HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

The most valuable features of the HP 3PAR solution for us I would have to say would be around thin provisioning and being able to provision big and then see what the utilization is like. And ultimately, the biggest thing, if you could draw a line from all of these features here down to one common thing, it's really the ability to change your mind. Now, as a service provider, you have to be able to change your mind, because your customers will, and if your customers change their mind and you can't, then you're kind of backed into a corner. So, you know, with the HP 3PAR and all of the dynamic-ness of that, you're able to change your mind at pretty much every layer of the technology stack.

So a key example of how the HP 3PAR has benefited our organization would certainly be from a reputation point of view. HP 3PAR is globally well known as a very high end, if not the best storage offering. But in particular, again, drawing back to that performance requirement it also has a reputation around performance and it does deliver on promise. We make big promises to our clients around performance, we have to be able to back that up with a technology that will actually support that initiative.

In the future releases of 3PAR, in terms of the overall roadmap, now I have been to the CDN booth and obviously can't say too much about that. But, HP's roadmap tends to align very well with our expected roadmap, for lack of a better term. And in terms of where we're wanting to see the technology go in order to accommodate the needs of our clients HP has a roadmap that aligns very well with that. So I would say I don't have any particular requirements that I don't think HP already have on their roadmap without saying what they are.

The stability of 3PAR is unquestionable. From day one, we had had not to bag the LeftHand product set, because it has a place in the market, but we had had some issues with that when we really pushed it probably too far. So when we moved to 3PAR as soon as that became apparent, and never looked back. You know, there's been no issues with 3PAR throughout the way through, and I say, the ability to change your mind and change your rate levels, change the way you're deploying the storage, that means that you don't have to break it just to make it what you want it to be.

So the scalability of 3PAR, bearing in mind we operate cloud platforms in New Zealand is far beyond what we need because our market is fairly small, and so being able to scale to multiple petabytes on a single SAN is great to know that it can do that, but it's not something we've had to worry about in terms of an overall capacity limit.

We engage quite heavily with HPTS, as we call technical support, and when it comes to implementing new technologies or birthing a new 3PAR, then we don't do that alone. We work closely with HP to make sure that it's all done according to best practice.

So before we went down the road of looking at the HP 3PAR, we were using another HP product, LeftHand, which was doing the job fine, but as we started to scale and started to see the demands of the client base that we were attracting, we knew we needed to make a change.

So prior to the HP 3PAR, we were using LeftHand products. That was really local disc in the servers themselves, which doesn't scale particularly well, certainly not back when we started, there was not a concept of a virtual SAN.

The initial setup of the 3PAR environments, I would say is very straightforward, when it comes to a new technology. Not so much now, because we have five 3PARs in play. But when our first 3PAR arrived, we spent a month trying to break it, and we do that with any new technology that we're not comfortable with and not yet confident in terms of our own use of the product. And so getting that implemented and trying to break it for a month, you know, we couldn't break it, and so that was good. But that's kind of our model.

Other than HP, we've been talking to, I wouldn't say working with, but we've been talking to both Cisco and Dell, more so with Dell over the years. But we've really failed to engage to the level that we have with HP. HP have always been incredibly engaging, incredibly communicative, with regards to not only the product sets that are available, where they're going. And the entire ecosystem around these product sets is really what adds to the ultimate value. Anybody can buy a hard drive and stick it in a machine, but, you know, being able to support that long term, understand where that technology needs to go, and then get it there.

So most recently, we have implemented the all flash or the entire flash-based 3PAR 7450, and the roadmap towards making that decision was really around performance. We've always kept a couple of keywords close to our heart with relation to our branding, and performance is one of those, quality being the other. And so the all flash environment has enabled us to deliver on promise with regards to performance.

We have two use cases: 

1. We use it with our internal applications, so for internal use. 
2. We are provider of national research computing infrastructure. Therefore, we are using it out there with all our systems.

There are not many mission critical applications or processes that we run on 3PAR. The mission critical applications are usually the ones for internal university purposes, like ERP systems. Our research systems are not a mission critical since our researchers can run their computing again in a week. 

If it runs, and you don't know about it, that is the best thing that you can have in IT infrastructure. This is what 3PAR does for us.

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything. I see this as a piece of hardware, which I don't want see and don't want to care about. I want some AI over it, not because I want to fire all my team, but what I want my team working on is definitely not to take care of our hardware.

It has basically never failed. It is a very stable thing in our environment. We don't have such experience with the other things that we have.

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

We are just a customer, who bought a solution and are running it. We don't really do much about it. From what I know, the scalability should be okay. Generally, it was one of the reasons why we purchased 3PAR, because we believed we will grow, etc. However, it is difficult in the public sector if you can't do an RFP for a specific product. So, you need to live with whatever you buy or whatever is the best combination on the market. 

We haven't really purchase any more 3PARs after our initial buy, and that was a few years ago.

I have never used the technical support, but my team is okay with it. At the time when we implemented 3PAR into our environment, we really needed some help. We had some issues, which were mostly on our side, but my team was very satisfied with the support.

We previously used a number of small servers with disks attached to it, distributed all over to data centers. This was absolutely not effective and terrible.

We had quite obsolete infrastructure. We were thinking about whether we should just upgrade it a little bit or if we should take a different path. At that time, a few years ago, 3PAR for us was a change to a very different type of storage. Today, I would say that it is standard. However, at that time, it was a change. We wanted to improve and start doing things differently. In general, at the time, 3PAR was from today's perspective, like implementing AI over our whole infrastructure. It was a giant leap forward.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't need any complex preparation or changing a lot of things in our environment to integrated it. It was quite straightforward. Bringing books and bringing it into the lab in a few days, then everything was migrated. It was very easy.

We had a reseller helping us implement it, then we took over. The experience with our Czech reseller was great. 

We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying.

3PAR has increased your performance. At the time that we purchased 3PAR, it was much more powerful than any of our previous storage.

3PAR has helped our company reduce the time to deployment by 60 percent. It is easier than before.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We did evaluate other vendors originally. We looked at Dell EMC and all the competitors in the market. We chose HPE because they had the best technology and performance.

We have had a very good experience with 3PAR, so we will probably not be looking at different vendors or solutions.

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

We do use the Memory-Drive Flash. We don't have any problems with latency anymore that we had eons ago. However, I can't really tell you from a technical perspective if it was from implementing 3PAR or something else.

We do not use InfoSight predictive analytics yet, but I would like to.

The biggest lesson learned is 3PAR is good, and I want it for future. Let us find a way how to do it. It was a giant leap in technology at the time that we purchased it, and I would like to do the same next time, which will be very close. While I wouldn't say not to buy a 3PAR again, we will need a new technology that will do the giant leap forward again. We need a big step once every few years instead of doing granular steps every year.

The ease of management is its most valuable feature. It is so much easier to manage storage on a 3PAR array than anything that we have had before. 

I really love the thin provisioning part of it. It has saved us tremendously by being able to provide storage to our Windows guys. They think that they have a terabyte and are happy about it, but they do not use anywhere near that, so it does not chew up space on the array, which is nice. 

Being able to snapshot things for backup purposes has been key. We do that on our databases four times a day. 

We are an all-flash environment, which is really good. One thing that I would like to see is the ability to take storage on 3PAR array and copy it up to the cloud, any type of cloud I want, e.g., Azure, AWS, etc. HPE has StoreOnce CloudBank integration, but I would like to see a little bit more integration from a cloud perspective. In this way, I would have some more flexibility to do more with data, how to store it, and where I have it.

Stability has been awesome. We have a couple of 8440s that have been in production now for about a year and a half with no hiccups; nothing. Its performance has been steady, very good, and it stays up. 

That is why we had P9500s and Symmetrix in the day, because they just stayed up, and they just always worked. 3PAR has been every bit as reliable and available as those systems.

We are in a mid-size company, and the 8000 series has been good. We are not utilizing all of it, so we have the ability to expand. We have a project right now that we are looking at expanding, so from that standpoint it is good. 

You can get way into the 20000 series and just cut into petabytes of data out there. I like that it moves from entry level to as high as you need to go.

Support has been very good. Upgrade-wise, we have had HPE guys call us up, and say, "You need to apply this firmware. We need to get you to this level." Then, we get it scheduled.

They are on time and work with us when we need to get anything done. They get things done, so we do not have to do them, which is awesome. 

I have gone the gamut of old EMC arrays, Clarion arrays, and XP arrays, and 3PAR is just so simple. 

Initial setup was straightforward. It is not a hard array to set up and install. Even though we had purchased installation, this was back when we had the previous 3PAR for a performance tool. I got it and set it up.

I installed 3PAR on the server, and it was not hard to do. 

HPE called us up and said, "Here are the things that you can do with this." I replied, "I already went through all of that." They said, "Okay."

They are very good, and I like the product.

It has kept our operations robust.

What I like is the flexibility and the pricing of the storage compared to other enterprise storage solutions. Also, the technology - they use chunklets, they spread the data out and offer resiliency.

The product is sturdy, it's robust, it fulfills its purpose. However, if the support guys or the installers, those who are deploying it, would show us all the features, I think that's would improve things.

It has very stable. We had one or two hiccups initially, but the HPE engineering team took care of them.

For us it's scalable, absolutely. We are not using it that much. It can scale beyond our needs.

Support is the biggest downside. I'm not so happy with support. I'm happy with HPE's products. HPE being an engineering company, they provide world-class products. But where we are struggling is with the services, the timeliness and how they deliver and support those products.

We were an XP7 shop and we went from that to 3PAR.

The setup is becoming more straightforward now. Initially, we had hiccups during the upgrades and they caused some outages in our environment.

Now, the upgrades are doable at the customer level. They're point-and-click. They have brought the administrative functions down to the user level.

We actually bought the most recent model six months ago. We bought two units, and that was based on our ROI analysis.

I rate the product itself at nine out of 10, but support gets a four out of 10.

3PAR completes the HPE solution for my clients. It gives them an environment that is straight HPE from a storage perspective, from a networking perspective with Aruba, from a compute perspective with Synergy. It completes the whole show with 3PAR on the storage side.

The performance of 3PAR is beautiful.

I only offer HPE exclusively, so it fits with the other pieces. The storage, the servers, the compute, the networking. They're all part of the same suite.

It's meant for the future. If you have certain storage requirements, for years to come it will be able to handle them. The price point is aggressive. We're ahead of the competition when it comes to feature sets. In a situation where clients have an existing 3PAR infrastructure, it is the perfect fit.

It is a very stable environment. This is round-three for some of our clients, round-three of orders. We had some orders that came in about three years ago and then another one last year and they're now going through the third round.

It's modular so you can add more. It is scalable.

Technical support is great. Most of the solutions that we offer, we offer with 24/7 support.

Usually, any 3PAR solution we offer includes the startup services from HPE. It is straightforward to set up. Setup is usually a same-day project.

In scenarios where my clients have an existing 3PAR, its a perfect fit. It will give them redundancy and they can buy more SSDs.

The HPE enterprise name is crucial for my clients when considering which vendor to go with. They have been HPE clients for a long time, many years. To them, this brand gives them confidence that the solution will work. They also have great local support from the HPE team and from us.

The reason why we chose 3PAR is because it was future proof. It had some features that the cabinets we were looking for at at the moment when we bought the 3PAR storage, that were not available in the market, like theme provisioning and the movement of blocks, which are really fast and are not so fast. In this way, we can put the hot data where it should be. It also has a really powerful tool to measure data, how it is working, the performance, and if we have any bottlenecks.

Also, it does not have any spare disks, so we did not have to use this as a spare. We even had the spare space. So, we had a lot of features which were not not available for all the cabinets in the market, at the time, when we bought this storage.

For me, the main issue with 3PAR right now is its cost problem. Right now, there are some other storage cabinets that can do what 3PAR can do; what 3PAR used to do a long time ago. Now, they can do it as well with a more revised budget. So, the main problem for 3PAR right now is cost.

It is a really stable product. We have not had any major issues at the moment. For us, it is a really stable product.

For us, scalability is fine.

We have a contract where we have field engineer. He is working for more customers, but is allocated for us. So, we do not have any issues at all.

It was straightforward.

We used our support field engineer. They helped us on the setup. For us, it was not a big deal because of that.

HPE is changing on the licensing way, because in the past, you had to apply for a license for everything. Now, they have made a combo for all the licenses, which is more helpful, but there are a few things which are not completely included in the product. Talking from a license point of view, to be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for reputation. Also, we want to have confidence in the product. We want to know a product has been deployed for a lot of customers. So, we are looking for a mature product as well.

There are tools in place that allowed easy migration from our existing infrastructure, i.e., our EVA arrays. We have a great relationship with HPE that has worked over many years. We have great confidence in what they can deliver for us and that it will fit in well with our existing environment.

The availability of the 3PAR array is the greatest benefit. The ability to perform upgrades to the machine while it remains online is very valuable. It saved us from making our systems unavailable. In addition, the tools that are built into the 3PAR array are a significant improvement and give us great visibility into what's actually being used and how it's being used. It has simplified the management of the array.

If you're familiar with 3PAR, there are multiple GUIs that have been available over a course of time and the new SSMC GUI is excellent. It has great consistency against the HPE line, so that an operator is immediately familiar with it. However, there are a few features that were included in the previous GUI that haven't been brought forward, or maybe are not quite as obvious. I would like to see some of those previous resources brought forward, or at least an option to see an emulation of that previous GUI.

We had great availability and stability with our previous HPE arrays and that has continued with 3PAR. We have not had a single incident of downtime nor have we had any service interruptions of any kind.

Scalability seems to be very good. I think it's been one of the strengths of HPE products in the array space for a long time. With 3PAR, the scalability is excellent.

The technical support is very good. The folks that have come in to work with us, particularly on some of our software upgrades on the machine, have been excellent. The field service staff is just superior.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex. There is more to it than there was in previous arrays, but I think that really ties into making the machine valuable to us. We probably have to rely on HPE a little more for the setup, but they did such a great job. I understand that it was necessary and I appreciate it.

Our arrays were getting on the older side. The new array fits in with our existing infrastructure very well. We have a great history with HPE support and it wasn't a difficult sell. We did look at other options, but in reality, because of the long-standing great relationship and outstanding support, we went with HPE.

For their own benefit, they really should consider 3PAR. It's so reliable, functional, has great support from HPE, and it is tied into so many of the HPE family of products. It is a great piece of hardware.