HPE 3PAR could handle NAS and all things related to NAS, you would not need to have a mixture of different storages, storage boxes, one solution could fit all. 

I have been working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ for 7 years.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a stable product.

This solution is scalable.

I have compared HPE 3PAR with NetApp, they have a monopoly over the NAS and can handle NAS very well. 

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an 8 out of 10  as a solution.