HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

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.

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.

It's our primary storage for our VMware environment. Performance has been excellent. We don't have multiple business needs. It's just focused on our virtual storage.

It has really improved performance. Before, we just had different storage devices based on different needs - so we didn't have to buy all-flash for everything. We couldn't do tiering. 3PAR was the first device that gave us that ability. It has really improved how we can streamline our storage purchases, as well as performance. It has done well.

Multi-tier storage was the primary reason that we bought it. I also love the interface that you use for administering it.

I haven't really thought about what a future release should contain. We've liked what 3PAR has so far.

It has been very stable. We've had very minor issues, but I've loved how HPE is proactive on letting us know. Usually, they let us know before we notice it ourselves and they already have a solution for us. It has been great that way.

We have used tech support a couple of times. Usually, it's just involving them in upgrading the service processor or upgrading the OS on the appliance. They have been really good.

The only drawback on it is they seem really busy. We get a critical notification when an important patch comes out, but sometimes it's a month before we can get this critical piece on because they just don't have time on their schedules to do it sooner.

Our main reason for switching was based on age. We weren't having major issues with our storage, but we try and replace things on a five-year schedule, at that level.

When selecting a vendor the biggest factor is a vendor we know. In the past, we had used one that seemed to be leading edge. I had a guy on the financial side that was pushing more for that. He really liked how that vendor didn't require you to purchase their drives. You could use off-the-shelf, enterprise-rated drives, so the costs of expanding the array seemed to be cheaper going that way. But after two years that company went belly-up and disappeared. This time, even though there were a couple other vendors he liked better - Nimble was actually one of them at the time, but they were still new enough that I pushed back - I said, "Nope. I'm going with somebody whose name I know."

The initial setup was very straightforward, very easy to do. It took a couple of hours. It wasn't very hard. We only had about seven servers that we had to connect to the three chassis, so it was very easy.

The biggest thing is we haven't had to buy multiple, different storage devices. That has reduced our costs significantly.

Nimble. At the time, Nimble wasn't an HPE company.

I would rate 3PAR a nine out of 10, primarily for a couple reasons. First, we've never had problems with it. It has been super stable, it has done everything that we've wanted it to do, and the performance is great. Second, I never give anything a 10, because there are always improvements that can be made.

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.

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.

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.

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.