HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VMware vSAN comparison

The compared Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware solutions aren't in the same category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 in AFS , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 2.9% mindshare in the category. VMware is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.8, and holds a 16.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage.

To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: December 2024).

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All-Flash Storage

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

All-Flash Storage

HCI

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson

Storage and Backup Architect at Concentrix

Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities

We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades. It's a very simple implementation. They have a good tool to analyze upgrades. The stability is good. Technical support has been excellent.

Read full review

SanjayKumar11

Associate General Manager at Adani Enterprises Ltd

I like the integration with VMware and the provisioning

HPE could improve by raising awareness when a new product is launched. They must think of ways to better serve and engage with their enterprise customers. HPE is selling enterprise products and mission-critical support. This is not a one-time sale, and then it's over. They need to maintain a relationship with their customer over the life of the product, which is typically four or five years.

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Lipaz Hessel

Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The latency is good."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"The solution is scalable."

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

"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."

"The Call Home feature is really a great feature, so I do not need to monitor the 3PAR. The 3PAR team is monitoring it and letting me know if there are any problems."

"The solution is easy to use and very stable."

"With the new flash arrays, 3PAR has improved our performance."

"It has helped with more than just serving data, but also with recovery."

"HPE 3PAR StoreServ has been stable."

"The most valuable feature of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is its online upgrades."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

"Very good VCG notification feature."

"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."

"vSAN is very integrated."

"We find it easy to deliver this solution."

"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."

"Easy to deploy and manage."

"Good performance, reliable and agile."

"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

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

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

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

"The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected."

"It's a very complex platform to manage and it's not cheap either. It doesn't really give us the level of flexibility we had for very, very small workloads."

"The main problem for 3PAR right now is cost."

"I would like to see more flexibility with the cloud. I've actually just been in a presentation about it, here at HPE Discover 2018, so those features are coming."

"Sometimes the required upgrades have been a little bit involved: "You have to do this before you do this," and I want them to explain to me why. It's more work than it should be."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ cons

"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."

"This product is very expensive."

"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."

"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."

"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."

"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."

"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."

"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"The product is expensive."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The licensing cost for HPE 3PAR StoreServ is expensive."

"The SSD is a little bit expensive."

"We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward."

"They have added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI."

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

"To be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available."

"The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features."

"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."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

"If you compare the price of VMware vSAN with other players like Nutanix and Cisco, its price is good, but could still have some improvement."

"VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license."

"It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive."

"There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."

"Due to recent changes in VMware's licensing approach by Broadcom, the cost has increased significantly, making it less attractive from a cost perspective."

"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."

"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."

"What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Educational Organization

85%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

52%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

After implementation, there are limitations, such as the number of paths, file systems, and replication options. It f...

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What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

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What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The tool’s price is higher compared to other products. The solution is 20% more expensive than other storage.

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

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How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 37% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 21% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

November 2024

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

December 2024

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

November 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

vSAN

Learn More

Pure Storage

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

VMware

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “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.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "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."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “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.”

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: December 2024.

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