HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

• 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 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.

Ease of setup and connectivity to our server environment.

We use it for our VND environment. It’s made it easy to make sure we have the highest throughput capable. It has helped with our connectivity to our DL servers. It’s made functionality a lot easier, doing that.

As far as what I do with it, I don't have any additional needs from the system. It is doing exactly what we need it to do. To make it even better, it could be faster.

It is very stable. The only issue that we've had with our 3PAR system was caused by a firmware update and it caused an outage. It was actually a human issue.

It’s very scalable.

Technical support was actually really good. Once we got the right person on the call, then it was actually resolved pretty quick.

We changed to the 3PAR solution to do a direct connect to 3PAR. Before that, we had a VND environment and we were connected to a larger SAN array. We actually had HPE come on-site. They drew up the solution and the architecture that we wanted to do and they actually were able to implement it based upon what our needs were. When selecting a vendor, we look for support, which is one of the biggest things. Other elements are up-time and hardware reliability.

I was involved with initial setup. HPE came on site for the configuration and they were really good.

We have IBM solutions on the docket. We are really big. Our storage team has everything, so we actually brought in 3PAR to get it in-house.

Work with HPE and the sales team. The HPE sales team has been great to work with. They offered a great solution to us.