HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We're almost entirely HPE outside of the network stack, so it's nice to have one place to call for support.

When comparing the cost to the comparable EMC solution at the time that we purchased it, 3PAR was significantly cheaper.

It was almost 100% financial decision. They had similar performance, similar build specs, but the business relationship with HPE was much greater. EMC didn't put their best quote forward when we did our bake off, they came in and put in a really high bid. When they found out we were going to go with 3PAR based almost 100% on the cost, they came back and gave us a better bid, but it was a little bit late at that point.

The technical aspect really were comparable. The difference with the EMC product was in the way that they cashed to their flash. HP's is strictly tiered based on a optimization. The EMC product, could cash reads for any tier into the flash. There was a performance advantage there the I don't know that we would have gotten. However, it was enough to make the decision easy.

The performance that we get out of it.

We probably purchased too big an array for our needs. We're not even touching on the IOPs that it can do. That's been a great benefit; the support on the 3PAR has been really nice also.

It's very reliable and it was cost competitive with other arrays at the time that we purchased it.

Support in the European region. These are things we are addressing with HPE and they're fixing already, but that's been the biggest problem - getting support engineers scheduled for maintenance, replacing a drive, doing an upgrade. We've had scheduling problems with them. We had one instance where the engineer just didn't show up with no excuse.

Our support in the US has been phenomenal, no issues at all. But the European support was poor initially.

Nothing bad to say about 3PAR. It's been completely reliable. There's always going to be drive failures with any piece of spinning disc. Those are expected and they've been treated, at least in the US region, with really rapid response times, really great support. Support for upgrades has been painless. HPE is very proactive about doing that - they'll let us know that there's a new version and they'd like to upgrade the array. It's fantastic.

It's getting better in Europe, but it could still stand to improve.

I would recommend it over anything. It's a great array; the cost was very competitive; the performance is great.

We used it in a casino BI environment, along with the BladeSystem 3000. It was a very good performer, and really no problems with it. It was rock-solid. Using it in a BI environment, we got a lot of IOPS, a lot of throughput with it, and very good performance.

It's a good performer. There's a lot of options coming out with the 3PAR and I'm very interested in looking at the old Flash systems too. In fact, I'm actually thinking of converting the 3PAR StoreServe that we have over to an old Flash system.

It needs to be cheaper.

We're just getting into the 3PAR world. In fact, we're getting ready to stand it up. We just got it. It's not yet running, but I've used 3PAR in the past as well.

It's very stable.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

It's a very expensive solution.

I think it's some of the software features. They've done a good job, and there was always a good class enterprise storage area network. 3PAR's always been at the top. That was a very good purchase by HP when they purchased 3PAR a few years back. That gave them a good enterprise platform, storage platform, that they are now building onto it.

In a converged environment, 3PAR is a very good product to look at. There's a lot of good competition out there with NetApp and EMC VNX, but 3PAR is right up there with them. It has features and performance.

We have a HP 3PAR C7200 storage array with a small portion of it being Flash. Even though it's a small percentage of our total SANs usable capacity, the applications that we run off it have greatly exceeded our expectations. I can't even fathom the performance increase of having an all-Flash array. Using HP's Adaptive Optimization including the Flash storage, it's great to see if one of our applications is under heavy stress to see it move to the Flash to increase performance for the end users. This, compared to our last standard SAN setup, has easily increased the performance and accessibility of our on-site applications ten-fold.

For the end users: This allows us to deliver content to them faster, access their files faster, load apps quicker, and increase stability of them, all to boot! This was a very imperative piece as we have an extraordinary first year of full 1-to-1.

For us (IT): Having the access to this technology has been amazing! This allows us to do so much with our virtual infrastructure. We can monitor things more accurately, move things around with no performance decrease, and, let's be honest, seeing all those IOPs is just fun!

Overall, having the Flash availability with a HP 3PAR Storage setup has been night and day from our last solution, and I can't wait to really start pushing it to it's true limits.

• The overall quality of the product is fantastic. Advanced Optimization is one of the best features I never thought I needed until I actually used it and saw it in action. 
• The overall speed has been great as well. 
• Create vVols and assigning them to the hosts is streamlined and easy. 
• The ability to delegate and control every aspect of the storage array has allowed us to split the workload safely. 
• The 3PAR StoreServ Management console has also given the console the fresh look that it really needed. 
• Also, their support has been fantastic every time I have had a question or a problem they have been able to help me every time the first time.

The management console could use some work. All the functionality is there, of course, but it can be hard to find some features or do certain tasks. I feel like to get to some features, I need to dig through many sub-menus then tabs in those sub-menus to change a simple thing. Their StoreServ Console (optional) Makes this better, but it still isn't perfect. I would love to see some better help documentation on the StoreServ console other than just writing out the tooltips in a document. I would also like an easier way to re-assign the shelf numbers as they cannot be set statically at least in the build I'm using.

I would like to see more integration with VMware as the plugin currently is good, but I would love to see a ton more functionality with it such as adaptive monitoring. I haven't used HP's OneView software, but I would really like to see something like that built-in with the base product other than purchasing this at an additional cost just to manage all my HP products in one place. I'd also love it if HP started branching out and integrating some of the more well-known solutions into their products by default, such as Veeam and SRM. I know that from a sales point, that might not be the most revenue-generating mood, but it would definitely make a lot of SysAdmins happy.

We have a large population of students and we have gone full one-to-one this year. We are striving to deliver content to them as seamlessly as possible to encourage a learning environment where they can get to everything they need without having to think about it. This can be quite a challenge just by the sheer diverse volume of data that the students use. Everyday is a new challenge that we are more than happy to tackle head-on.

I like the adaptive optimization and that it functions as virtual storage and I don’t have to go in and carve things across spindles.

The biggest benefit is the ease of administration, since we only have one administrator – me. If I’m not there and others need to be able to allocate storage, I can give a step-by-step guide for my company to follow to do that; whereas if I had an EMC product, for example, we’d need two administrators. We’re an agricultural co-op so we have to run a very lean IT shop.

In future versions, I would like to see Peer Motion become bi-directional, and also able to function over the normal data ports and not require extra ports. I thought I was going to like storage v-motion, but I’m running into problems where Peer Motion doesn’t do what it was advertised to do.

It works as if we have a disk on that is currently our destination, and we wanted to put that on our source 3PAR. We have to tear down our Peer Motion and rezone a bunch of stuff, changing how courts are acting on the 3PARs, and rebuild a new Peer Motion configuration. Because of this, it’s a lot more cumbersome than what we thought it would be.

None. It's an easy system to get installed and up and running.

It’s very stable; rock solid.

It meets our needs. I don’t foresee a point where we won’t be able to meet our needs with 3PAR.

Excellent. We do have critical support, but for us, the cost of critical support is well worth it.

Two pieces. First, the 3PAR people (backend support) are kind of hit and miss, and it depends on who you get. I’ve had some great people and I’ve had others who seem to think it was their mission in life to frustrate me. As I understand it, most are based in Colorado but others are based in India, and it’s really hard to communicate with them at times.

We have what’s considered a secure site, and 3PAR can’t just remote into our SANs, and their technicians seem to take issue with that sometimes. However, the hardware people, meaning the field service engineers, are excellent.

Well, we had an EVA, which is another HP product, and our storage usage was growing so fast that we weren’t going to be able to expand that to cover what we needed.

It was very easy to set up.

We looked at Dell, HP, NetApp, and EMC. There are two big reasons why we chose HP:

1. The 3PAR product is a lot easier to administer because it’s a virtual storage that aggregates all the disks together; and
2. There were two virtual products for what we were looking for, but we liked what it did in terms of optimization better than Dell.

Support and service is a big one for us, we needed good support. Also, we had to make sure pricing was good. For our purposes, it’s the best SAN that we have found. The things that keep it from being 10/10 are things like Peer Motion and the back end service.

Unless you have a very specific kind of load that requires a super high-end array, which 3PAR is not designed to be, I would recommend you look at HP, as there’s a very wide range of what HP can cover.

• Peer Motion
• On-line import
• AO

As a 3PAR consultant, I have installed systems for a lot of customers, municipalities, and other state authorities. I cannot speak for them, but the results are very good. The possibility/feature to move data across tiers (AO) has been a great feature, and of course the possibility to non-disruptively migrate from current storage system to 3PAR.

Deduplication on FC disks needs improvement.

I've used it for two years.

As a 3PAR consultant, I’ve seen some deployment issues with the broadcast-handshake procedure between 3PAR and the service processor.

I did find a bug in the system in 3.1.2 MU3. Deleted data on the 3PAR did not reclaim the deleted space.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

Initial setup is straightforward. The wizard guides you through the installation process, but I always install the 3PAR and SP via CLI to eliminate any deployment issues that may occur when using the wizard.

Implementing 3PAR StoreServ for clients as a vendor, we have the highest level of expertise, but it would be naive to rate my own level of expertise without any of my clients' inputs. However, I’ve been working with implementation, upgrade and maintaining 3PAR systems for two years with certifications and continuous information regarding anything that happens within the 3PAR storage.

Since our company doesn’t own any 3PARs I cannot respond correctly on this question. I consolidate, install, upgrade, and maintain the 3PARs.

Wait for the right opportunity as HP tends to do “3PAR bundles”. They bundle 3PAR storage and software licenses at a great discount, so never accept the listing price for a 3PAR, but that goes without saying.

As an IT consultant, it’s my job to compare different storage solutions. Many of our customers want our consultation where I evaluate and recommend different products depending on the business needs and demands. The other products that usually come in play are Dell, EMC, and NetApp. I’ve also seen some evaluations on a “new” storage manufacturer, Tintri.

I can clearly see a trend of implementing a full flash array instead of the traditional 3PAR hybrid solution. Why? Well, the cost of SSD is dropping steady and the $/GB is less than FC disks when using deduplication, which is to this date, only applicable on SSD tier. You will not only have lower $/GB, you also significantly increase the performance, stability, and durability. For a smooth start-up, make sure you have done a valid assessment in your environment before implementing a new 3PAR. Read about the different software that 3PAR can offer your business.

It is for shared storage for virtual machines running VMware.

It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far. 

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. 

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is stable. I didn't have any issues.

It is scalable. You can add storage quite easily.

We have only 10 users. It is a small system.

I never contacted HPE support because I have a selling partner,  but we didn't have many issues. So, we rarely needed any support.

Its initial setup was done by our partner, who has previous experience. So, it was relatively easy. 

It is reasonable. As compared to other solutions, it doesn't seem to be much different.

I tried to look, but it was more about the products that our IT partner had available than me choosing. They had previous experience with HPE and 3PAR, and they recommended it to us, and we followed their advice.

I can't compare it with other brands because we only have this system. 

I would advise having some reference implementation that you can test and see if it's good for your needs. In my case, I would have liked to have the opportunity to test it first to see if it's good for our use case, but I couldn't.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Performance is the only thing that I would like them to improve.

It's very similar to most of the other arrays, which are available there. 

The auto-tiering is something that we like. The provisioning is quite good. 

Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud. That's the other important aspect of using 3PAR.

The initial setup is simple.

The solution should have a smaller footprint. It's large compared to, say, something like Pure Storage, which is a lot smaller. 

3PAR is not as fast as Pure Storage. That's something that 3PAR needs to look at.

They need to look at the frequent breakdowns. It's not as lag-free as some of the other HPE Arrays, the enterprise flash arrays. That's something that HPE needs to look at.

The pricing could be lowered. 

In the future, I'd like to see it being controlled more from the cloud itself.  

The solution lacks reliability. This aspect has gone down in the last few years.

I've been working with the solution for many years now. It's been five or more at this point.

Reliability is one area that needs improvement. I cannot afford to have a 4-node storage array suddenly having 2-nodes reboot for no reason. This has never happened on Pure or even on Dell EMC Storage Arrays. However, I've seen that happen on 3PAR on multiple accounts. That's something that HPE needs to work on. They need to work on their codes and make them more reliable. It was reliable to start with, however, somewhere down in the last three or four years, they just slipped.

Technical support has always been quite good. I have no complaints there. They're pretty good, very professional. I'm satisfied with the level of service.

I've been using it for so many years that, for me, the implementation process is quite easy.

The costs can be lowered. They're a little more expensive, especially on the support side of it. Even with us being that kind of partner, and getting discounted prices, it's still a little expensive.

We use it in our company as well as our customer's companies.

We've used all different versions of 3PAR from the smaller arrays to the newest one, which we have, even their 2400, 2800 versions as well.

StoreServ is good storage, which needs to get implemented alongside other products to allow it to be utilized in the way it's supposed to be - especially in a private cloud environment. Some of the other storage arrays, which came after StoreServ didn't really fully feature. For example, Nimble. We thought Nimble would do that, however, that's not the case. Still, StoreServ is quite well-rounded as storage, which we can still work with on multiple traditional environments plus with the new environments - with cloud and DevOps running the show. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

It is for the storage that we use. Our entire banking system is on it, which is mission-critical.

It has provided us our solution for VDIs, so it has been working very well.

Any infrastructure is an enabler that provides services for the applications that you run.

The ability to have a solid state and deduplication on that solid state.

The deduplication functionality is great. We have seen a lot of benefits in the deduplication ratio. So, it has proven that it is a good cost savings.

It is easy to manage and performs very well.

There is always the case where there are the little things that bother you, but you live with them.

There are features that we would like to deep dive into more, but that is where the consultants would come in and help.

We are using Synergy, so it is the next evolution of blades, which has been great. We have had no complaints, except for the problem with the Spectre vulnerability.

The scalability is great, because if we need to, we can just turn on a blade and start paying for it. Also, if we want, we can shut it down, and the next month, we don't pay.

The technical support is good. We haven't had any major issues where we have had to call them, as of late, so it has been fairly good. They help us when we do our upgrades, but that has been going well.

At the time, we needed a better solution than our previous solution (Dell EMC) for storage, so we looked to HPE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We been setting up 3PARs for 10 years now. It is like second nature for us.

The straightforward setup also applies to experiences with Synergy and Flex Capacity.

We mostly deployed it ourselves. We also had help from HPE, because we purchased directly from them. Our experience with HPE was great. This is the case when they give you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services.

We have seen ROI.

We did not look at other vendors beside HPE. We were one of the first adopters of 3PAR. We had one of the old T800s. We were early in the adoption of HP 3PAR.

Management made a decision to go with 3PAR, because HPE came and made it appealing.

It is a great solution. There are others out there, but we have always been using 3PAR. We are pretty happy with it.

We are using the GreenLake Flex Capacity offering. At first, the service was great, because we had a configuration that was meeting our needs. However, when the issue came with Spectre, and then the L1TF vulnerability came out, those really affected us, so hopefully we will find a solution that meets our needs going forward. That is what we are looking at now.

We just started getting into InfoSight predictive analytics. It is something that I want to explore more, and something that I want to get going.

I can say that, "All-flash is the way that the future will be."