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HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VNX [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (7th)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
301
Ranking in other categories
NAS (7th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (2nd), All-Flash Storage (8th)
VNX [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 31, 2018
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Wayne Cross - PeerSpot reviewer
Very stable and scales quickly, allowing us to roll out new services
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.
RS
​The VNX 5700 provides a large number of features including the ability to work for both file and block as a unified array.
Once you establish a replication job, when the file system is synchronizing its data to the target file system, it tends to create a balloon effect where it creates a file system that grows as the new data is synchronizing. It would be very helpful if the replication job could incorporate a self-cleaning job after the synchronization job completes to reduce the size of the file system in the target automatically. Very often, we have to run a script called “SavVolReclaim” to clean up space consumed while the replication is in progress. If the replication job hits its maximum capacity of 16TB while synchronizing, it stops the replication job. By adding this reclaim process natively, it would eliminate additional unnecessary work for the storage administrators. It would be very helpful to get an automated report that shows you the size of the checkpoints and get warnings when a checkpoint is reaching either maximum capacity per a file system or hitting the ceiling on the SavVol pool consumption.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The latency is good."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"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 was the easiest SAN that I have ever set up."
"The most valuable feature of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is its storage capabilities."
"I benefit from the HPE Call Home feature. It tells me about any issue once I have it."
"The all-flash positions our organization for growth. If somebody comes to us who needs an application with performance, we have that already formulated."
"We use a virtual domain in 3PAR and we can create individual pools where clients are able to manage their own resources, instead of we, as storage admin, getting involved in that."
"It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far."
"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."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options."
"One of the best features of the VNX is the ability to combine drives of different types into a virtual Storage Pool. By combining small but fast flash drives, SAS drives, and high-capacity but slower NL-SAS drives, the VNX can intelligently move data to the different tiers of storage based on usage."
"The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"Integration with VMware"
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
 

Cons

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"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."
"We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution."
"I would like to see NVMe support, not only on the disk side, but also in the NVMe over Fibre Channel."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ's pricing could be cheaper."
"The tool needs improvement in the utilization report at the granular level."
"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."
"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."
"The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"The management software used for the VNX is Unicenter. While it is an improvement over Navicenter, used in older EMC SANs, it still feels outdated in comparison to other SAN management software."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"Poor connection to FC."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"Based on our workloads, we see repeatedly in performance reports that the built-in controller (SP) cache of our VNX model is not sufficiently large, resulting in forced cache flushing."
"There is an easy replication process between distinct data centers via VPLEX and/or RPA. But I hope in the future that EMC/Dell could replicate this with other types of storage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"The product is expensive."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"The price of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is reasonable, but buying upgrade licenses are priced very high. There are additional fees."
"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."
"They have added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI."
"From a comparison of bang-for-the-buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best."
"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."
"You need to properly assess your needs before buying the solution since there are chances of overpaying. The type of configuration that you choose can make the price go higher or lower."
"I would like it to be cheaper."
"The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable. Yearly EMC is more expensive."
"Make sure you understand how the licensing works and that you are getting the right set of licenses if you need array-to-array replication."
"Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive"
"​Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages​ (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead.​"
"While EMC tends to be on the expensive side, the stability and support of their products are top-notch and I feel are worth the cost."
"Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Answers from the Community

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018
Pros EMC VNX Multi-tiering positively affects the efficiency of the storage space. The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data. The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages. From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is ha...
2 out of 19 answers
reviewer325866 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 29, 2018
As far as I know, VNX line is no longer available, therefore I think that the real comparison has to be with the Dell EMC Unity family systems
it_user551106 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 29, 2018
One user says about HPE 3PAR, "The optimization features move chunklets or hot spots to faster drives." The moving of Chunklets is to maintain performance. What kind of CPG or level of protection you choose for 3PAR volumes will determine your availability and protection level? Although Chunklets can be moved to higher levels of protection, that is not the stated purpose above. Another user says about EMC VNX, "The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data." The replication feature mentioned is for protection and not performance. VNX performance can be enhanced by FAST Cache. Availability is determined by the Virtual Provisioning of the VNX and by choosing a Storage Pool in which the proper RAID level is chosen.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
85%
Computer Software Company
2%
Financial Services Firm
2%
Manufacturing Company
2%
No data available
 

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.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive.
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...
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.
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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
VNX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Samsonite, Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Kindred Healthcare
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