HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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!

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 this for our highest tier level applications, our tier 0 through tier 2, so those are our mission critical and business essential type of applications. We want to make sure that we have the most critical things running on the best equipment that we have, and it is performing well right now. 

We have been working with 3PAR for almost three years now. We leased two arrays, struggling with it a bit. However, HPE did right by us and provided the resources (people, hardware, and additional storage) to do what we needed to do.

It has been reliable recently. In the past we did not have very good luck with it the first year or so that we owned it. Now that HPE has put the right resources, as well as the additional solid state drives, it has helped improve the performance and stability.

We are taking somewhat of a different approach. We are going more towards a hybrid solution in our data center. We are focusing more on developing our hyperconverged technology, and expanding it. 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.

Tech support is great, and that is for any of their team who has ever worked with us. They are willing and committed to making sure the customer is treated the way we need to be. For example, they were there for about a month or so when we were having calls every day with them. 

Initial setup was straightforward and fairly easy. The hard part was that we were on EMC VNX and trying to get those converted over into the HPE 3PAR, that process took awhile, along with scheduling downtime to get some of the physical stuff migrated over to the new device.

We ran into some struggles when we were trying to implement it. We have two production data centers running Active-Active. Our arrays did not like talking, reading, and writing to each other. Therefore, they were causing some hiccups, but after several phone calls and meetings with HPE reps, and some additional storage, we were able to get it working exactly where we needed it to.

I would have rated it higher, but there was a length of time that it took to resolve and get the product working the way we wanted it to. This happened on day 60 rather than day one.

Our primary use case is data retention. We also use it for test environments and deploy systems for customers as well. The performance from it has been excellent, from what we have seen so far.

It has improved our throughput in terms of workloads.

The flexibility and the intelligence inside of it.

The stability has been great. Of course, we've had limited experience with it so far.

Scalability looks excellent as well.

We used older HPE solutions. We worked with our HPE rep. He described some of the functionality and we could see how it fit into our organization.

Our most important criteria when evaluating a vendor are

• performance
• support.

We went with HPE because we had worked with them and they met our requirements. Those were the main drivers. They had proven support and reliability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but it was straightforward. It took about two days.

We evaluated some other vendors loosely, but we were more focused on HPE.

In our limited experience so far, it has been excellent. Support has been fantastic, the setup process was smooth.

We use it as a primary storage device for user data and applications. It covers complex business needs in our organization. We have a lot of secure data on there. A lot of our financial applications run on our 3PAR.

It has been excellent. We've got a 7440c at my office and then we have two 8000 series at the other sites. We're using Adaptable Optimization, we've got the different tiers of disks. We find that the performance is excellent, really excellent.

Previously, we had lots of different storage vendors. We moved to a standardized platform using 3PAR and then we were able to have a consistent set of documentation through all of our sites, and we're able to replicate data between the sites really easily.

The biggest benefit is the fact that it's pretty much bulletproof; we never have any issues with them.

Reliability, the fact that it works really, really well. It is a really solid platform.

I know that the reporting functionality is changing. It's going to be much better and that's something that we're looking forward to. 

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.

It's still an older architecture, you've got a lot of physical spinning disks. I would imagine more the memory-based computing is coming.

It is massively scalable. It's very easy to add more capacity, it's very easy to add more modules if required. It's the same with the licensing model. I think the licensing model changed last year, or two years ago, and now it's much more flexible.

Technical support is good. It's still separate from the normal HP Enterprise support team. It's really responsive, incredibly knowledgeable. Their engineers are wonderful, really good. We have had really positive results with the 3PAR support guys.

About eight years ago, we had a bunch of different storage platforms, and we actually went through a proof of concept and selected 3PAR. Our company was expanding. We realized that our data footprint was going to grow massively in the next few years. We're a game developer so our data growth is completely mirrored by the hardware that we make our games on. At the time, we knew that there were new versions of PlayStation, Xbox 4K coming out for TV, so all of our assets just blew up, about 20 times the size.

We realized we needed to invest in an enterprise-grade solution. We looked at three or four different companies. Then, we rolled out the F400 series.

The factors we considered were the normal things: Obviously, cost per terabyte or gigabyte, performance, IOPS; scalability was a massive factor as well. We knew that we were going to grow and we needed to be able to just add shelves of disks or add SSD, add SaaS or add Nearline.

The setup is one of the drawbacks of 3PAR system, it's a fairly complicated piece of hardware. You need to get the engineers in to do it. So it wasn't something that we could do on our own. The Professional Services that we engaged with were wonderful, and it was a couple of days as opposed to a week or two weeks.

ROI, that's a difficult one. It's expensive. When we compare that to the cost of the product that we make, and the return that we get, it's a small piece of the overall project cost. So we don't really complain about how much we initially had to pay for it. The value is that it works, and we don't have any downtime. The return on investment is pretty good.

We looked at NetApp, we looked at EMC, we looked at 3PAR, and 3PAR was the best fit for us totally.

• Get a proof-of-concept
• Draw a list of testing criteria
• Have a testing matrix
• Be clear in your objectives

3PAR is a great solution but it has a big physical footprint for the amount of data. There are other solutions out there. If you don't necessarily require the performance and the redundancy, there are other things to consider. But, it's a really solid storage appliance.

I would give the 3PAR an eight out of 10. Because we don't have any issues with it, it's hard to complain about it. But obviously giving it a 10 out of 10 would mean that there is no work to be done. I give it a strong eight.

It's our primary storage and we are using it within two of our datacenters with replication between them. Actually, that part is currently being implemented.

Overall, performance is great. Personally, I'm fully satisfied, even when we had some problems, failed disks or some bug in a software version, HPE would always be fully proactive. They would actually tell us of the problem, even before we were aware of it.

For me, personally, I think the most important value is really the way HPE is treating us as a customer.

I would say that now that we even have flash storage on the 8200 models, it would be the deduplication. We were hoping to use the automated tiering much more, but it's not a good fit for us. Although the technology works great, due to our workload, it's really not an option for us. So, I would definitely say the deduplication on flash drives.

Downtime, never. I have heard of other customers having some serious issues. I personally am not the type of person that would say, "they are now the bad guys," because it can happen. It's technology. 

Overall, in my experience, maybe one of the worst was when we suddenly got a lot of different alerts. It caused some stress within our team, but later on it proved to be a bug in the firmware version. I think in two-weeks' time we received an update that resolved the issue. So, I really think it's stable. It's a good choice for the price.

I can say it is scalable because initially, when we bought our first 3PAR, we extended it up to its maximum over the years. That is the part, maybe, where I see room for improving for HPE. Extending is not a problem, scalability is okay. But once you buy additional box of disks, you have to wait for HPE to contact you with their plan for implementation, for connecting, and it can take several weeks. So, you have the box and you have to wait for several weeks to actually implement it.

In terms of reaching the right person, actually, the way it goes is that they call us.

Of course they contact us via the partner, but they contact us, and the response is great. Everything is within SLA.

We had different storage. For instance, we used IBM storage. When the time for replacement came due to age of the old storage, we actually performed a tender. So, we didn't start with, "Okay. We are buying 3PAR." But, through the entire tendering process, we reached the place where it proved to be a good decision to buy HPE 3PAR.

I think storage implementation is never so straightforward, but I would say it's among the simplest to implement.

IBM. We went with HPE because the decision was, in the end, based on price. 

We had a list of required specifications, invited several vendors, they offered what they could. But in the end, when you get all of this matched, then the price decides.

For me, when we last did a purchase, last year or so, at that time flash drives and the deduplication were really important. Actually all of the vendors have it, offer it, but then we had some discussions looking at overall performance, resistance to disk failures and the like. I would say that HPE is the leader here.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor - I'm saying with a small disclaimer, I'm saying this personally, so it's not the company - for me, the most important is always vendor support. We have, of course, contracts with partners that implemented the solutions, but I think that vendor support is mandatory in the way they are supporting you through the lifecycle of the product. It can overcome any problem the technology may deal with.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall. Whenever I rate something, I'm immediately going subtract one because I'm really reluctant to give a maximum grade, so say, "Okay, now it's nine." Well, there is room for improvement, and the way that the implementation of extensions goes is one of the examples. But, overall, I would say we are fully satisfied.

I actually do recommend HPE 3PAR because, for me, it proved to make my life easier.

We use 3PAR for storage of all the city's data, everything from videos of sewer lines, to orthophotos for our GIS system, to storage of our databases, data in general.

It's performing awesomely.

We're able to expand more. It's faster, more efficient. The technology is 10-years, 20-years advanced from where we were before.

• Ease of use
• Low power consumption

We saved a ton of power just turning off our old one when we went to the new one.

All of a sudden something didn't work. We've never had downtime where data wasn't available, because it's got multiple ways of staying up. It doesn't usually go down. But we've had some issues when we were trying to upgrade, doing some firmware upgrades.

We've never had downtime in four or five years now. Except when we want to.

It's very scalable.

We've had our issues, but overall they've been pretty good. Doing some upgrades, we've had some problems.

We were using HPE EVA. The support on our old EVAs, the cost to keep them up was more than going to a new one. Then, by the time we added the power savings and the reduced space and the heating, it was just so much less that it was well worth it.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria for us is ease of connectivity. I also like the fact that I know Hewlett Packard Enterprises. I've worked with them for a long time. They're very reliable.

I give it a 10 out of 10 because it's just been awesome. We have four 3PARs running our enterprise, the city.

Don't be afraid. It can do just about everything you want to do; for a small/medium business, to a large business. I'm running a small city and all our storage is 3PAR.

We are using it for the installation as part of our customer solutions. We are not end user, we are integrator, and we are using it in big IT infrastructure projects for our different customers, mainly for NATO.

They are reliable. They are fulfilling their requirements. They have the right features for our customers. It's the overall combination, together with the complete architecture of the servers from HPE.

There's nothing at the moment. Everyone is pretty happy.

From our perspective, and from our experience with the customer, it's a really stable solution. We have no problems with the customer, no negative feedback from them, and we have been relying for years on close cooperation with HPE in this area.

I think our customers will use it for the long term, even though they are now on the way to change. I think the special environment we are working in, they will use it for some years, and it is scalable.

The support from HPE in our projects is always very good. We have been working together for 15 years in this customer environment, and one of the main reasons to stay with HPE is the very good support we have had from all the HPE people over these years. That's one of our main success factors.

I give it a nine out of 10 because it fulfills what we need and, as I said before, it's reliable and it satisfies our customers. That's the most important point for us; to have satisfied customers.