HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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. 

I work with customers all over demark, which consists of small to large companies. I normally make dual data centers with one HPE 3PAR StoreServ on each side. Our customers are mainly running with failover/failback mission-critical systems.

There's a lot of good features. HPE 3PAR StoreServ is similar to Dell EMC. It is a high-speed system with automatic failover/failback, integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.  These are the main reason for choosing HPE 3PAR StoreServ in Denmark. We have a very good consulting service together with the product. 

In Pakistan, there are no AI applications or the use of highly specific workloads. We typically use it in financial sectors as well as corporate sectors, for many business-critical apps. We use the 3PAR solution resource. Primarily, we use the 3PAR 8000 series here.

I must say the uninterrupted upgrades of 3PAR, the OS, and its RAID-type system are must-have features. In 3PAR, all drives work on rebuilding if any drive fails. We can replace any failed drive, and storage is maintained. Rebuilding and performance are very fast in case of failure, plus uninterrupted upgrades are the most important features. There is no downtime when we upgrade our 3PAR systems.

We target 3PAR because of the availability aspects that it brings with a synchronous replication. I work with a lot of medical and larger business organizations which are looking for the ability to run stretch clustering between data centers. If they lose a full data center, they can use this to flap over live without application downtime. This is probably the biggest thing that comes into play from an availability aspect. Then, there is also inherently a lot of the performance which comes with it. E.g., if I have a lot of high demand applications, it is one of those where the system, the all-flash array, the 8450, and even the 9450 that recently came out, can keep the latency and response time down.

A lot of it has to do with its ability to stretch between data centers. It has helped a lot for times when our customers do DR testing. Instead of having to spin down and spin up, I can do it live and seamless. Therefore, I do not have to schedule downtime with an organization. Especially maintenance on arrays, if I need to do some maintenance, it could potentially slow down somethings or even take things offline. 

With 3PAR, I can transparently sort of flap over to that other data center and do all the maintenance I need to do (even if it means forklift upgrading things). I can do this without having to take applications down. For a place like a hospital, which is open 24/7/365, it can't suffer downtime. That is why this product is one of those nice game changers. 

It allows me to do so much and worry about taking care of the clients, instead of how do I keep things up.

We deploy 3PAR across all of our locations, Canada-wide. It provides primary storage. It covers complex business needs. All of our financial applications sit on it, all of our databases sit on it. We also use it for unstructured data storage, and we're about 95 percent virtualized so it runs all of our virtual workloads.

At one point, we had HPE EVAs and when we were changing them out we didn't just look at 3PAR, we looked at all the solutions. We actually started out with a V400 which is an older version of the 3PAR - they didn't have the 7400s as yet - at our data center. Eventually, when the V400 became end-of-life, we looked at all the EVAs and by that time, they had come out with the 7400 and 7200, which are a lot less expensive and a better fit for a smaller organization. We were able to throw any workload on it and not worry about performance. It certainly made my job easy and my team's job easy in terms of maintenance and management of the platform.

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. 

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.

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.