HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

Reliability. It’s a good, solid product with ease-of-management.

Before switching over from HP’s old storage, we just needed to upgrade our aging infrastructure, which was pretty easy.

3PAR has everything that I’m interested in. I come from a storage background, and everything that I want to see is there. I don’t really have anything pressing to suggest, but nothing is perfect.

Stability is rock solid.

If my company doubled in size, I could scale it well.

Everything has been very positive with no issues. Working at a nuclear power plant, it’s mostly on our end when issues come up. Otherwise, HP’s been perfect.

It was mostly just aging storage. We used HP AVA before, and so we just switched over to a new product.

It was purchased prior to me being there, so I’m not sure what else was considered.

We always look for ease of use, and 3PAR is very easy to use.

From my experience with other storage platforms, if you want something where underlying hardware is designed with a goal and you rely on pre-existing hardware around which you build your product, you’re setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. It seems to me that something like 3PAR, where it’s designed around a specific product, just makes life so much more easier. You’re essentially setting yourself up for success with a product like 3PAR.

The performance is a good feature.

We have consolidated our storage solution from six EVA's of various ages into a single 3PAR array.

The support needs to be improved.

I've used it for three years.

The only issue I run into with HP storage is that they are not really focused on parallel file systems. It's not that their hardware is incapable, it's that HP's knowledge and support in this space is extremely limited and they are not interested in developing it.

No issues encountered.

The array was fully built out when purchased. The only scalability available is to stripe the file system across a second array, which is a very viable option.

The pre-sales team is 8.5/10, however, post sales team is a 3/10.

The parts replacement is good, however, as for serious technical issues, getting to someone who actually knows enough to help is usually a challenge. This is especially for areas that HP are not interested in developing.

We migrated pieces from various storage technologies - EVA, Nexsan, and an old EMC Clarion. They were all EOL and 3PAR appeared to have the performance to consolidate all the workloads at the right price.

Any time you're setting up a parallel file system, the setup is going to be complex. I'd say it was no more complex than any other. However, HP's limited experience with parallel file systems on their hardware (especially at the time we purchased the 10800 three years ago) was limited so a lot of performance tuning had to be done prior to releasing the system into production.

We did it mainly in-house, but HP brought in a partner for the rack, stack and cabling. I then did the implementation with limited guidance from HP engineers.

I don't know the financials, but we were able to quadruple the production output by shifting the work to the 3PAR array.

I don't have an idea of actual numbers, but I do remember at a high-level meeting, stating that a three year lease, including hardware support, would cost us about as much as we were then paying for support for the six EVAs that we owned.

• DDN
• EMC
• Isilon

3PAR is the best storage product HP has ever sold. It's not cheap, but it's definitely one of the better block-level storage products out there.

The solution provides streamlined deployment compared to other products. It has a smooth interface and configuration. Also, it is easier to do pre-requested checks as well.

They should add AI-enabled dashboards to the solution.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

It's a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have around 500 customers using it.

The solution's initial setup process is easy. If there are no hardware issues during initial configuration checks, the process takes two and a half hours to complete. It requires two executives for maintenance.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I advise others to test the feasibility of the solution's compatibility checks feature when moving from source to target. Apart from that, it is easy to use. I rate it as a nine.

As a partner, we use it to run databases and for virtualization. Another use case is the cloud.

All-flash provides optimization through deduplication and compression and provides high performance for both databases and virtualization. It has increased IOPS by 200 percent. In addition, it has reduced deployment time by ten percent.

One of our customers, using SAP, had 16 terabytes of data. When we implemented this solution for them, their storage was reduced to two terabytes.

• High-Availability 
• Security
• High performance

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

It's stable and uses Call-Home. Support is 24/7.

The 3PAR solution has a problem with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. It's predictive. If my customer has a problem, they inform the customer of the problem and send any necessary parts. They also email the customer to let them know when they need updates.

The initial setup is easy.

We see ROI after six to eight months, by using all the capacities of all-flash, including deduplication and compression.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good.

In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

3PAR is our primary storage for everything aside from VDI, which is where we are using our Nimble.

We use everything from point of sale to database. Those are the two big mission-critical applications. There is also virtualization for servers.

It makes for less administrative overhead.

The solution has improved our throughput by helping us keep up with the demand and acquisitions that we have been going through.

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

The quick, easy deployment, along with its administration, are its most valuable features.

I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team.

It has been a lot more stable over the past year that I have using it. Early on, we did have some issues, but working with HPE, we were quickly able to fix all that. Since then, it has been very stable.

It does help with the growth, mainly in some of the point of sale systems that we need.

I would rate the technical support about a seven or eight (out of ten). They have been pretty good. The response time has been pretty good for any issues that we have had. From a hardware standpoint, we haven't had that much. It has been more from a software side, and we have had some pretty good responses from HPE.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is quick and very intuitive. You can turn it on and figure out pretty much what you need to do right away. You don't have to have too much hand-holding for it. So, it's fairly easy to use.

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

It has reduced time to deployment by about 30 percent, mainly from the virtualization server standpoint.

I have used a number of different storage solutions, and the HPE products are probably the best from an ease of use and administrative standpoint. 

From my experience in the past with other storage solutions, it is very easy to use with pretty good support. So far, from what I have seen, I do like it.

It is a real good solution. It is probably one of the better storage solutions for large enterprises and main back-end storage that I have used in the past.

We do the InfoSight predictive analytics. We have just gotten into it with the 3PAR storage, as we have mainly used it on the Nimble side.

We actually don't use the deduplication right now. That is something that we have looked into, but haven't implemented yet.

It's the performance that we need. Before, we had another system and we noticed that the performance wasn't enough, so now we have two types of 3PAR systems, the 20850 all-flash and also the 8450 all-flash. We can really see that the performance is much, much better and the latencies are much lower. That's what we needed. 

The performance.

The new interface, the OneView, is a nice interface. 

The command line is very extensive, a lot of tools so in comparison to other vendors. It's one of the great things about 3PAR, that you can really drill down on performance, get statistics, really know how your system is internally performing. You don't need to wonder what is happening, you can really see it inside.

For performance it's all okay, but we are also hoping for the compression feature, hoping that we can have not only good performance but also more gain in our capacity; we are still waiting for it to be deployed.

We have had a painful migration to transform from the old way of doing dedupe, in version 2, to the new way of doing dedupe; and also getting rid of the old CPGs with the old way of storing the data. So it's a bit painful, cost a lot of manpower to do it.

One big thing that we really need - it's a simple thing - is longer names for our volumes. Now they're only 28 characters and we try to have the same name convention as our VMware guys, the datastore names. We want the same name, but if we want to create a SnapShot, and we want to add something - an underscore or something like that and maybe another number - then we have issues. It's only 28 characters and we then hit our limit. Twenty-eight is too low nowadays. I will ask our Technical Account Manager to do an enhancement on that. It should be 64, or at least more than 32 characters. 

It sounds simple but, somehow, I think it's a deeper integration issue and it's not so easy to change. But I need to ask for it because now we are trying to use SnapShots for copying production data to servers and we need those extras, a space, character spaces, to create a longer name.

We haven't had any downtime. There have been some small issues sometimes with an upgrade, a link went down but we didn't investigate further. Or sometimes we send it to support but it takes too long. But no downtime, not like we hear from other customers. Sometimes they really have a node that reboots; or our colleagues in Hungary, they had some issues, but we haven't had any downtime or the like with our 3PAR systems. We're happy about that.

Setup was very easy. I think even for the 8450 - we had also prepared ourselves -but in one day we had installed everything and it was up and running. So it's easy to set up.

I rate it about seven out of 10. It's not bad but it's also not the best. We had some issues, now they are resolved, but one issue existed for a year. We needed to migrate everything, and all the extra work needed to be done by our VMware colleagues, and they would not be so happy if we ask again to transform something.

Also some things were promised, like turning on/turning off dedupe and compression on the fly. But now it will create another one, compress, and then migrate it via the VMware tools. So we are really depending on vMotions. We wanted to remove the load from our VMware colleagues so that we could say, we will do the transformation to compress, you don't need to worry.

The main features are good pricing, very good options, and ease of use. From a management point of view, the reports provided by the management console are very good.

We are pretty happy with what we have. One small disappointment was when we invested in an HPE 3PAR 7440c two years ago. We had heard that it was supposed to be a long-term system. Around a year later, when they answered our RFP, it was for an HPE 3PAR 8400c, which was already on the market. The HPE 3PAR 7440c system was a bit old. I would appreciate if they made more of an investment in the “c” series.

We are wondering what we should do for the next purchase, because we want to invest for five years going forward to protect our investment. I know that we have the support for new, huge capacity, so on the technical side, there is no pressure.

I would like to see a bit of improvement from the new managed interface because they have this Windows client which was used in the past. I don't remember the exact name of it, but it worked fine.

The new web-based interface for reports is great for some parts of the monitoring. But for day-to-day usage, it’s not very user-friendly.

This solution has been in production for a year and a half, and we have installed everything on it. It’s 99% stable. We had some crashes, but they were due to technical problems. All companies have these kinds of things happen.

The scalability of this solution is pretty easy. When we did the initial sizing of the solution, I estimated our business needs at the time. Approximately three years ago, the estimate was about 700 TBs in total. We had two sites, so I sized it with all of the documentation and with staff feedback to have it grow in size to 1.5 PBs per site. That comes out to 3 PBs in total.

We have had very extensive growth due to some medical applications we use, such as DNA and image analysis. We are up to 2 PBs for each system. This is our maximum capacity, but it's our problem because we scaled it up too much.

I have used technical support and they are pretty good, responsive, and quick. Many companies outsource technical support and then you have a very process-by-process situation. Overall, the technical support is okay. We've had some problems, but we can survive.

When I arrived two and a half years ago, they were using multiple Windows solutions. They were using NetApp for all of the file services and we decided to separate. We decided to keep NetApp for all these file services, but I suggested that we use FlexArray in order to virtualize our NetApp tool with a disk from HPE 3PAR.

They also had a lot of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). They were customers of Hitachi for 10-15 years. They had multiple systems. My goal was to consolidate everything on those boxes. Currently, we have one storage box per site. There are almost 2 PBs for each site and we have storage arrays to perform the deduplications and backups.

Since I already had experience with storage solutions for almost 15 years with IBM and Hitachi solutions, I did an RFP to find our next provider of a storage solution. I made a request for features. As a public institution, we are primarily focused on price, and the competitive price was one of things I really appreciated about HPE.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was really, really straightforward and easy. Because we are one of the biggest customers of HPE 3PAR solutions in Switzerland, our problem was that the consultants weren’t with us during the installation. The installation was just done by installation wizards.

When we did some auditing, we requested a highly technical guy from HPE to come directly to us. They sent us someone from another city and he did okay, given our large environment. For our environment, installation wizards are not so good. We needed to fine-tune the installation. For basic environments, for perhaps 70-90% of installations, the installation wizard should be okay.

We received four replies on the RFP, and HPE beat them all in terms of price.

You need a good service contract. HPE has a solution called Datacenter Care. If you are a big, critical customer, then you should get this type of contract.