HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it on a project basis and based on the customer's requirements. We use the HPE systems in data centers with servers and virtual environments. This is the most common use case.

I like that it's stable. This is the reason why we're using these products. We work in the broadcast market, and stability is very important. HPE has global services, and that's also important. Dell and HPE are some big companies, and their solutions are robust and stable.

From an overall perspective, all the latest technologies can improve support and performance. This is very important for us.

As a company, we have been selling HPE 3PAR StoreServ for more than 24 years. Personally, I've been dealing with it for more than 18 years.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine.

We use it mostly for databases and file share. 

I like that 3PAR can remake the disk online. That's one of the best features because when we first started, that was the best. The team provisioning feature was also a good one. Those features are the best for me, provisioning and online optimization, and the tier you can have for storage.

Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance.

I have been working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ for about ten years or since the beginning when the product was in the market.

It's quite stable. The only problem that I have found with this product is when you are missing storage space. When you lack storage space, and the disk is full is when you have most of the problems with this product. But if you don't have these issues, you'll almost never have a problem with it.

Scalability could be better. I think it's getting short right now, and another product has more scalability. This product, I think, is medium if that's acceptable. I don't know how to measure it.

I think it's excellent. I actually think they are very good.

The initial setup is easy. It takes between two to four hours to upload the functions.

It's a good price.

If you want to run this solution, I would say that this product is mostly dying from my point of view. If you're my customer, I would recommend not to buy a 3PAR because there are a lot of new products. I would recommend Nimble, depending on the size, or a Primera if they need a really big solution. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven.

We use this product as our primary storage. 

We are in the manufacturing industry and we use the HPE 3PAR StoreServ to store our company data and then we can retrieve it as required.

All of the features this storage product has, work well.

This is a very robust product and it offers everything that we are looking for.

There is a slight difference between what we expected and what was delivered.

I have been working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past three years.

This is a very stable storage solution and we plan to continue using it.

This product is scalable and we have more than 100 users. We are planning to increase the amount of storage space.

We are satisfied with the HP Enterprise technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

HPE installed it for us and we did not hire a third-party consultant to assist with it.

This product is a little bit costly, although this is because it is a high-quality product.

There was a one-time cost when we procured this product and there are no monthly or yearly licensing fees.

We purchased this solution with an open tender and we invited several vendors to present their products.

In general, this product works well. That said, it is not perfect because there is always a difference between what we expect and what is delivered. There has to be a gap.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for everything. We have server files and we have SQL's.

It's a flexible solution.

Currently, we are finishing the possible quotation to upgrade the 3PAR we have here in Portugal. 

It's a case of obsolescence. Since we have had the machine for four years we must remove the old one to put in the new one.

I would like to see more storage, a better interface, and to move from mechanical disks.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have had the solution for four years and the software has been updated.

It's a stable solution.

This is a scalable product. We have approximately 1,000 users in our organization.

We are considering the possibility of a move to Primera or PowerMax.

We have contacted technical support and it's pretty good.

We purchased VMAX three years ago.

We also used the NetApp Series but decided to go with 3PAR.

The initial setup is straightforward with the help of the technicians from the company.

The deployment was completed in one week.

We had help from a consulting integration company for the deployment.

We also have a production team of 34 admins and engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

We don't pay for any licensing fees.

We would recommend this solution to others.

It works well and we don't have any issues with it.

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a ten out of ten.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

I've seen a lot of data storage systems. It's the only storage system you can watch over the application time and it keeps measuring it. We have some thresholds on our end on it, a very good graphical user interface and reporting. 

There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has limited flexibility in building replication solutions. There are limitations to the number of IOPS the system can do. It's not bad as it is doing its job. However, for the application, if you need a toolbox, you can build everything concerning periodic replication modes of synchronous or asynchronous three-site, four-site, with supported cascading which requires you to buy an IBM product. 

It also takes a few hours to one day to upgrade the system and sometimes; it takes more time because, in some HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage, you have an eight-node system. If you do an upgrade, you do it node by node and every node might take more than an hour.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past seven years.

Last year after summer, HPE had to locate replication groups getting stopped and took a lot of time to find out what's happening, and yet we still don't know what's happening over there. It feels like the message is quite clear after replicating from A to B, and it states that B is not responding very well.

There is a timeout, and it stops the replication group because there is no stability or consistency and is not good at that moment. So that might be negative, but when was the last time? I think in November of last year.

At one point, some remote copy groups stopped working, and we used a disaster recovery plan because, in production, we replicate everything from A to B and then split up into some remote copy groups, gathering together some data source and clusters. If one of those remote copy groups stops, you don't have DFP anymore and you have to restart them. And last year after starting one of those replication groups; we had some performance issues because they're trying to get in sync as soon as possible using all the resources, so we had to plan very well outside the business hours.

We have proactive datacenter care; I call it a storage advocate, and we can send every question to them and we get quick answers. They also help to find out if new releases are available and other services. For now, they have more insights on that. They have better sources sometimes, and I have better sources than them sometimes, but they do a great job and they also assisted us concerning the compression issue we had at the beginning.

It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available. 

We have done total cost of ownership calculations over the past five years, and we also ask for some cost prices for the sixth and seventh year so that we can get some insights into what happens after those five years. We have some systems that are five years old and we keep them because it's flash data storage. It's still almost a three terabyte solid-state drive, and the support cost is not that high. We'll have a look after that. I see other things happening on the Hitachi boxes with all those license defeats. This is also positive for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, everything is on the license. When we bought the systems, it was the case and then I've been reading something about it. You can buy the rest of the licenses. If you buy a system, that will not be replicated to another system, then you get a license without replication software.

The job of direct channel support to HPE 3PAR StoreServ is not an end of life or end of support but HPE Primera has now replaced it and I hope they get all the functionality in there like the HPE 3PAR. I remember it seems like HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera have support for volume plugins and that will be a big game if they can implement volumes on their system because that kind of release is much better than the datastore level.

 The primary use of this solution is exclusively for VDI.

 I find the most valuable feature to be compression and deduplication. 

The solution could be improved in regard to space reclamation by adding automation. This should be added to the next release.

I have been using the solution for four years.

I have only had to adjust the solution four times in the time I have used it, it is stable. 

The solution is moderately simple to scale. We have approximately 1000 computers using the solution.

The technical support has been fantastic.

The initial setup was straightforward, it took approximately 45 minutes.

We purchased the solution as CapEx and we only pay support now. I find the pricing fantastic. 

My advice to others looking into the implementation of the solution is to pay attention to detail if you are on iSCSI. 

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten. 

We have deployed HPE 3PAR systems on all database-related storage including MSSQL and Oracle. All of the SQL databases are running on VMware, and the database-related storage is mounted as RDM. The Oracle database is mounted directly to HPE 3PAR with remote-copy enabled.

HPE 3PAR provides fast and reliable storage for our critical systems like the database (MSSQL and Oracle). It also improved the availability of the system and at the same time provides a Disaster Recovery solution by using the remote-copy feature.

The adaptive optimization is also a factor in maximizing the capability of the system.

The most valuable features of this solution are Remote-copy and Adaptive Optimization. 

Remote-copy provides high availability and disaster recovery for the connected clients.

The Adaptive Optimization provides tiering and optimizes the storage requirement of the client based on its load from time to time.

The cloud-based monitoring Infosight would be better if users are automatically enrolled in the cloud/group based on the configuration or information gathered or uploaded on the internet.

The auto-discovery of the system is not easy for first-time users.

I have been using this solution for 5 years.

This is one of the best solutions if you want to have a stable and highly reliable system.

This is a highly scalable system.

Technical support assisted us with a smooth and fast installation.

Previously we were using HP EVA but since this is an old solution, we wanted to upgrade. We wanted to try a newer solution with almost the same features, like HPE 3PAR.

The initial setup for this solution is indeed straightforward, although HP will not allow non-HP engineers to do the initial setup.

The implementation was completed by an HP engineer through the vendor.

The cost is reasonable given that the licensing is all included once you purchase it.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward but HP only allows their engineers to do the setup. This gives us peace of mind for the setup.

We use the solution for multiple business applications, with SharePoint, our internal management system and Exchange 2016. We are customers of HPE 3PAR and I'm a system engineer.

I think the main thing of value to me is the intelligence around the solution and how data is taken care of on the storage side of things, with your LANs and your virtual volumes and how it sort of manages everything else.

The scalability could be improved plus management. Currently, you can only identify what's connected to it through the system names and the like and it would be helpful to have an overview of everything that comes to it. It's easy to upsize but you can't downsize.

We've been using this solution for about seven years. 

This is a stable solution. 

The product used to be very scalable but its end of life will be in about a year so there's no point to upgrade or enhance it. 

The support is quite good and we'll continue to use this product.

The initial setup is complex, it requires you to do your volumes, fibre channel volume from the switch and the same connection from the storage. You also need to make sure you've created warning profiles. I don't recall how long the primary setup took, but the secondary one took us four to six hours to get it going. We used a consultant and we have 1,200 users.
We have about six people involved in maintenance, they are admins.

The product is at end of life so although we'll continue to use it, I wouldn't recommend it. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

This solution hosts our core banking system. Mostly everyone in the bank uses it — about 1,000 users.

The features which are most valuable are the availability of the system and the management.

We do see room for improvement, especially in regard to expanding the defined storage areas.

The alerting system could also be improved. If there are issues with the system, it's supposed to send emails and SMS alerts — this could be improved.

I have been using this product since 2017 — about five years.

It's very stable. It has never broken down.

It's scalable. Only now it has reached end-of-life.

The technical support is very good.

We were working with an HPE storage called HPE EVA. We switched over to HPE 3PAR StoreServ because EVA's technology was end-of-life.

The initial setup was complex because we didn't have experience with it. 

We had a consultant set it up for us. It took about a month.

This solution is expensive. We pay every year for support. It's a lump sum because we pay for data center support services, and everything is included in one. 

Currently, we're looking at HPE Primera and Nimble Storage. 

It's a very good system, especially the All-Flash system. That's quite good. The only downside is the price — otherwise, the product is perfect. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

I want to build a MetroCluester in VMware.

The speed is very good.

This solution only provides active-passive replication, as opposed to active-active. Competing products also provide active-active replication.

Adding support for Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) would be an improvement.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for more than seven years.

3PAR is a stable product.

This solution is easy to scale. It is done online.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE Nimble.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple.

The installation and configuration are quick. You can complete them in one or two hours, which is fast.

The deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We are always using the latest version because I upgrade every year.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for clusters, database work (Oracle and MySQL), and storage.

An area of improvement for this solution is an increase in the bandwidth as well as an upgrade of the storage functionality and capabilities. The storage needs to be expandable for future-proofing.

An additional feature I would like to see in the next release is for the management interface not to depend on Java.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years.

The solution is easy to use and very stable.

The solution is scalable, but we required an extension.

The technical support is very good.

Previously, I used EMC VNX. We switched because we couldn't monitor anything unless we uploaded a data file to EMC and they send us back an analysis.

The installation of the solution required three people and took three days, but for the storage-side, it took eight hours to get running.

Generally, clients use the solution as primary storage or data storage for corporations. They also use it for data replication where they replicate to another site or even on the same site. They're typically replicating the data for a backup situation.

The solution has greatly assisted data performance as far as a VM-ware environment goes. My data performance is much faster.

One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. 

The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. 

It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment.

The solution is very easy to use.

The product is very robust and offers very good performance.

HP has several integration elements that work with other vendor storage products. I'd like to see a greater expansion on that so that a customer can do a more seamless migration from other vendor products. The migration of data to their platform could be better.

Primarily they don't have a lot. They have several EMC elements that they can migrate data from, however, there are many more controllers out there and it'd be good to see a more seamless integration so that that could occur.

I'd like to see 3PAR have some integration with Cloud services.

I've been using the solution for several years. It's been probably around seven years or so. It has definitely been a while.

The stability is pretty decent. The only thing you have to worry about is that you don't overtax the controller. In other words, you don't do that combination of deduping and compression as well as data replication and then also heavily use the controllers where your IO starts, the IO performance. With IOPS and Truepoint, it's important that users do not over-utilize the environment. Then you have performance issues. 

You have to be careful about exactly what your usage is. You really need to understand what you want to do with the controller. You need to understand what your total IOP performances will be, before you do any sizing so that you can size appropriately, otherwise, as with any storage, you could have an underutilized controller. That would then cause you frustration and business units would suffer as you would have slower performance than what you expected.

A lot of times customers get themselves in trouble due to the fact that they make a purchase or size a controller and then later on they undersized it. Sometimes the under-sizing can occur due to the fact that a company starts putting more demand on the new stores where they want to put one more device on the storage product or connect to it, and that wasn't what it was sized for at the time. If you didn't plan on the growth of the utilization of the controllers the product doesn't look like it's performing properly, however, indeed it is. It's just, not big enough to handle the new user profile that you have put on it.

Microsoft Exchange, VMware, SQL, and Oracle - those are the types of software or devices that are applications that were used within our environment. We have several different departments or groups that get access to that storage.

There were some older 3PARs that we wanted to replace and there were some Clariion EMC products that we wanted to replace. The reason why was due to the fact that the 3PARs, were four years old and we needed a technology revamp, so to speak. 

The other reason we switched was that EMC was just too slow. It was getting overwhelmed and we had to go to a stronger or newer technology controller. Therefore we decided to go with the 3PAR as it was a lot easier to use. We also liked the virtualization of the product and we appreciated the ease of being able to make changes without having an overall effect in the environment.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too complex. If you have any SAN experiences pretty easy, as you have to understand some of the terminologies so that you can pre-prep the architectural design that you're looking for. Overall, however, it's pretty easy from a GUI perspective. You can do everything from a GUI. You don't need to play at the CLI level. Of course, if you'd like to do that, you can do that as well.

I typically handle implementations for my clients.

I'm a consultant and an HPE partner and I have my hands on several different things in terms of products I use.

Normally I work with all the versions as far as software versions. I've worked with all the different hardware, 3PAR versions as well, and I do a lot of installations.

The big thing and with 3PAR and with any other storage - and this goes for any kind of storage as you're sizing - is to make sure that you are getting the right size environment for what you currently have and what you expect for future growth. Otherwise, you may run into performance issues.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. We've been quite happy with the solution so far. It's robust and offers very good performance.

We use it for all kinds of needs, such as infrastructure needs, and application services. We are using the latest version of this solution.

Their support is the most valuable. The support that we are getting from HP Turkey is very good. 

This product is better than some of the other products in terms of reliability. It is very reliable.

We are using a built-in solution in 3PAR. We are using All-Flash Storage, and there are some difficulties with it. HPE has now developed a new tool system to support All-Flash, and that's why we are changing our investment.

They must increase its performance. I want unlimited support, which is very important for performance. I am not interested in spinning disks. HPE is developing new storage systems called Primera, but they must be developed more.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

3PAR systems are stable. We don't have any problem, but in the past, we had a problem with the 3PAR disk. I don't remember the disk vendor, but it was about the disk. That's why we changed all disk parts, which was a bit of hard work for us. We didn't have any other problem other than the disk problem a few years ago.

It is easily scalable. It is easy to scale, but if you plan to increase it substantially, it can be a bit difficult.

I'm a service provider. We provide support for Unix servers for many companies and customers. Some companies have more than 1,000 3PAR users.

The support that we are getting from HP Turkey is very good.

We are using IBM Flash Storage. In Turkey, IBM has more support and more products for the flash systems, which is an advantage. Performance of the storage is also better. 

We are also using FUSE Storage, which is also All-Flash Storage. Their performance is also better than HPE 3PAR. HPE 3PAR doesn't support any images.

The initial setup was simple.

Our storage team deploys the HPE 3PAR system. Sometimes, we also need some support from the local HPE support team. Its maintenance is done by a vendor.

It is a bit more expensive. IBM is cheaper than HPE in Turkey.

The most important things are availability, scalability, reliability, stability, and performance. We are service providers, and the customers want availability. You must focus on these things before buying storage. I advise going for All-Flash Storage to all people because spinning disks take too much space and electricity and provide less performance. That's why NVMe is better.

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten.

It is used in data centers. We are using HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8400.

It is easy to set up, easy to use, and user-friendly. It is easier to work with HPE 3PAR than with Hitachi. Its technical support is also good.

It is suitable for medium-sized businesses and data centers with less number of users and less important data. It is not really an enterprise-level solution. It needs more capacity.

It is also not really stable. It should be more stable. It should also support any server model. It is really weak in this area.

I have been working with this solution for three years. 

It is not really stable. It should be more stable.

Its scalability is good, but it needs a bigger capacity for an enterprise data center. We have around 1,000 users.

Their technical support is really good. HP is the best in terms of technical support.

The initial setup is easy. It is easier to install than Hitachi. You need two or three people for its deployment.

I would recommend Hitachi over this solution. We plan to keep using this solution because it is useful for one or two of our projects.

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten.

I use 3PAR as the standard storage. The main production is VMware, and it is connected to 3PAR across fabric switch. The fabric switch between them is MDS Switch and Notebook 8. We also have a Hyper-V environment, which is connected to the same storage. The main service is the exchange service. I have a public cloud and a private cloud. I use 3PAR as a private cloud.

In our organization, the storage is not detected from the first day, so I don't have the workload. The workload is run in my environment, and 3PAR is the best solution. If I have a workload from Thursday, I don't make the adaptive optimization on this because 3PAR is collecting all the storage and doing all tiering of the storage. If I have another disk from a new line, 3PAR makes it as tiering and adaptive. When a VM has more rights about the storage, it will make such VM of a higher tier. It can make it a C-tier. If the VM has a need for more IOPs, they need to use the scale command every time. This VM will move to another tier, and after the weekend, I will schedule adaptive optimization to check if this VM needs this tier or not. This way I can make all the storage tiered. If the workload is big and needs more IOPs, it moves the VMs from one tier to another tier. This is the main advantage. 

3PAR is different from other storage solutions because it uses a chunklet when we initiate the storage. Every disk is submitted as a 1 GB chunklet. This chunklet can be RAID 1, 4, 5, or 6. This fabulous feature is very useful for me because I can distribute the RAID for any volume. 

The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning. Other vendors take this volume as thick provisioning because of which the capacity is reached quickly. It doesn't happen in 3PAR because it detects zeros. It only writes the data, and it doesn't write zeros. There are two processors in 3PAR: the ASIC processor and the main processor. The ASIC processor detects zero writing and doesn't write it, which is a big feature in 3PAR.

File Persona can be better. I don't use File Persona because it has many problems with my environment. The antivirus that it has is not compatible with File Persona, and that's a big issue with File Persona.

3PAR is not as good as Dell when making a file in the storage. 3PAR for a block is very good, but when comparing row capacity, I get 14% capacity with 3PAR, but with Dell, I get 60% capacity.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is very stable because the controller is active-active. It is more secure if you make the best design and make two fabric switches around that.

3PAR is easy to scale up and scale out. It can serve a production workload without any problem. To scale up, you can have another inclusion in 3PAR. To scale out, you can add another controller. You can also have more IOPs in your production. 

We have 5,000 users of this solution. The main workload is in 3PAR now. I will also implement 3PAR on another site.

Their live technical support is available 24 hours a day. When I open a ticket with them, the support calls me within 30 minutes and schedules a meeting to show the issue.

I have PowerMax from Dell. I also have Dorado from Huawei in my environment, which is all-flash.

It is straightforward. I power on 3PAR and take care of the cabling. 3PAR is managed by two components: a services processor and a server component. The server can be a virtual appliance or a physical appliance. 

For upgrading, I take different configurations from the services processor. I update a package on the servers, which makes it easy to upgrade in production. For initial configuration, I do an upgrade offline, and it is easy.

It is lower in price as compared to other vendors, such as Dell. As compared to Huawei, all storage solutions are expensive, including this one.

If you are a new company and you need more capacity, availability, and scalability, you can choose 3PAR. Otherwise, you can choose another storage. When you put 3PAR, you must tell the customers about the usable capacity from the first day, not the row capacity.

I would recommend taking the official course from HP for 3PAR before performing any tasks. This is because 3PAR is not easy to manage in your IT environment. You must know everything about storage and how everything is written in the storage.

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten.

We use it only for storage.

Its stability is the most valuable. It has soft alerts. When an alert is raised, we get a call from HP saying that there is this type of alert, and they need to do a remote session to check things. Similarly, for firmware updates, they get in touch to say that a firmware upgrade is required on your storage. They schedule a time and take control remotely to upgrade the firmware. In all such cases, there is no downtime. Everything is done when a full-fledged operation is going on.

Its user interface is also quite good. We are quite accustomed to this user interface. We can easily take a look at the current usage or the amount of storage. It is quite easily understandable, and I can present those things to my seniors or other people who are not that tech-savvy, and they can easily understand what we are trying to tell them. We can easily show them that we are using around 87% of the storage, so we need to plan for another tree and things like that.

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree.

I have been using this solution for four years. 

It is very reliable. In these four years, we have not had any big failure or faced any issue.

Scalability is not an issue. If someone has 3PAR and within one or two years, they find that they need to add more storage, it would not be an issue. It will scale perfectly fine. 

We have already consumed around 87% of the storage. We may have to add another tree. We had a discussion with HPE, and it was quite good. The only reason for not going forward with it was that the amount of money that we will be spending in just upgrading the storage has a life of only two and a half years now. We are now evaluating whether we should invest this much money for two and a half years, or we should invest more and buy a completely new storage. We can then use this storage for other backups and all those less important steps.

From the application side, we have 50 users. There are also a lot of other users who are connecting to the applications and the storage because their data resides on the storage. For its maintenance, we don't require any engineers.

We haven't raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR, but they always call us if there is any soft alert or any firmware upgrade. The only thing that we have to do is to schedule a remote session during which they will perform the update activities.

Before HPE 3PAR, we were using Dell EMC. We have used three storages from EMC. The first one was very reliable. It was 300 series that we were using in 2003 or 2004. After that, we replaced it with the 400 series EMC storage, but it was not that reliable. Every three to four months, one of the disks would fail invariably, and we had to raise a ticket. After some time, they will review the ticket. They didn't ask any questions, and they would just replace it and take the faulty one. After that, we moved from the Dell EMC storage to HPE 3PAR, which has been very reliable. We haven't faced any issues in all these years.

The initial setup is really smooth. 

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree, but when we purchased it, it was okay with us. We had compared it with EMC and other solutions, and it was okay at that point in time. 

Our storage has a lifespan of seven to eight years. When you purchase it, you need to keep a headroom of around 40% to 50%. After three to four years, you generally plan for an upgrade. The price is not so bad today for two years or so, and within a year, I might find that I have to upgrade or increase the storage. This usually happens when there is a radical change or a new application has come that is consuming a lot of data, but generally, there is a plan for the amount of data that we generate and the storage upgrade. 

3PAR is very much reliable. In these four years, I've not raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR. 

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten. It has good support, good UI, and good reliability.

We use the 3PAR to host our SQL Database and Oracle Database. We also use it for VMware and vCenter.

We do not manage this product ourselves, so we are not familiar with all of the features that it has.

We had an issue a few months ago where we experienced a degradation in performance.

Every time you scale by adding more capacity, you need to pay for re-balancing services that cannot be performed in-house.

I would like to see an automatic re-balancing system or functionality for adaptive optimization.

We have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for almost five years.

This product is stable, aside from the performance problems we had.

We have added capacity to this solution between four and six times. Each time we did, we had to purchase services for re-balancing. It has to be done by a 3PAR engineer, rather than by our staff. It's a complex process. With some other products, you can just add a new disk to increase capacity, and you don't need to perform re-balancing.

There are three of us in the company who uses it.

For development, we have an IBM DS5000 storage system.

As it is for development, I cannot compare the two solutions. Our 3PAR is adapted for production.

The initial setup is complex because it needs a special engineer from HPE to take care of the setup and load balancing.

Our equipment is managed by a holding company. I request the load and capacity, and they configure it for me.

This is not an expensive product but every time you add capacity to it, you need to pay for re-balancing.

This is a product that I do not recommend because it is too difficult for people to manage, and it should also be a little bit cheaper.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the StoreServ as our main storage device. We have one unit in the main site and the other in the DR site, with replication between them. We have a file server running, it hosts our database, and it acts as our Exchange server.

The performance is very good.

This product has come to the end of its lifecycle. We could keep it for many years but we are following the recommendation from HPE and are looking to either the Nimble or the Primera.

This is an expensive product, so the price could be reduced.

We have been using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ in our organization for about five years.

This is a stable product.

This solution is scalable. We have 50 users in our company and our clients have approximately 500 people who are using it.

Technical support is perfect.

We did a comparison in the market, and HPE was the best service providers for regular configuration and for the remote configuration.

Previously, we were using HPE MSA.

The installation, which included migration from our old system, took approximately one week.

The HPE partner installed this solution for us.

We have an IT member in our organization to maintain it, but we have a support contract with a center that is a supporter of HPE. They provide us with support and services. This is not only for storage but for everything that is included.

The SSD is a little bit expensive.

We are now thinking about transitioning to the HPE Nimble or Primera, although not this year. This may happen in 2022. We plan to continue using this solution for performance, and availability. We are following the recommendation of HPE. They have recently started to mention the Primera and Nimble, which is why we are studying them.

We are not looking as much at Nimble because we are interested in the 100% availability that Primera has. The Primera is a little more expensive than the Nimble, so this is something that we have to think about.

This is a good solution and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have been using 3PAR for three months. 

It's stable. Although we experienced malfunctions where a virus was running and it failed. 

We have around 1,000 users. 

Their support is very good. They are available in the case of a malfunction.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I would rate 3PAR a nine out of ten. The stability is the most important.

We primarily use the solution as on-prem with local SAP HANA application servers. We have five of them.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any malfunctions with it at all.

The product lasts a very long time without having to be replaced. It's had a very long life.

As long as they can keep the solution stable, it will be good. Stability is very important to us.

We've been using the solution for three months at this point.

The solution is stable. We haven't had any issues in that respect in the time we've used it. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

We have more than 1,000 users on the product currently.

The technical support has been very helpful. They are responsive and knowledgeable and we've enjoyed working with them. They tend to know if there are any issues before we can even catch anything.

The initial setup was not complex or difficult. It was pretty straightforward and easy.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with HPE.

I'd recommend the product to others. We've only ever had a good experience with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using it for Oracle Databases. We're are also using it for VMware and NetBackup. It's one of the storage solutions for NetBackup.

The primary system comes with not too much software and is pretty simple and straightforward. You're not really using too much. The solution doesn't make things that are too complicated.

The replicating software is very good and the duplication part of it is very efficient.

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution offers good stability.

It has a good ability to scale.

The replicating software is pretty complicated. I probably would have put it on a sequence.

I've been using the solution for about a year now. It hasn't been too long.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

In general, the solution can scale. That shouldn't be a problem.

The technical support on offer is very nice. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We're very satisfied with their level of service so far.

We were using Synergy. The company wanted to go to an all-flash drive. At the time, HPE was one of the biggest manufacturers of all-flash drive. Therefore, it made sense to switch.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy to go back and look at it. It wasn't too complex at all.

The solution is moderately priced. It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive option.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with HPE.

Anyone interested in any solution should probably research the software that comes with their own system a little bit better. If you do that, there's a chance that you might not buy some of the things that we bought and that were defaulted on setup. That was not good. Knowing what works together well will help in the long run. Don't be afraid if a third-party asks you questions. They're probably just trying to get to the bottom of how your setup looks.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten overall.

We use this product for our server storage. Our systems are primarily used for ERP.

The most valuable feature is the proactive technical support. If there is a problem then the HPE facility will detect it and immediately contact me.

It achieves very high performance.

The price is a little bit high.

We have been using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past five months.

In terms of stability, our experience has only been good. We have not had any problems in five months.

I think that its scalability is good. You can have up to eight storage units and you can vary the storage rate. For example, we need quick database storage so we rate that high, compared to some other applications of lower importance.

Prior to this, we used the HPE3PAR StorServ 7200 series. With that version, sometimes the hard drive was broken. It's not about storage, but rather, it is about how the hard drive operates.

The deployment took about two weeks to complete.

One of the HPE partners deployed this solution for us.

We paid for five years of support when we purchased the product.

We evaluated a solution based on NetApp and ultimately, we decided to implement HPE.

There is a storage replication feature that I think is nice, although we don't use it right now.

For us, this product is a very good, full-flash storage. The suitability of this product depends on the organization. It comes down to a combination of the performance and the price.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I use this product in VMware Shared Storage. I work with VVoL, but I have a problem that is related to the update.

This solution has provided me with very low latency and high performance.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the native full mesh (multi-pathing).

I would like to have support for On-The-fly reallocation Data when using VVoL.For further explanation I must say When using vvol , you can have 3 tier in Storage .This tiers different in IO an Capacity feature.Usually tier 0 can support maximum IO and minimum Capacity and use SSD in this tier, Tier 1 between Tier 0 and 2 for Support IO and Capacity This layer is known as FC (Fast Class) nad Finally in tier 2 you Have only capacity and usually used NL disk for capacity .from that side in vmware Cluster equivalent this tier have a concept called Gold,Silver,Bronze that define in Storage Policy.You may want to first move a virtual machine to the silver group with disks; and then move it to another group, such as gold or bronze.This feature is based on the feature that the storage device provides and This feature is not yet available on the storage device, according to the documentation of HPE company will be presented in an update called T05 

The solution is very stable. HPE is always stable.

The scalability has always been great because of one idea from HPE: no need for us to pay from the beginning for the full machine. We can purchase based on the budget of our company. This makes it scalable. It's great.

Technical support for both 3PAR and Dell EMC in my country, Iran, is very difficult because we are under sanctions. We can get it through other countries.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Any action we want to do with a Dell EMC product needs a license. But with 3PAR's converged solution, at least there is no need to purchase more licenses to get all the features that we need. We can get basic and mid-range features without licenses. But for simple activities with Dell EMC, we need a license. Also, HPE is simpler than Dell EMC for the end-user.

I would recommend this product for sure.

At a minimum, I would rate this product at eight out of ten. I give it an eight because of the support, that I can't get support in my country. This is the worst part. Support cannot be sold until we are out of the sanctions. It's not anything to do with HPE, it's political issues.

We use 3PAR as our primary storage array.

We have been able to scale faster and get our applications out in much less time. We don't need to worry about the platform's ability to manage the workload, so we are pretty happy.

Our VMware platform sits on 3PAR. We also have databases, ERP applications, and websites running on it. 

All-Flash also positions our organization for growth. It certainly has its place. We don't use All-Flash because the performance of the existing arrays knows the job, but I certainly see where if we are doing data-intensive operations it could assist us.

We deployed InfoSight predictive analytics not too long ago. It improved our management of VMs. We are now able to see a lot more using InfoSight and we have a pretty good idea of exactly what's going on in our storage array.

The storage array absolutely increases performance. Compared with what we had before 3PAR, this has certainly done its job.

The solution has also helped us reduce time to deployment, I would say by at least 30%. It's easier for us to deploy. We get our servers up and running quickly and that way we support our environment faster so we can be more agile.

It has also significantly improved throughput, so we don't need to worry about performance for any of our platforms.

The ease of maintenance is what is most valuable for us. We don't need to worry about upgrading the platform. HPE takes care of it for us.

Deduplication functionality is pretty good. We have had it for quite a few years. We are pretty impressed with their capabilities and we've never really had a problem.

As it is, it does its job very well, so it's very difficult for me to say what we should be looking for in the next platform. I think cloud integration would probably be the biggest part because that's where everyone is going and the seamless integration between on-premise and cloud is an important part of any IT strategy today.

It's very stable.

Also, the solution's availability is remarkable. We have never had a breakdown over a storage array.

It's very scalable as well. We never had a problem where that is concerned.

They are pretty good at what they do. Those guys fix whatever the problem is. We just kind of plug it in and leave. We don't look back at it again.

We previously used HPE. We had to upgrade because our previous platform was end of life.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The guys knew what they're doing and I have a technical team to assist as well.

HPE did the deployment for us. Their onboarding process is pretty good.

We have absolutely seen a return on our investment. I don't have numbers offhand, but the organization has certainly grown significantly as a result of the kind of platform that we have deployed.

All of the tier one vendors were on there: Dell EMC, etc. From a perspective of price point, performance, and integrity, we felt that HPE gave us the best value.

It's not necessarily about the price. The price is certainly an important factor, but what the solution does and how it supports you is even more important than price.

Our biggest lesson was that we need to do our homework and make sure that we're going with a vendor that can support us in the long term.

I would probably rate this as eight and a half out of ten. It does what it's supposed to and does that very well, even if there are areas to improve on. More integration with cloud would be great. But what it does, it does very well.

Our primary use for this solution is data storage.

The increased throughput has allowed us to scale and maintain performance, or even have better performance.

In terms of the mission-critical applications that we run on this solution, our application is benefit adjudication.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its reliability.

The deduplication functionality is good, and the solution is fully redundant.

The InfoSight feature helps us with troubleshooting problems in our environment.

This solution is becoming dated.

This solution is very stable.

This is a scalable solution.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

This product is an improvement over what we had before. Our old solution, which was an HP Blade Server, was four years old. We wanted to switch to newer technology.

I was not part of the initial setup.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was good.

We have not seen ROI with this solution.

This licensing fees for this solution are merged with all of our HP annual costs, which in total are a couple hundred thousand dollars.

HP is the only company that we've ever dealt with, so we did not evaluate options by other vendors.

Using this solution has increased our system performance. We will continue to use HP products in the future, and this is a solution that is worth investing in.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution internally for our test environments.

This solution handles everything to do with our business. If it’s down then we can’t deliver to our customers. We can do more, faster, whether it's spinning up more virtual machines or handling large amounts of data.

The All-Flash has positioned us for growth because we can do more. Going past traditional hard drives has really been fantastic for us. Our performance has increased by anywhere from fifty to one hundred percent. Moreover, our deployment time has been reduced by about fifty percent.

For us, the increase in throughput translates to an increase in productivity.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its security.

The deduplication functionality is fantastic.

We had a minor error when we were configuring this system, which initially detracted from its overall stability.

We had some minor issues at first, although it was mostly due to configuration. Since those were ironed out it's been very smooth.

The scalability of this solution is excellent.

Technical support for this solution has been great.

Prior to implementing this solution we were using one by Dell. We were not meeting our commitments to customers because it was not meeting our performance requirements.

We had a lot of legacy hardware in our environment, and the step into the future by implementing this solution has been fantastic.

The initial setup was a little complex. It was our first time setting it up but now as we're doing another iteration it is much smoother.

We used a consultant to assist with our deployment and it was a good experience.

We get about twenty percent more productivity out of our people because we use this solution.

We do not have any licensing fees.

We only considered solutions by HPE because we have a partnership between our companies and they are our number one pick.

This product has met our expectations. Once we got past the minor configuration issues, it's been smooth sailing, so I'm very happy with it. It is important to understand the terminology upfront because it helps prepare to do the actual implementation.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

This solution provides flash storage for our servers. Our environment contains Linux operating systems, VMware, and some web servers.

The availability of the server has given us increased stability in our environment.

The mission-critical apps and processes that we use are our Oracle database, VMware, and some web services.

The All-flash positions us for growth because of its better performance, which means that our applications are faster.

This solution has improved throughput. It has helped when we deploy non-production servers.

This solution has great availability that works for us.

This solution should be easier to use.

The stability of this solution is good.

We have not yet tried to scale this solution.

I think that technical support is good. We have only had one report.

We implemented this solution when it was time to renew the servers. Prior to this, we used HP EVA, but it had reached end-of-life.

Although I don't recall the details of the initial setup, I think that it was a little complex. The people that normally work with storage had to ask for help.

We used a consultant to assist with our deployment.

The vendors that we evaluated were HPE and IBM.

The All-flash has better performance, which means that our applications are faster. Our performance has increased by twenty to thirty percent.

The biggest lesson that I learned from this solution is to try something before you reject it.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to test all of the functions that the vendor tells you about. It is important to see how it works in order to see whether it suits your business.

This is a good solution, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

As a partner, we use it to run databases and for virtualization. Another use case is the cloud.

All-flash provides optimization through deduplication and compression and provides high performance for both databases and virtualization. It has increased IOPS by 200 percent. In addition, it has reduced deployment time by ten percent.

One of our customers, using SAP, had 16 terabytes of data. When we implemented this solution for them, their storage was reduced to two terabytes.

• High-Availability 
• Security
• High performance

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

It's stable and uses Call-Home. Support is 24/7.

The 3PAR solution has a problem with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. It's predictive. If my customer has a problem, they inform the customer of the problem and send any necessary parts. They also email the customer to let them know when they need updates.

The initial setup is easy.

We see ROI after six to eight months, by using all the capacities of all-flash, including deduplication and compression.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good.

In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

We use it for mission-critical apps and database. It runs our core banking applications.

It helps our core applications run very fast. It has increased overall performance by about 60 percent. There is one process which has gone from taking seven hours to taking one hour. It's a key for storage in our organization.

They provide very good support for our mission-critical processes. It's also very solid and reliable in our environment.

We would like to see full virtual. We would also like to see improvements to the ease of administration of 3PAR.

The hardware stability is very good.

It's very scalable. For our organization, it's very scalable and at low cost.

Overall, technical support depends, but mission-critical support is a nine out of ten.

We needed the capacity and faster processing.

The initial setup was very easy. It went very quickly.

We used an integrator, HPE Enterprise Support. Our experience with them was very good.

HPE is the preferred solution for our company.

I would recommend 3PAR, especially in the financial industry where data is mission-critical. It's very good.

It is our main storage solution for our entire VMware environment.

Everything run on the solution is core: MEDITECH, all the EMRs, and back-ends support services.

We use a combination of flash and spinning disk. For some of our less critical functions, since we run everything on the 3PAR, there is no reason to spend the extra money on flash to run the stuff that is not super mission-critical.

It allows us to grow. We added almost 110TB last year alone. Not a lot of product let you throw that in, resulting in the performance that we have been seeing.

It has definitely reduced our time to deployment. We can call up, and say, "I need 110TB," and they configure it so my IOPS stay consistent across 3PAR, Then, I don't actually have to worry about the IOPS. HPE takes care of that for me. I need the space, and they take care of the rest. They install it, and I just provision it, which is nice.

If you can handle the IOPS, throughput is a natural byproduct. Usually, IOPS is where you are capped. HPE has done a great job in making sure that our IOP-intensive EMRs stay up and running. We have really good performance on them.

We run approximately half a billion IOPS every six months. This 3PAR seems to handle it just fine.

Expandability and performance are its most valuable features.

We do not use Memory-Driven Flash in the old 3PAR. Perhaps we will use it in the new 3PAR. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading.

We aren't using HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity yet. We are looking into it. The old 3PAR didn't support it, but the new 3PAR does.

It is extremely stable. I'm able to do everything that I need to do in the middle of the day without interruption. It has been an absolute fantastic piece of hardware.

The availability is excellent. I have not had any problems with 3PAR.

It runs. I don't have a problem with it. If it needs an update, I can do it in the middle of the day with nobody being the wiser. It is phenomenal in that respect. As a hospital, I get two hours every quarter to reboot things, so it is imperative that nothing goes down.

The scalability is phenomenal.

The technical support is excellent. They do everything.

My old 3PAR is end of life, so it is time to switch.

I haven't done the initial setup yet, and I haven't gone through the initial setup on the new one.

We used HPE technical services for the deployment. They sent another company, Unisys, who was great. They did it all. I didn't have to lift a finger, which makes me happy

I would like it to be cheaper.

We are an HPE shop. Everything that we have is HPE, so we just stuck with them. We have never been upset with HPE. They have been phenomenal, in my opinion.

Check out HPE. They are well worth it.

It pretty much checks all the boxes that I have concerns about moving forward. This version will do dedupe better. We will start to use some of the data classifications where it tiers the storage for us. Of all the bubbles that I care about, it checks them all.

We don't use dedupe on our old 3PAR. We're hoping to use it on the new one.

We don't use InfoSight at the moment. It's something we're looking into, though.

I'm very happy with it. It has performed as I expected.

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 use this solution for mixed, unpredicted workloads.

This solution has allowed for massive performance acceleration of all workloads and massively increased availability (with peer persistence/transparent failover feature).

The most valuable features are:

• Peer Persistence, where storage failover is transparent to servers and there is no complex cluster-software integration.
  
• Thin Provisioning translates to reduced efforts in management on the server-side, where calculated growth of application data and LUNs can be provisioned on the first install.

The Unified Multiprotocol Access to the storage array needs to be improved.

We use it for our file shares, our virtual hard drives, and for all of our Hyper-V clusters. It stores everything, like backups. 

We have virtualized almost all of our servers, except the ones that require high I/O, like maybe our SQL Servers. Everything else in the entire organization runs off of our 3PARs.

We actually aren't all-flash, but we do have flash drives for our hottest data which is used most often. This definitely makes everything much more efficient.

The 3PAR arrays replicate offsite. Everything is safe and optimized. There's automatic promoting and demoting of blocks, moving hot ones to the flash storage and the less used ones onto Nearline storage. This optimizes everything and uses the resources to their best ability.

It has increased performance since we added the flash drives. Originally, we had 2-Tier storage (the Nearline storage and SAS storage), but adding the flash storage really improved performance by maybe 30 percent.

We can cut a VM quite quickly, so we can probably stand up a workload in half an hour. So, the time to deployment is quite good.

We have been able to back up our data more frequently now that we have everything on flash. It responds a lot faster, so the IOPs are a lot faster.

The failover/failback: Just to keep our mission-critical stuff running all the time.

The solution’s deduplication functionality has helped us save a lot of space. People save their files over and over again or email them around, then everybody has a copy of the same thing. Therefore, the deduplication is very helpful.

if it were easier for us to manage the product ourselves without having to get HPE to connect, because it sometimes it does take a bit to get the scheduling worked out with the HPE support. If it were simpler, then it might be easier for us to handle it ourselves.

The stability is very good. We have HPE connecting in remotely to help us with any of the major firmware updates. This keeps everything running great.

It has not failed us yet, so it is very highly available and error free, so far.

We could add more drive cages, so I'm sure it's quite scalable. We haven't hit our limits yet, so we haven't had to do that. However, it's supposed to be quite scalable.

Technical support is very good. We bought the support package where they will connect remotely to help us with upgrades and firmware changes. So, it's very solid.

Previously, we had all sorts of different storage arrays, e.g., the MSAs, which are also from HPE. We also had just servers with hard drives in them scattered around everywhere. Now, we have centralized everything onto the 3PAR arrays. 

It was a little complicated to set up originally, as it takes quite a bit of rack space and we are a small organization. Once it was set up, it was well worth the effort.

We bought through a reseller called PC Corp in Alberta, Canada. PC Corp was very good.

I would definitely recommend it. It is a good fit for our organization, and if it works for you, that would be great too.

File Persona is now included, so we might explore doing file shares straight off of the 3PAR array.

We do not use HPE GreenLake.

Biggest lesson learnt: The initial pain is worth it.

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.

The primary use case would be disaster recovery and uptime. 

The entire company and our fire pump division, for the most part, are run on this solution.

Getting rid of spinning media is our primary objective.

We had a major down five years ago where we actually lost our entire data center, which caused the company to go down for over 12 days. In that time, we bought and implemented a full 3PAR product to get us up and running. We were able to buy a smaller set of storage and invest in the actual technology to get our company back up and running. Then, we were able to buy a second 3PAR to allow us to set up a secondary data center and immediately replicate over to that and succeed in designing a DR strategy without having to relearn everything.

We don't use InfoSight for management. We use it to help us determine if we have our workloads in the wrong place or set up incorrectly.

My users are happier because the response time is there. We haven't really analyzed the true IOPs, or anything. We are just trying to give them a solid user experience.

The solution has improved our throughput. It has allowed our SQL databases and report servers to run at a much higher capacity. Reports which used to take the better part of a day can now run in under an hour.

• Uptime
• Technical support
• Speed

The solution’s deduplication functionality does a really nice job for us in that we are able to leverage the money in a more productive way.

We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly.

The upgrade in the firmware and software need improvement.

The user interface is still a little kludgy.

It is very stable. We have had no downtime since putting it in.

We have not found the maximum scalability yet. For what our initial purchase was, we have been able to grow over the past five years. It has not limited us in anyway with our initial investment.

When I can call and talk to somebody who does not repeat back the question I am asking and we can get to working on it, whether it takes an hour, a day, or a week, I have support for the solution. That is the most important thing for me.

We start of with the EVAs, and as the EVAs aged out, we were moving up. However, it was the EVA that failed on us and 3PAR was just the next, better solution for our scale of need.

The initial setup was complex only that we had never seen the solution before. There were some decisions that we didn’t understand the implications of in the beginning that we were able to redesign as the years of owning it allowed us to better understand what were being offered and how we could better utilize it.

We used Logicalis for the deployment. Our experience with them is wonderful. We appreciate them being our partners and implementing all of our solutions.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by about 60 to 70 percent, because I am able to spin up new systems within four to six hours, where it used to take me two to three days.

Think seriously about the very long-term: the three, four, and five-year costs of the solution. Will it still be there doing what your company needs? Do not just look at the initial capital outlay of year one.

We didn’t really look at anybody other than HPE because we wanted a one stop solution for a single technical support problem, and we knew from Locigalis and from our years with HPE that they would give us an enterprise class solution the first time out.

We like it so much that we are in the process of evaluating our next three to five year roadmap. We are planning to reinvest in the next generation of the systems.

Everything can always get better, but I’ve been very happy with it. I have not been called in during the middle of the night because of it. It is the right solution for the right people.

Biggest lesson learnt: You get what you pay for.

We use 3PAR as our centralized storage for database use, mostly. It's also data stores for our VMs. We have a few Oracle Databases running on 3PAR and we have our production VMs running on 3PAR, as well.

Before using centralized storage, we needed to make sure that we have enough physical disks installed in a server. Now, we know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers. Again, in our case, it's mostly the databases.

All-flash positions our organization for growth in a way, mostly for performance, because again, we're using all-flash for the performance that it provides, and we have critical databases running on it. It's providing day-to-day functionality, the way I see it.

• The ease of use, from one perspective
• The centralized storage
• The ease of copying, backing up, and moving data from one server to the other

I would like to see more visibility regarding issues - active alerting. I know that InfoSight is currently trying to do what Nimble did for its storage. If it were proactively alerting regarding maintenance or something that's going to go bust, it could be very useful for us.

All in all, it's a stable solution. From an availability perspective, we have it in both data centers. 

We found one huge bug when we implemented the solution, a critical bug that eventually crashed and shut down the storage, which is something that we cannot live with. But since then, a patch was provided for this issue, and over the last a year-and-a-half we haven't had any stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is problematic. We would like to scale with our current infrastructure but we can't. We need to actually buy additional components, not just add disks. We actually need to buy additional controllers and, eventually, another storage unit. So it's not good enough.

The technical support is not good. Usually, when we have a problem, it takes ages until we get a response. We need to escalate several times, using HPE and the partner in Israel to make sure that we get the appropriate response. Usually, what we know or what we find out right away, is the same response that we get from support a week or two later - that something is happening. And only a month after that do we get a good solution that we can do something with.

From a technical perspective, we understood the benefits of having centralized storage. From that point on we looked for what was supposed to be the right solution for us. Eventually, we zeroed in on the 3PAR solution and not the competition.

The initial setup was complex. It's not a straightforward integration. There are a lot of parameters that you need to configure, and each parameter affects a lot of other things. Even though we used a partner for the implementation, after the installation in the data center we needed to rebuild everything and reconfigure everything several times. At the beginning, it wasn't good. Now we are stable so, except for the performance issue, everything is working as we expect it to work.

We used an integrator. The guys are great, responsible. They did what they were supposed to do. They worked with HPE regarding the sizing of the storage solution, and it seems like someone there didn't do his job correctly. I don't know if it was HPE or the partner. But eventually, we had a problem.

It's a much more expensive solution than just buying local disks. On the other hand, it provides us a centralized point of management for all our storage. I can't tell you the exact ROI, but the simplicity and the centralization of the storage probably provide us with some kind of a return.

We looked at NetApp. We also evaluated hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix, but it was not relevant at the time. And we were approached by HPE regarding SimpliVity but it was not relevant as well, at the time.

We went with 3PAR because, at the time, we were convinced that this would provide us the solution that we need, from several KPIs that we were looking at. We were promised performance that we didn't get in the end.

Check the performance and every technical aspect that you can, as much as you can. Don't trust anyone else telling you otherwise. Test everything yourself.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that having centralized storage is the right way to go and that sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected.

What every IT guy will tell you is that we disable the dedupe, mostly because of the hit on the performance. Regarding InfoSight predictive analytics, we tried to use it. It was not that predictive because it doesn't give as much information as we were told. We had actually turned it on and we had a few critical issues but we got no alerts from InfoSight regarding them.

It increased performance for a while, but then, as we grew, and we did not grow significantly, performance dropped down. For a few of our critical, online systems, we went back to using the physical disks and not the centralized storage.

It was supposed to improve throughput but it was not enough, not as much as we were told before we bought the product.

We have talked about using the flex-capacity offering, HPE GreenLake, but we haven't used it yet.

From our experience, I would rate low, but I don't want to rate it low because from a technical perspective, it's a stable solution, it works. I would give the product a seven out of ten, even though our experience has not been that good. A seven is fair at this point.

The primary use case is production data. The mission-critical app that we run on this solution is SQL.

1. Performance that it gives me.
2. The speed of how we process data on the manufacturing floor.

• Ease of use
• The speed of the performance of the unit.

The solution should have better integration with legacy systems.

We would like memory-driven performance on the storage.

So far, the stability has been good. We have not had any outages.

In theory, the scalability is supposed to be fast, but we don't know until we try.

It does position our organization for growth by making things faster and easier.

The technical support is very good.

We were previously using NetApp.

We needed a new solution because:

1. Our old unit was very old.
2. We had requirements from our production.

The initial setup was complex, due to calculating the amount of performance that we needed for the floor.

We used Compucare for the deployment, which was rocky at the start. Now, it's very stable.

We have not seen ROI yet.

The solutions has increased our performance. We went from 24,000 IOPS to around 70,000 IOPS.

The solution has improved our throughput. We have less downtime.

We didn't have a shortlist. We worked directly with HPE.

The reasons for switching to HPE were:

1. The performance. 
2. The technology that HPE uses had more integration with our servers.

Never go with your first impression regarding 3PAR. They say that hybrid is the best thing anytime, but if you read the small print, it depends on how you use it, etc. So, we went with an all-flash for that reason. So, don't go with your first feeling. Investigate and try it out. Try to get a demo to make sure it works.

I like that the solution's availability gives me: 

• Ease of use
• Performance
• Good support from HPE.

The primary use case is DR. We use it in the automation industry.

I has helped our organization with DR and replication of our VM environment and Oracle databases.

The solution has improved our throughput, which has improved our performance.

It has improved our company's performance.

It has an easy implementation and the support is awesome.

We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution.

The integration has room for improvement.

The stability is awesome.

The scalability is awesome.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. We have more places for Oracle applications, VMware, and servers.

We have had to contact technical support. We have had no problems with them. The support is great.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has increased our performance by about 40 percent.

This solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by 50 percent.

The performance is great. 

It is for the storage that we use. Our entire banking system is on it, which is mission-critical.

It has provided us our solution for VDIs, so it has been working very well.

Any infrastructure is an enabler that provides services for the applications that you run.

The ability to have a solid state and deduplication on that solid state.

The deduplication functionality is great. We have seen a lot of benefits in the deduplication ratio. So, it has proven that it is a good cost savings.

It is easy to manage and performs very well.

There is always the case where there are the little things that bother you, but you live with them.

There are features that we would like to deep dive into more, but that is where the consultants would come in and help.

We are using Synergy, so it is the next evolution of blades, which has been great. We have had no complaints, except for the problem with the Spectre vulnerability.

The scalability is great, because if we need to, we can just turn on a blade and start paying for it. Also, if we want, we can shut it down, and the next month, we don't pay.

The technical support is good. We haven't had any major issues where we have had to call them, as of late, so it has been fairly good. They help us when we do our upgrades, but that has been going well.

At the time, we needed a better solution than our previous solution (Dell EMC) for storage, so we looked to HPE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We been setting up 3PARs for 10 years now. It is like second nature for us.

The straightforward setup also applies to experiences with Synergy and Flex Capacity.

We mostly deployed it ourselves. We also had help from HPE, because we purchased directly from them. Our experience with HPE was great. This is the case when they give you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services.

We have seen ROI.

We did not look at other vendors beside HPE. We were one of the first adopters of 3PAR. We had one of the old T800s. We were early in the adoption of HP 3PAR.

Management made a decision to go with 3PAR, because HPE came and made it appealing.

It is a great solution. There are others out there, but we have always been using 3PAR. We are pretty happy with it.

We are using the GreenLake Flex Capacity offering. At first, the service was great, because we had a configuration that was meeting our needs. However, when the issue came with Spectre, and then the L1TF vulnerability came out, those really affected us, so hopefully we will find a solution that meets our needs going forward. That is what we are looking at now.

We just started getting into InfoSight predictive analytics. It is something that I want to explore more, and something that I want to get going.

I can say that, "All-flash is the way that the future will be."

It is storage for our SAP environment. SAP is the mission-critical application that we run on the solution.

The snapshotting capability allows us to do a database replication very quickly. As a result, we have some applications which need a fresh copy of the production database everyday, and we are able to give that to them by eight o'clock in the morning.

Its snapshot capability is the most valuable feature, because replicate our databases from production to nonproduction for development. This allows us to do it very quickly.

The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent.

It has latency issues.

It seems pretty stable. Once we got over the birthing pains, it has been pretty reliable.

As long as the array is not full, it is available. We filled it up.

It is very scalable. We can grow it up to the size that it will contain. Then, we have to move to another array, a bigger one, if we have to. However, my understanding is that is a pretty seamless process.

We moved to 3PAR from a different array, which was a smaller array with fewer controller cards in it. So, 3PAR did not increase our performance, and it has increased our latency by at least double.

We went with 3PAR because we have HP-UX systems. Since we already knew HP-UX, they offered us a significantly cheaper solution than the one that we had for storage.

The first array that they sent us was in some type of a factory mode. We didn't find that out until we loaded a bunch of data onto it, then we had to back it all off. We had to replace the array, which was sort of painful.

We are actually a federal customer, so we get the HPE Federal direct team helping us. Our experience was good, except for that one problem with the first array.

We evaluated Dell EMC, HPE, and some other competitors. We went with HPE because of the price point.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using 3PAR is the snapshot capability.

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 provide DoD services for military healthcare. The storage is used for healthcare delivery.

It allows us to cohost as needed. We are able to put more systems on one data storage system and it is still able to deliver the availability and speed that we need it to deliver.

All-flash also positions us for growth. We can look to simplify things while still maintaining the reliability and speed that we need to deliver quality healthcare.

In addition, it has increased our performance and it has improved our throughput. The latter improvement means that we're able to ensure that the users can get to their data as quickly as they need it, and that it responds to any queries that they have. It's able to meet their daily needs.

• The reliability - the solution's availability is really good
• The amount of storage that you can have on a system
• The speed

We've started to see an issue with the older models that we have. We've had issues where facilities would have unscheduled power outages or scheduled power outages and the 3PARs weren't able to come up successfully. We actually had an incident recently where it wiped data that we didn't anticipate would be wiped.

We will be having sidebar conversations with them later today, here at HPE Discover 2019, to talk about some of the possibilities that we're looking at.

Going forward, we're looking for bigger capacity and drives, which I know they're looking at. We want them to ensure the speed and reliability because keeping those systems up and running, 24/7, is important to us.

The stability and scalability of the solution are great. They're among the reasons that we selected this product.

Technical support has always been great. We have to be available 24/7, 365, and for what we've needed, they've always provided really great support.

We've had a long-standing working relationship with HPE. They're a trusted solution, so we've continued working with them.

We deployed it ourselves, although we had HPE come in and give us some guidance and then they were available by phone. We worked together but it was pretty easy to do. The HPE consultants have been great. Whenever we've needed assistance, they've been available and able to provide us with the assistance that we need.

The fact that it's able to provide the speed and the reliability that we need means fewer outages for the hospital. That means less back-filling the data so it's worth the money that they're spending.

We have looked at other vendors but a lot of them couldn't handle the capacity or the speed or the reliability that we needed.

It's a great product. Their support is great. We even have the ability to have loaner products provided to us as an option. We can have the products come inside and test and use them before we make our final decision. That helps with the analysis and recommendation process, so it's been a great partnership with HPE.

We haven't really had any significant issues. So other than that it's able to provide what we need and that the customer service is great, we haven't learned any big lessons from using it.

We don't use too much deduplication, but from what we've seen so far, it seems to execute what we need it to execute.

Once we get this issue that we've had recently resolved then I would say it's a ten out of ten. We haven't had any real issues with it.

We use it for the production and backup environments. We use it for a service that we deliver directly in our data center for our customers. It's a live environment, directly for the customers.

The stability is what we consider to be the best feature it provides. The stability of this solution is what conquers us, every day.

The deduplication is pretty good too. It does the work.

Upgrades could be improved. We would like to see more upgrades.

We have already had situations where we had to optimize and put more space on the storage. It has been very simple to get done. We are happy with what we have in place.

Technical support is pretty good. We always have somebody available to support us. We do have a maintenance contract with third-party vendors for HPE but we've been attended to very well in this field.

It was the first solution that we defined, at the beginning of the data center, so it has always been there. Since I joined the team after the data center was already implemented, I don't have a previous scenario to compare it to, what it has improved or not.

The setup was straightforward, because of the partnership that we maintain with Logicalis. They supported us during the whole deployment.

We used a company named Logicalis. They are our partners for everything that we have. Any doubt that we have or any challenges that we face, they are our port of call. We have had a good experience with them.

We are happy with what we have in place. You should consider getting this solution if you are in the process of acquiring or switching. I would suggest giving this a good look.

The biggest lesson we have learned from using the solution is the stability. This is what I always tell people. The stability is what surprises us. It's a stable solution.

In terms of growth, we are planning on going from 35 terabytes to around 50 terabytes in the six months. We will probably keep using 3PAR but we may change to something better. We are here at HPE Discover 2019 looking for other solutions. If we cannot find something better we will continue using the same technology, the 3PAR.

I would rate 3PAR at eight out of ten because we love the stability but sometimes we still lack upgrades for the solution.

We use three power arrays. The first array is for video storage and video surveillance. The second array is for production of our virtual machines. Pretty much everything is run on one of these three systems.

It provides us some disaster recovery capabilities. The all-flash storage gives us the performance that we need.

The remote copy group failover is very useful and has helped us.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. The most useful part of it is being able to see the growth curve.

• The uptime
• Its reliability, that day in day out, it will continue to be running.

The solution's availability is very good.

I would like to have single click upgrades because the process is cumbersome right now. The upgrade process is very tedious. It takes a lot of time and effort, in addition to coordination with HPE. We are looking for something which is more user-friendly and easy to deploy. Fixing the upgrade process is very critical.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The scalability is alright. When we try to scale it, we do upgrades.

The all-flash positions our organization for growth. If somebody comes to us who needs an application with performance, we have that already formulated.

The technical support is good. We work with a local vendor.

Our previous solution was between five to six years old, so we were looking for something newer, like all-flash.

The initial setup was complex, but we had the partner there to help.

We used a partner for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

The solution has increased our performance.

The solution helped our organization reduce our time to deployment.

I would recommend looking at Nimble instead. It is a similar option and something that we are looking at now, though 3PAR has been a pretty solid product.

The solution’s deduplication functionality is alright.

3PAR is our primary storage for everything aside from VDI, which is where we are using our Nimble.

We use everything from point of sale to database. Those are the two big mission-critical applications. There is also virtualization for servers.

It makes for less administrative overhead.

The solution has improved our throughput by helping us keep up with the demand and acquisitions that we have been going through.

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

The quick, easy deployment, along with its administration, are its most valuable features.

I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team.

It has been a lot more stable over the past year that I have using it. Early on, we did have some issues, but working with HPE, we were quickly able to fix all that. Since then, it has been very stable.

It does help with the growth, mainly in some of the point of sale systems that we need.

I would rate the technical support about a seven or eight (out of ten). They have been pretty good. The response time has been pretty good for any issues that we have had. From a hardware standpoint, we haven't had that much. It has been more from a software side, and we have had some pretty good responses from HPE.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is quick and very intuitive. You can turn it on and figure out pretty much what you need to do right away. You don't have to have too much hand-holding for it. So, it's fairly easy to use.

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

It has reduced time to deployment by about 30 percent, mainly from the virtualization server standpoint.

I have used a number of different storage solutions, and the HPE products are probably the best from an ease of use and administrative standpoint. 

From my experience in the past with other storage solutions, it is very easy to use with pretty good support. So far, from what I have seen, I do like it.

It is a real good solution. It is probably one of the better storage solutions for large enterprises and main back-end storage that I have used in the past.

We do the InfoSight predictive analytics. We have just gotten into it with the 3PAR storage, as we have mainly used it on the Nimble side.

We actually don't use the deduplication right now. That is something that we have looked into, but haven't implemented yet.

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.

It is our primary storage for all of our data. Everything from personnel systems to file shares, print services, and databases are mission-critical applications that we run on 3PAR.

It has allowed us to set up a fully functioning disaster recovery site with replication, which we have been able to configure between our 3PAR systems.

The solution has helped improved our throughput. It has helped our organization with our DR site and connections to our blade systems.

The replication that you can set up between remote 3PARs is its most valuable feature.

I would rate it a ten (out of ten) for its ease of use. We haven't had any issues when we have had to build anything out on it. There have been no major issues, as far as outages or hardware issues.

The GUI was a little hard to figure out how to use.

The stability has been great and solid, so far. We haven't had any hiccups or any major outages.

The scalability is very good. We are planning on adding another rack of hard drives.

The technical support was very knowledgeable when we first set it up. Outside of that, I haven't really had any experience with them.

We had an old HPE SAN. We compared one 3PAR to the SAN. Then, we wanted to set up replication between our DR sites, so we purchased another 3PAR.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment.

Our organization issued us an HPE 3PAR. There really wasn't any market research with other vendors.

It is a solid product. It works really well for our situation and what we need at a disaster recovery site. It is fairly simple to set up.

We do not use InfoSight.

We have two use cases: 

1. We use it with our internal applications, so for internal use. 
2. We are provider of national research computing infrastructure. Therefore, we are using it out there with all our systems.

There are not many mission critical applications or processes that we run on 3PAR. The mission critical applications are usually the ones for internal university purposes, like ERP systems. Our research systems are not a mission critical since our researchers can run their computing again in a week. 

If it runs, and you don't know about it, that is the best thing that you can have in IT infrastructure. This is what 3PAR does for us.

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything. I see this as a piece of hardware, which I don't want see and don't want to care about. I want some AI over it, not because I want to fire all my team, but what I want my team working on is definitely not to take care of our hardware.

It has basically never failed. It is a very stable thing in our environment. We don't have such experience with the other things that we have.

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

We are just a customer, who bought a solution and are running it. We don't really do much about it. From what I know, the scalability should be okay. Generally, it was one of the reasons why we purchased 3PAR, because we believed we will grow, etc. However, it is difficult in the public sector if you can't do an RFP for a specific product. So, you need to live with whatever you buy or whatever is the best combination on the market. 

We haven't really purchase any more 3PARs after our initial buy, and that was a few years ago.

I have never used the technical support, but my team is okay with it. At the time when we implemented 3PAR into our environment, we really needed some help. We had some issues, which were mostly on our side, but my team was very satisfied with the support.

We previously used a number of small servers with disks attached to it, distributed all over to data centers. This was absolutely not effective and terrible.

We had quite obsolete infrastructure. We were thinking about whether we should just upgrade it a little bit or if we should take a different path. At that time, a few years ago, 3PAR for us was a change to a very different type of storage. Today, I would say that it is standard. However, at that time, it was a change. We wanted to improve and start doing things differently. In general, at the time, 3PAR was from today's perspective, like implementing AI over our whole infrastructure. It was a giant leap forward.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't need any complex preparation or changing a lot of things in our environment to integrated it. It was quite straightforward. Bringing books and bringing it into the lab in a few days, then everything was migrated. It was very easy.

We had a reseller helping us implement it, then we took over. The experience with our Czech reseller was great. 

We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying.

3PAR has increased your performance. At the time that we purchased 3PAR, it was much more powerful than any of our previous storage.

3PAR has helped our company reduce the time to deployment by 60 percent. It is easier than before.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We did evaluate other vendors originally. We looked at Dell EMC and all the competitors in the market. We chose HPE because they had the best technology and performance.

We have had a very good experience with 3PAR, so we will probably not be looking at different vendors or solutions.

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

We do use the Memory-Drive Flash. We don't have any problems with latency anymore that we had eons ago. However, I can't really tell you from a technical perspective if it was from implementing 3PAR or something else.

We do not use InfoSight predictive analytics yet, but I would like to.

The biggest lesson learned is 3PAR is good, and I want it for future. Let us find a way how to do it. It was a giant leap in technology at the time that we purchased it, and I would like to do the same next time, which will be very close. While I wouldn't say not to buy a 3PAR again, we will need a new technology that will do the giant leap forward again. We need a big step once every few years instead of doing granular steps every year.

We use this solution for low latency, high-performance workloads.

This solution has given us improved application uptime and performance.

The most valuable features are Dedupe, Compression, and the simplicity of SSMC (StoreServ Management Console).

We would like to see dedupe and compression allowed on all drive types.

Our primary cases for HPE 3PAR Flash Storage 7000 are: 

• Transport sector
• Four nodes, 1000 virtual machines
• Entire rack solution
• Partially flash
• 350TB (dense IO).

The bad news: In its initial firmware, both four-node clusters were locked down. The downtime was 17hrs, and once patched, it worked like a charm — no outage for two years. Whereas, IBM SVC had three outages (node crashes) with impact in the 2 yrs before

• Four-node performance
• No split IO groups as on IBM SVC clusters.
• Easy tiering (with a small % of cache) did a good job in a large scale environment of 1000 VMs on 350TB external Monitoring, giving a detailed dashboard. A nicely virtual appliance for remote callout support to HPE services.

• Made on three times a price comparison, and only on one occurrence, the largest enterprise infrastructure of all three was HPE able to compete with its competitors.
• It's way too expensive for the SMB market.
• HPE care packs like datacenter/enterprise provide highly automated reports and reviews.
• I liked the periodic SAN performance reviews which are highly detailed reports in about 100 pages and provide recommendations and a final score. However, the price is outrageous!

It's used for allocating disk to many servers.

It has high availability, and it's flexible to tuning for system admin.

• AO
• CLI
• Performance report.

Integrate to monitor with CentOS.

For use with a major database for telecom customers who need to collect all of their customers' information.

Provides amazing performance all day in multiple workloads. We applied different usage models which showed great performance.

Scalability, because our customer is fast growing and our solution should be able to start very small and grow very quickly.

Security is a mandatory feature because our customer needs to protect delicate information.

We run a High Performance Computing grid for Nuance and run GPFS on top of 3PAR. We are using SAS-based 3PAR for data and the 8450s, all SSD, for the metadata.

It has been performing great. We have had SSD based 3PARs since 2013 and we have only lost about four drives so far.

We are an R&D group, so it does not change the function. However, it improves the performance for our grids. 

It allows us to buy less capacity for performance. We would buy spindles just for the IOPs, so we were wasting space for the performance. Now, we don't have to.

The performance is the most valuable. We had the spindle problem that most places have. With the chunklet technology, it allowed us to spread our load across all our drives, unlike traditional raid groups that can leave some disks idle while other take the load.

It is more specific to High Performance Computing, but I would like to see a faster Ethernet connection. Right now, it is 10G. If they could do multiple hundred gigs to speed up the transfer from the array to the servers, that would be good. We are trying to get away from Fibre Channel.

When we went to 3PAR, it has the Call-Home function. Now, I do not have to do a whole lot for monitoring and problems. The sales engineer (SE) will show up with a drive, and say "You've got a drive down." Therefore, we don't even monitor it.

This makes our job so much easier.

We typically max them out. When we buy an array, we buy a SAS-based array with 480 drives. We use a clustered file system on it that prefills the LUNs, so it looks likes it's full the day that we get it. We receive sales calls asking, "You are beyond 95 percent full, do you want to buy another one?" However, we have not even started yet! 

When we want to scale, we buy another one. We spread the filesystem horizontally across arrays.

We used the technical support early on for tuning and configuration. We went pretty deep with tech support onsite to get the most out of the arrays.

We had the MSA P2000 series previously. We had 120 of them in one data center. Therefore, we went from the MSAs to the 3PAR, and the decision-making was based on the performance. Our issues was neither a throughput nor an IOP problem, but more of a file open issue. We have billions of files where you need a lot of different spindles with different heads moving around independently of each other. 3PAR provided this for us.

We first started with the 3PAR V400 series, which is two racks that had to be wired together to provide 600TB of storage.  With the 15TB SSD based arrays we replace 6 racks of V400's with 8U of 8450's. 

In R&D, it is hard to put an ROI on time. We are a worldwide company with Ph.D.'s working on the system 24/7. We don't want them waiting around so everything we do to speed up their process helps.

You can find cheaper storage but you pay for performance.  3PARs performance has been consistent.  I have seen other arrays slow down as the load increases due to controller saturation.

We had been an HPE customer before, and when we first started with the MSAs, we had an issue where HPE got a batch of drives in from one of their vendors that had a bad firmware on it. Basically, we had to replace 960 drives with the system online.  HPE recognized replacing 750G drives with 500G drives was less capacity than what we purchased so they gave us three more arrays just so they could match the space. That was a huge turning point for us going to HPE. We have had vendors say, "It's your problem. Deal with it." We have had vendors walk away from us. For HPE to actually come up and do this, that was a big deal.

We benchmark vendor solutions ourselves, and knowing the internal technology that makes it work is important.

We had a project where we did get somebody else's storage. It got to the point where we could not keep it performing enough to keep up with the load. We ended up just getting rid of it after a year of problems.

With our 3PARs, we have never lost data.

I would really push the chunklet technology. That is the main benefit out of 3PAR. The way it subdivides a disk into 1GB chunks. 

The our primary use cases for 3PAR are:

• We have some secure applications which use it.
• We have some built-in, embedded applications that we use on it. 
• We have some major critical applications which run on 3PAR. 
• We are using flash arrays 2850 and 8440.

The company has been using 3PAR for approximately eight to 10 years. I joined in 2015, and since the day I joined, we had these 8440s flash arrays. Lately, this year only, we bought these new flash arrays, because we had some issues with the 8440s, especially with the drives. After we migrated the 8440s to the 2850s, we have not been seeing performance issues anymore. It seems as if all of the performance issues have disappeared, which is a big achievement.

With the new flash arrays, 3PAR has improved our performance. Also, the new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) tool is more user-friendly.

We are using the SSMC tool. In combination with it, there is a lot happening around InfoSight, and we are spending a lot of time on it. It does seem like there is some additional functionality built into InfoSight that we can use effectively.

We need additional enhancements to InfoSight, especially from a VM standpoint. Today, we can see in the Azure VM performance stats in 3PAR, but it is so huge, we can't just drill down on each and every VM and look at its performance. We want to add rates of performance issues from VM points of time frame. Therefore, we can look, for example at 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and see how the VMs performed. That particularly feature is not there today in InfoSight.

We are also seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard. E.g., if the 3PAR is not completely healthy because the remote copy helps are not performing, the dashboard will show all green, so there are some additional enhancements required. 

We are not seeing any issues. No hardware failures.

I would rate stability as a nine out of 10.

I would rate scalability as a nine out of 10.

I would rate technical support as a nine out of 10.

As a storage admin, my return on investment is having the system up at all times functioning properly and seeing no performance issues. This is what we are seeing after we recently migrated to our new flash arrays.

Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries. 

We are a multi-vendor shop, even today. We do have some IBM storage in our environment, but most of our critical applications sit on 3PAR.

I will recommend going with the all-flash arrays, especially on 3PAR, because that is something that I have personally experience with and I have not seen any issues.

We are using it for the storage for our on-premise servers, which are both Oracle workloads, as well as having many VMs. We have a lot of complex business needs around legacy things.

Our organization has been using 3PAR for about a decade. The performance has been good.

Everything runs smoothly.

The expandability is good. 

HPE can login, fix things, alert us to things, and upgrade. We are there and aware, but we do not do the work. So, that is good.

There are some weird things that we can't figure out.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

My team is happy with technical support. However, I have not called them personally.

We had EVAs before, then switched to an earlier generation of 3PAR.

If you can afford it on-premise, and that is the way you want to go, then it is a good solution. 

Overall, it has been a good product, and it is stable.

We use 3PAR as our main production environment. Therefore, we use it for everything from VMware to our NAS solutions. It is used for complex business needs, because we also store all of our databases on the 3PAR as well.

We have a lot of systems at the airport where I work. So, we have a lot of Oracle databases, which run a lot of core functionality. This includes the financial systems. We have a large maintenance program, and we have to track all of our maintenance needs. This is all done through an Oracle database. All of these databases are on the 3PAR. 

We have about 500 users. All of their user data is stored on the 3PAR for groups and user data. Then, most of our environment is in VMware. Thus, we have a reasonable sized VMware environment of about 700 servers, and that all runs off of the 3PAR.

It has improved our functions because we have a very small IT team. We have to do a lot of things. The more solutions that we can bring onboard which are easy to use and do not require too much maintenance, this is good for us. We just do not have enough bandwidth to cover everything.

Therefore, we are always looking for good solutions which do their job well and are easy to use. 

3PAR is fairly easy to use. We have used a few different arrays in the past, and they were a lot more complicated. This one was fast to bring up and start using right away. It is easy to keep running and does not require too much effort. It has been very reliable, which is key.

Foremost, we look for a reliable solution foremost, and 3PAR has been very reliable.

I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly. That would be a great feature.

The controllers are going to age out, then eventually they will need new controllers. If we could upgrade those controllers live without interruption, that would be great.

The stability has been great. We have had zero issues.

The scalability is good because it is easy to add in new disks. We just add them on the fly, and they are available for use. We do not have to go in, then configure then. We just put the disks in, then they are available, so it is easy.

I needed to invest in a new solution because the previous solution was getting old.

We wanted to go to market to find a better solution. We wanted something that had a little more intelligence. However, because we are a semi-public company, we had to go to market. We could not just pick 3PAR.

The 3PAR actually had to prove itself. It had to be scored and graded across a panel of people in order to win the bid. Not only that, it had to have a good price.

It was not complex.

We had a third-party vendor help set it up. We had two weeks to set it up, and we had it done within one week. We had a whole week to sit back and enjoy it.

I have seen ROI, because it has performed extremely well so far. The amount of data that we have flowing through it has worked out very well.

The return on investment for me is that all of my customers are happy. That is a really good return on investment: less complaining.

We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, Dell, and 3PAR. We went with 3PAR because of price and the functionality had everything that we wanted it to do. Also, the presentation that the HPE team put together went really well.

Give the product a good, hard look, because HPE does a very good job. They are a market leader. They are not a small player in the space. You can be very comfortable when dealing with a company like HPE.

It is doing everything that we want it to do. We are not that big, so we did not have a lot of crazy requirements. Therefore, it is doing everything we want it to do. The other big factor is that it is easy to use.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Easy of use
• Ability to have two arrays back each other up. In case one of them has a problem, the other one can take over.

We use it as a shared storage solution for a virtualized environment. It is not for complex business needs. It is really just for storage, and not even a very large amount of storage: between 20 to 40 terabytes.

We have used it in three environments. We were not happy with the performance initially, because it turned out the system was initially designed for Fibre Channel, and we needed iSCSI. So, we used the iSCSI configuration option off of 3PAR. This was probably when 3PAR was purchased by HPE, but the performance were extraordinarily bad in terms of I/O capabilities. It took a long time to obtain HPE's help and resolve the issue. This was for iSCSI in the context of VMware for shared storage.

The product is not for us. We deploy solutions on-premise. We use this product for one of our customers.

We would like to see better support for iSCSI.

After being properly configured, it has been a very stable product.

Our systems are fairly static once they have been deployed.

Their technical support is bad. I would rate it as a two out of 10. 

After we insisted for quite some time, then we did receive good support. However, it was a bother, we would have liked to have known initially that the system was not designed for iSCSI.

In the end, we ended up selecting something else.

We were previously using multiple vendors. We switched to 3PAR for more performance, reliability, and we had challenges with MSAs (low-end storage).

The initial setup takes about two days.

I have not seen any ROI so far.

We evaluated Nexsan. However, we wanted to stay with HPE.

Be extremely careful if you want to use the iSCSI feature of the 3PAR. It was not designed for it initially.

We were using low-end storage from HPE. I was hoping to get something a bit midrange in their storage, in terms of price with the reliability. I am still hoping that it will be reliable despite poor initial performance previously. As the problem was fixed, I am hopeful it would be reliable in the long run.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We need something stable and reliable in the long run. Our contracts are at least five years, and they can be extended all of the way to seven to 10 years.

It runs all our tier one and two apps. Right now, we are replicating between two 3PARs and two different data centers. We use for our tier one and two apps, so they can do failover, synchronous replication.

We have been running 3PAR for three years. It was running well until we tried to split our two 3PARs and put them into two different data centers. Then, we had a lot of problems.

I do not think it has changed the way that we function.

When we were having problems, it actually hurt us. Before that, we did not have any problems.

The most valuable feature when we purchased it was that it was a four-node system. However, the throughput knowledge should be a lot better than what we previously had (EMC).

A lot of tasks, you have to manually set up. They need to already have them set up and working. Then, you can just go in and tweak them if you need to. There are a lot of things that we did not know that we needed to schedule and make happen, and that is what we found out six months ago.

Stability is a little lower than EMC, because of the problems that we have had. We ran EMC for the last 10 years and never had any problems with it.

We have not scaled it up yet.

We worked with technical support for six months to get the splitting 3PAR issue resolved. We met every day, until it was finally resolved, but it took six months. It was good that the issue was resolved, but we were disappointed it took so long.

3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors. 

We switched because of the cost and 3PAR's four-node system, because they said we should get more throughput from the four-node system, since EMC is a two-node system.

3PAR is more complex to set up and start than EMC. There are a lot more things that you have to do and know that you need to do. Where with EMC, stuff sits there and runs.

The initial setup only took a few weeks to get it going. However, this is when we found out there were a lot of things that we did not have set up right. We just got these fixed about six months ago.

HPE assisted us with the initial setup, but they did not tell us about all these other things which needed to be done.

For the amount of downtime that we have had, I do not know if it was a good option. We might have been better to spend the extra money and stay with EMC, therefore not experiencing any downtime.

Purchasing maintenance: You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

Evaluate if the money savings is worth it. One of the problems that we have had is HPE spec'd it out for us. They underspec'd it, so this was one of our problems with performance. It did not have the amount of drives in it that we needed.

Pay attention to what you are spec'ing out and make sure that it will meet your requirements.

It is a good product, but it is very software driven, and it has some software problems. That will be our challenge going forward. Once we go out of maintenance, how do we keep the system up-to-date software-wise, if we have problems purchasing maintenance?

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is definitely part of it and reliability has to be there. When you buy something, you do not know what you are getting until you purchase it and put it into production. We did not do any type of try and buy. It was just off the word of the vendor.

It is for mission critical storage. We use it to keep high uptime. We have two 3PAR systems that we leverage.

Its performance is good. We have a lot of applications that have high I/O, and 3PAR handles those with no problem.

It has improved uptime, as well as speed to delivery.

The uptime for mission critical, because have website services that provides 24/7 roadside support. Therefore, we treat it like it is an emergency service and always has to be up.

We would like to see smoother firmware upgrades going forward. We cannot afford to go down. When we went down, it was very painful for all our mission critical system. When we bought the system, we were under the impression that we were supposed to do firmware upgrades transparently, and on the fly with no impact, and it was very impacting. However, this is the only time that we had any issues.

The reliability has been good, except for upgrades. We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us. The proactive support help us with the set up.

We have no issues with scalability. We have been scaling up.

Support was good. They keep wanting us to always upgrade. However, with this failure that we had, it has made us nervous moving forward.

We had HPE EVAs. Then, we had to move away from EVAs, and the 3PARs were the next ones in the line.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days.

We had HPE support help us. 

We have seen ROI with the product. Overall, the 3PAR has been performing very well.

We looked a EMC before Dell purchased them. Cost is what made us decide on HPE, plus we had a relationship with HPE. We have always been a big HPE shop. Otherwise, the products were apples to apples.

Evaluate your needs. Prepare a cost comparison comparing it to what your needs are. Sometimes, you may not need a 3PAR if you are looking for secondary storage. You may want to go with Nimble. You need to look at what your requirements are, then make your determination that way.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

1. Price
2. Best of breed
3. Reliability.

I found it easy to deploy and simple to configure the storage.

We have had no problems so far.

One of the points that moved us towards 3PAR was we wanted to escalate it in a very high way.

We have not used tech support often, but when we have, they have been clear with us.

We have already some IBM storage, but we are not happy with it. After checking out other models, we decided to work with 3PAR. Not only because we are familiar with HPE, but also the features combined well with our services.

The initial setup was easy. However, we get stuck on preconditions. We were not aware of some of the preconditions. For example, the need for a different, separate IP network for replication. We had to rethink how we were going to implement it.

We are using 3PAR for production workloads, processing insurance policies and claims, file shares, and storage.

It has been performing well so far. We have had a few hiccups on the configuration side, but we have been working with HPE on them. For the most part, the product has been pretty seamless.

It had our organization start to think like an actual organization. A lot of stuff came out where the management of our workloads has improved dramatically.

We have gotten out of the mindset of physical is better; virtualization has taken hold and is starting to take off. We are going through the process of consolidation to 100% virtual. It has been incremental growth over a short period of time.

I live in Houston, so disaster recovery (DR) is very important, and the site-to-site replication is huge. I love that feature. We have our backups set up to replicate between two sites, then we also have our storage set up to replicate between two sites. The next piece would probably be to stack on a synergy appliance and be able to get our compute layer replicated between the two sites as well, which would round out that whole DR scenario.

What appeals to me is having mobile functionality. There is a vendor portal for 3PAR for whatever you want to purchase. I would like to see something from an administrator's standpoint, as opposed to having to go to a web browser, where you get a ping on your phone which says, "Your license is coming up for renewal," or, "You have a drive that is bad," in conjunction with stuff, such as InfoSight.

This is something which provides value back to me, because then I am not having to constantly babysit my vendors and say, "When do I have renewals coming due?" It is tough to get vendors who engage with you on that level. They go back and say, "Just a heads up, but these are what are coming due." Maybe they can backfill that with a mobile app.

My admins like having this functionality and direct integration, where it is like, "I need to do this, this, and this." If they could do it all from their phone that would be better. Though, sometimes it is tough, because of tiny phones, and all there is to use is a web browser. It can be hard to read on a smaller screen. If it is a mobile app, maybe it could be finessed into something where basic tasks could be done.

After we got past all the hiccups with the conditional configuration, the stability has been rock solid. I like the simplicity of it. We do not have to fidget with it a whole lot once we have it set up correctly. It has been stable and performs well, so I have no complaints whatsoever.

Scalability is incredible. We have a single server cabinet today, but we can grow it to as many cabinets as we need.

We go through a third party. We did not use HPE tech support unless we need to escalate an issue.

Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have.

I was not involved in the initial setup. When I came onboard, the product was already in the environment. 

We have already seen ROI. We have had it in the environment for about three months. It has been absolutely tremendous. Workloads have improved in performance. We do not have a lot of the same struggles that we used to.

It is stable. It does what its supposed to. You can feed it compute and storage as you need to. Whereas with our standard DL380 and ML350 servers, once you get to a certain point, that is as big as you can get. With this product, you can throw another shelf of storage or blade at it and grow it as much as you need to. 

As our workloads have increased, we have been able to finesse those into a good size to where they are valuable for us.

We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution.

Our organization looked at NetApp and Pure Storage. Pure Storage was just too expensive. NetApp was good, but they did not have anybody familiar with the NetApp configuration.

Our biggest requirement was ease of use. HPE seemed to have all the pieces that we needed, and it easy enough to get somebody trained up on how to manage it.

Understand your needs first. If you do not have a need for a highly technical solution, or you have workloads which are not high-performing. 3PAR is a perfect fit.

Understand your environment. Know what you are getting into. Research the different tools which are out there. Make sure that it is a good fit. It is nice to have the high performance stuff, but if you do not have high performance workloads, keep it simple and 3PAR is simple for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:  Our biggest requirement was ease of use. Scalability was another. We can scale it up pretty much as big as we need to. Those were the two biggest criteria.

Our customers use it for primary SAN storage. They have multiple business needs for their enterprise-class business, e.g., for high-end data processing, oil, and natural gas. We also have media customers, who are trying to use it. The businesses are predominantly all verticals who use it.

The performance is awesome. It is one of the best storage products comparatively to like size competitors. I am a big fan of 3PAR.

It is about the availability and predictably. The performance is also good. 

It is a rugged, performance system; it is trouble-free and a workhorse. We have a c7000, which with 3PAR makes a great combination for any workload.

The following need to be improved:

• The ability to contact the correct HPE resource to give you the right product. 
• We had to undergo at least two or three iterations before we finalized a product which fit. This took time.
• The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability. They are possibly all busy, or maybe at the headquarters less. I don't know the reason, but this happens every time we have to burn the midnight oil to get some solution out and running.
• 3PAR needs to keep on increasing its capacity.
• It needs more array support.
• It needs to be more data-driven. 

It is stable.

We have to go through the non-rolling part of it, and that takes time. We are waiting from HPE to hear (possibly next year) how better InfoSight will be coming into the picture. We are looking for more developments on that front.

So far, technical support has been good. However, we use our own in-house expertise to resolve issues.

We help our customers decide on purchasing new solutions. This is our process:

1. We have a headroom of about 20 to 30 percentage depending on the customer's business. The visibility for the next year on the future annual growth. 
2. Once we hit a headroom of about 60 percentage, we talk to the customer and tell them that they are up for either scalability, compression, or dedupe for their data. 
3. When the capacity hits about 80 percentage, then we buy a new product and app.

Earlier, it used to be complex. Now, we have our own skill set, which has made the installation easier. From the time we gather all the necessary data, it takes about a week (five business days) to set it up and have it running.

We do the system integration for our customers.

Not all of them see ROI, because there is definitely good competition available from NetApp and Hitachi. When you look at the ROI, those are the other two organizations who are making inroads. In terms of product performance, 3PAR is really good.

Cost-wise, it is a little bit on the higher side, but it is an awesome product. 

Other competitors in this marketplace are Dell EMC, NetApp, and Hitachi. These vendors are very competitive in terms of pricing.

Product-wise, it is good. In terms of cost, I will leave the choice to them.

Most important criteria that our customers select a vendor:

• Supportability
• Scalability
• Financing.

The main reason that our customers choose 3PAR is because of price.

We use it for virtualization, vCenter, and infrastructure. 

We have simple needs. We are a very small shop and are not a technology company, but we do have mobile apps and websites that we provide to our customers.

I am new with the company. I have only been there about a year now, but I understand that they have had this system for at least three to five years.

The performance has been fantastic. It has not had many issues whatsoever, and what issues they do have, the support picks up on it quickly. They send us tickets saying that they are doing work without us even having to engage them. So, that is very nice.

All-in-one containment: I do not have to worry about cross systems talking to each other or multiple systems trying to interact with each other. Our entire vCenter infrastructure is one large stack, which is nice.

I would like to see a little better integration with OneView and provisioning ESX Hosts, but other than that it meets our needs.

Possibly because of the version that we are running, but we do not have not enough features.