HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

The service and the support, as well as the technology. Yes, there are plenty of technical features that it offers, which we would expect from HPE. One of the reasons that we use HPE is because they tend to provide a quality product with all the latest advances in technology; so, its storage level, things like deduplication, all-flash array, real-time replication.

In addition to that, it's just as important that the ongoing support and monitoring of the system is proactive, and also the account management side. If we have particular challenges with either the specific design and build of the array or we need to upgrade, we feel like we have good support from the people who own our relationship to help guide us through that process.

It's a very critical technology component within our service offering. The storage sits central to everything else, such that it needs to be really robust. It needs to be highly available and it needs to be secure as well. All those things are very important. Because we're a service provider and we offer multitenancy, we need to be available to do that in a way such that we can host multiple clients’ data on the same storage system and in a secure fashion.

I suppose I’d like to see more security in terms of encryption on the device without it impacting performance. For all I know, that might exist. It’s something occasionally we get asked for. Our understanding has been that there are challenges around introducing inline encryption to a storage system because it increases the performance overhead.

Initially, some years ago, it missed a few important features. Until reasonably recently, one feature that was missing was the asynchronous real-time replication. In the last year or so, that's been introduced. I think that's taken too long. That was a little bit of a step back.

We've been using 3PAR for about five or six years.

Overall, touch wood, we've never had a major failure. We found it to be very, very stable. I think there are some challenges when it comes to upgrading the firmware on the system, and making those incremental updates. Apart from that, it's pretty rock solid.

I suppose that those types of highly scalable environments that perhaps larger service providers need; we don't really push the boundaries of the product in that sense, too much. There are some step changes you have to make, I suppose, as you grow, which you'd prefer not to. You have to invest, maybe, in more enclosures or those kind of things, whereas you'd like it to be a bit smoother.

From a financial point of view, which is probably the main challenge there, HPE are providing solutions for that in the terms of flexible capacity, where they help part share the financial responsibility and give you a more linear and smooth scaling of the system, and help you fund that.

Before 3PAR, we used the HPE EVA technology. We’ve always used HPE.

We have looked at EMC as an alternative to HPE 3PAR, but in terms of servers and storage, we are very much aligned with HPE and have been for over 20 years, so there are a lot of reasons why we use them.

One of the reasons we selected 3PAR was a similar reason that HP first acquired 3PAR: It's used by the world's biggest service and cloud providers. They're particularly focused on the multitenancy elements. It provides virtual domain technology that allows you to securely separate different customers' environments and where they store that data. You basically create multiple virtual SANs within a SAN. For a service provider who's doing multitenancy, clearly that's a big advantage for us.

The most important criteria when selecting 3PAR was the multitenancy piece, because we get a lot of questions from our clients around how we securely segment their data; if we can prove to them that our administrators can only log into their specific domain within that shared storage system and we can provide an audit trail.

Absolutely get the design of the system right. Work very closely with the right pre-sales technical teams. If you don't, it can be expensive to try and rectify that after you've bought it.

The compression it offers is probably the most valuable feature for us. We're able to reduce 16 terabytes of data by a 2:1 ratio, giving us the ability to put a lot more onto the 3PAR than our previous solution. Our files include a lot of large videos.

We have about 250 users on it and it's not messy. We're able to tailor it to our needs, including the GUI, which makes it easy to use.

IT is always evolving, but there are no improvements that I see right now. There will be a lot of new stuff, I'm sure. I'm interested to see what happens in the future.

We have no issues with deployment.

It's highly stable and has 99.9999% uptime.

We just got up as much as we need. We had no issues with scalability.

Our prior solution was end-of-life, and this was about six or seven years ago.

It wasn't the most straightforward setup. It would be better with an easier setup.

We looked at EMC, Nimble, and Pure Storage, but 3PAR is the market leader.

It is for mission critical storage. We use it to keep high uptime. We have two 3PAR systems that we leverage.

Its performance is good. We have a lot of applications that have high I/O, and 3PAR handles those with no problem.

It has improved uptime, as well as speed to delivery.

The uptime for mission critical, because have website services that provides 24/7 roadside support. Therefore, we treat it like it is an emergency service and always has to be up.

We would like to see smoother firmware upgrades going forward. We cannot afford to go down. When we went down, it was very painful for all our mission critical system. When we bought the system, we were under the impression that we were supposed to do firmware upgrades transparently, and on the fly with no impact, and it was very impacting. However, this is the only time that we had any issues.

The reliability has been good, except for upgrades. We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us. The proactive support help us with the set up.

We have no issues with scalability. We have been scaling up.

Support was good. They keep wanting us to always upgrade. However, with this failure that we had, it has made us nervous moving forward.

We had HPE EVAs. Then, we had to move away from EVAs, and the 3PARs were the next ones in the line.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days.

We had HPE support help us. 

We have seen ROI with the product. Overall, the 3PAR has been performing very well.

We looked a EMC before Dell purchased them. Cost is what made us decide on HPE, plus we had a relationship with HPE. We have always been a big HPE shop. Otherwise, the products were apples to apples.

Evaluate your needs. Prepare a cost comparison comparing it to what your needs are. Sometimes, you may not need a 3PAR if you are looking for secondary storage. You may want to go with Nimble. You need to look at what your requirements are, then make your determination that way.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

1. Price
2. Best of breed
3. Reliability.

It is performing great. We are using it for our data store and everything, so that is 3PAR mainly using it. It is a school, so we use the management system and all the virtual machines on the 3PAR.

It is fast and stable. It is really helping us a lot in terms of data store, etc.

The Call Home feature is really a great feature, so I do not need to monitor the 3PAR. The 3PAR team is monitoring it and letting me know if there are any problems.

I am not sure because I am not an expert in 3PAR solutions. I do not know what the new features are. Already what we have, it is huge for us.

We have been using it for more than two year with no issues at all. I think it is really stable.

Right now, we have only one. If I need one more, then I buy one more box and attach it to it. I can scale up to whatever I want. I am not nervous about scaling up at all.

I hardly need to call their support. 

I did for when we were going to upgrade our 3PAR, because initially the 3PAR has some blank space for hard drives. So, we ordered additional hard drives over there, so that was a time they need to come up and update all the framers and everything before we were doing it. So, it was already taken care by the 3PAR team, and it was excellent support, too.

We were using a different HP storage. I think it was MSA 7000 series storage that we were using. Right now, it is 3PAR.

It was pretty much straightforward, because our network is not that complex.

We were looking at competitive product just from a financial point of view to have multiple quotations. So, that is why we looked at a different vendor, but as an IT team, we had 3PAR and HPE on the mind already.

Go for 3PAR, straight away as I am very happy with this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a school, we always have low budgets. We are a nonprofit organization. We do not have too much budget, so we care about prices, discounts, and especially about the product quality. The last 16 years, we have been an HPE customer. We are very much happy with HPE products.

We use it for our main production system, for SAP, and also for SharePoint, Microsoft products.

We have a good relationship with HPE, but we still have some challenges in the Arabic implementation and in migration, but for daily work, it's fine.

We built a DR solution based on this, we can sustain our business for any amount of time, 24/7. We have minimized downtime to 10 minutes now, because of this solution.

Support.

More flexibility and expansion, and also relocation, a cloud solution.

It's stable. We haven't have any issues, unless it's human error, until now.

We have issues with scalability because 3PAR has limited storage capacity, so we have to invest more after a while.

We have gotten to level 3, the last level of support. We had some high issues with them, but they were fixed. It took some time. The issue with it was, when it's in production, even one day is too long.

For storage we had Dell EMC, and we used to have IBM but not any more.

IBM is not a Windows platform, and Dell, they didn't have storage at that time. Now they have EMC. So they both have a full solution, like HPE. And they are presenting a solution to us everyday.

What is most important to me in a vendor is that when I need them there, they're available.

I give it an eight out of 10 because of scalability.

HPE is a full solution, and they have a bigger scale for everything. You can build something cheaper when you combine companies, but there will be problems after a while with support and troubleshooting. Everybody will blame the other.

We went through a whole data center refresh cycle and one of the things is that we needed to look at our disk system. Everything was for spinning disks, so we decided to make the leap to an all SSD data center. We brought in all the competitors, went through an RFP process and 3PAR came ahead. Some of the main things, for us, that we were looking for was the Veeam integration, i.e., the ability to set I/O limits (floors, ceilings, etc). That was the one thing that we were missing and the customer experience was suffering because of it; we were having all these I/O bottlenecks so we were spending more time having the disk manage us, rather than us managing the disk. It was a huge struggle for us.

A little bit of a background about us. UBC is the largest university in Western Canada, we have over 6000 VMs and what we do is Infrastructure as a service for all the higher education in British Columbia. That is around 25 or 26 other institutions, so they look at us for their infrastructure and we provide it. We're not for profit so cost is really important to us because it's publicly funded and it's the tax payer's money.

We wanted to make sure that we found the balance of the experience, cost, supportability for a small team to do this and 3PAR came out ahead with that. It wasn't just the technology, it was, also the relationship that we had with HPE over the years. We don't really have time to fiddle around with things because we're a small team we just want to get to the point and move on and do the next thing. Even though we're not for profit and we're a university, the customers still have the same demands as a bank in all this; they're servicing students and students are young people who just want to click on things, and they just want things instantly as they've been trained with an iPhone (you click, download an app and it just works). They don't have the patience so that trickles down to our team, which then trickles down to the vendors. It's like show us what you can do and go through the list if it doesn't work, then it's out.

The other important thing, in my opinion, is that the relationship is also very important. Technology problems you can be overcome, but relationships issues with the sales teams and resellers really can't. If you have a poor relationship and no matter how well the technology works, that's still going to impact it. HPE has been a partner with us (we do have a lot of partners), but they have been a loyal partner with us and really wanted to know what our problems were and how to resolve them. They get down to the point, such as how do we solve your problems and they understand when we went through it. It doesn't feel like we're being sold, but instead like we're kind of working together.

The one thing that we've always struggled with are the file sizes. With our competitor, we have had issues with the file sizes (I'm talking about the VMDK sizes) and how big a drive can be. HPE 3PAR, still, has a limit of 16 terabytes for VMDK limit and I think there is more to do in this aspect. There are ways to go around it but we still want DDUP and the compression functionality, if we want to turn those on we have to stay at 16TB. We're working with them on that and it is our biggest hurdle right now. Five years ago, 16 terabytes was big, but not anymore, i.e., not with current file servers. We don't know what the users are doing on the other end, because it's the Infrastructure as a service so we just get the feedback. I want to make a 64 terabyte drive and we need to work through this right.

Actually, we're new with users of the HPE 3PAR solution, this is our first 3PAR and we have just acquired it three months ago.

We're really happy with the stability of the product. Everything's self-service, so our whole cloud-front is fronted by the vCloud Director. The goal with this small team is self-service, so we just publish the new tiers and people start using the tiers. There haven't been any complaints. There are a few technical things with them, we think are to do with the software that we will work through with them, provide feedback, and see how it goes. It has actually exceeded in quite a few spots.

It's VMware so they're all data stores, and data store moves are non-descriptive so we can just keep providing more data stores and then, the software figures out where to place the workloads. If the customers aren't happy with the current performance tier that they're on, then they can self-move to a higher tier. SSD's are coming down in price, it's a usable price range now and having an all SSD data center is actually functional.

Technical support is good. It's the standard HPE support where you go through the tiers and if you've worked in IT for a while, you know to mention the words as how to move up. For example, you can ask for the duty manager and then you'll get escalated. However, we haven't got to that point yet. It's pretty new, I'm sure that with anything new we seem to push things to the limit, so it will get to that. I can't say anything negative about it.

They sent us a team to work with us for the setup process. They still kind of managed the firmware and upgrades right now. It is pretty new and simple to use, it wasn't hard to figure it out. They sent one of their post-sales SEs to come in and go through the training. In two days, the team kind of got it. It's mostly that one of the goals to go back to a small team is we want something that is set and then to forget about it; we don't want to sit there all day and manage it. We want to put it on the floor, be able to do capacity planning, alert all those pieces but we don't want to manage it.

Traditionally, we were using NetApp. We did look at IBM, Lenovo, Nimble and all of them. Actually, Nimble didn't come to the table, they missed it; so IBM, Lenovo, and Dell are the solutions we looked at.

They missed the thing, it's hard to describe because earlier we used to strongly believe strongly in just using NFS for ESX since it was easier to manage. However, with SSDs, NFS actually puts in a little bit of latency in it because you have to change that protocol thing. When we wrote the IRP, we made sure that everybody could reply and I think they missed it. There was some sort of miscommunication, so basically, everybody was on that chart.

When we are looking at a vendor, it's a mixture of everything. Basically, for our IRP, the feedback from the vendors was good, this is our problem how would you solve it. These are mandatory and minimum requirements whilst selecting a vendor, these are highly desirable, and we broke it all down so that they could fill it all in. The feedback was good, it was easy to fill out but there were somethings that some players could do. Veeam was big and we use them for all our stuff, but not everybody integrates with Veeam. The alerting capacity planning and all those things were a big thing for us too.

We're not fully pushing the envelope on it, but there are no complaints. Everything's good, the team has been good from the support to the setup to the post-support setup, to we've actually opened a ticket to do their firmware upgrade part. They gave us the plan and broke it down as to what they're going to do and when they're going to do it. Things have been good.