HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

Virtual machine data storage. It's serving one specific business need.

It is performing as expected. It hasn't been fully exercised as we're still moving production onto it.

We are still transitioning to it.

We're utilizing the Peer Persistence. 

Also, we haven't had to fully embrace it yet, but the predictive analytics, where we're getting notifications prior to a failure - we've gotten some during our PoC and testing - has been helpful.

It has shown a lot of stability. We have a pretty rigorous QA process and there have been some minor issues and some things that we've had to work through, but nothing that has been unpredictable or unexplainable or just flat out faulty. It has been pretty reliable.

I'm not too familiar with the scalability, I haven't to expand on it yet. But, from what I understand, scaling it should be easier than with typical storage platforms. We did recently just add a shelf of disks, which didn't take too much effort. I think it definitely has good scalability, but I don't have too much hands-on with that yet.

Technical support has been pretty good. We always have to work hand in hand with our HPE support teams, we have to provide data and logging and feedback, etc. But typically they're pretty responsive. They dig into issues and but you have to work with them. You can't just throw a problem at them and expect them to fix it, you have to keep an open line of communication, give them the data they need, and work with them that way.

We were in a position where we could reinvent our wheel. We had an older, aging architecture and we needed to update. So, as much as it is a replacement and an upgrade from our existing equipment, it is also brand new. It's a complete transition from where we were to this. It's hard to look at it as a transition when there is that much stark difference. When we get over to it, there's going to be a clear benefit upgrading from what our legacy networks and servers are.

When evaluating a vendor our criteria include

• price
• customer service 
• quality of the technology 
• whether or not it can serve our needs.

I think once you know the system, the setup is pretty straightforward. Being somewhat unfamiliar with it going into it, it can appear complex. Once you understand the key concepts and the configuration points that 3PAR is using, I think it becomes easier.

We worked at it for at least two weeks, but we had other priorities than just setting it up. We were exploring, poking the box, so it wasn't just an out-of-the-box, get it set up process. The out-of-the-box, basic set up was about a day for rack and stack and then maybe another day or two - once we knew which configuration we needed on it - to have it fully implemented.

Clearly we see value. It is serving a specific purpose for our hardware solution. When our full solution is implemented, there is a clear return on investment, not just for the storage component but for our compute networking components that are part of the larger architecture picture that 3PAR fits into.

Our organization already had an established relationship with HPE so, in this particular case, we weren't in a position to shop this piece of the solution around. We stuck with HPE after making the other decisions.

It's a very good solution. It doesn't come without some of its own quirks. We had a few struggles to get certain things working and HPE worked with us through them. Not everything was well-defined in the HPE White Papers. It definitely required working with HPE engineering and the solutions architects to get through that. That being said, the promise of what 3PAR was supposed to do for us, we were able to achieve that.

All our data is in 3PAR. 

Our application worked well after we implemented the 3PAR solution.

• Stability
• Performance

These features are why we like this product.

The newer versions have some other characteristics that we are not using. We would like to use them and set them up in our current version.

It is reliable. The product is rich and very stable. Since we started, we have not had any problems.

Also, we have some upgrades that we have needed to start for a while. However, stability is a characteristic of the product.

We have not upgraded the size of the discs since we started.

Support is good. Every time that we contacted HPE, the problems were solved within a good time frame.

Previously, we had another solution where we have some problems. The application would be waiting for the IO. With 3PAR, everything was solved.

The solution, stability, and the performance work well for us.

HPE helped us set it up and the product worked well afterwards.

VMware and SQL.

In terms of performance, we had an issue with the earlier version, the 7400, an iSCSI issue. They replaced it with one from the 8000 series and it has been doing pretty well so far.

It lets us mix a lot of drive spaces, as well as performance drives, between Fibre Channel, long-term storage, and SSD drives. It performs pretty well as far as moving the data around and not letting a lot of it go to waste.

• Redundancy
• Performance (I/O and stability)
• The tiering

Nothing really comes to mind. We talked to somebody earlier today, here at HPE Discover 2018, about their Docker integration for it, so that's something we'll probably check out next for both the 3PAR and Nimble.

We haven't any issues with scalability. We have added a lot of different shelves to it, we have close to about 400 terabytes. It has done pretty well in that regard.

Technical support is pretty good. We've used it mainly for firmware upgrades and those type of things. We also used them initially for troubleshooting issues on the previous version. They have been helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We did have HPE onsite to help with that. It didn't take too long, maybe two to three days.

I believe it is paying off at this point, but I don't have any numbers for ROI.

We looked at Dell, Tegile, and Pure Storage. We went with HPE in the end because we already have HPE equipment, we're mostly HPE server and software, so we went with that. We're trying out the new Nimble now in our new data center.

When I evaluate vendors the important criteria are 

• redundancy
• scalability
• performance
• metrics for reporting.

My advice would be, make sure you know your workloads going into it and how you will best be able to utilize a solution, especially when deciding what disk structure to get and how to lay it out.

Overall, I would rate 3PAR at eight out of 10. The biggest issues we had were performance issues with the older version, but this one has been doing okay.

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.

Our use case is primary storage.

Forest who actually take a back up of our databases, like snapshot, to another volume and snapchat to be melded for a different operating systems, which has helped us tremendously as far as speed and time to completion.

It is very easy to manage. I can provision disks and monitor the performance easily.

I would like to see the reliability improve. While it has been a good product, the QA of the product could be done a little more thoroughly.

We had a rocky start. It has been stable for last year or so.

It should meet our needs going forward.

Support has been great. We find the people knowledgeable, and it is easy to find the right person for anything.

We did have a rocky start. However, support has been with us all the way to remedy issues.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy to setup. It can be done in a couple of days.

It has greatly reduced my management overhead time. Therefore, it has been good.

The performance is pretty good and the usability is excellent. The only thing which will downgrade it is the stability.

Our primary use case is data retention. We also use it for test environments and deploy systems for customers as well. The performance from it has been excellent, from what we have seen so far.

It has improved our throughput in terms of workloads.

The flexibility and the intelligence inside of it.

The stability has been great. Of course, we've had limited experience with it so far.

Scalability looks excellent as well.

We used older HPE solutions. We worked with our HPE rep. He described some of the functionality and we could see how it fit into our organization.

Our most important criteria when evaluating a vendor are

• performance
• support.

We went with HPE because we had worked with them and they met our requirements. Those were the main drivers. They had proven support and reliability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but it was straightforward. It took about two days.

We evaluated some other vendors loosely, but we were more focused on HPE.

In our limited experience so far, it has been excellent. Support has been fantastic, the setup process was smooth.

From a management standpoint of the arrays, they work really well. They handle a lot of data and, overall, it lowers the complexity of our storage infrastructure. We've been able to consolidate down to a single platform which meets all of our demands, anywhere from our advanced meter systems to our customer information system.

When we started using 3PAR what we liked was the simplicity of the product. We needed a higher performance storage and, in our support model, we needed to keep the simplicity of the storage architecture, keep it as clean and as manageable as we could.

We have seen one area, where we have highly virtualized Solaris instances, where we're getting into the queue depth, so we probably need to do some work in the queue-depth area in the arrays. I'm not sure if its specific to Solaris, because we haven't encountered it on other platforms but, then again, on some of our largest Solaris frames, we are running several hundred virtual containers and we see the queue-depth issue there.

It has been stable. It has been very reliable. I have no problems around it.

As we transform and we're starting to move data, much more data, we're looking at the scalability. I don't have any indicators that it will not scale, but there is a lot of analysis we have to do. We're doing modeling of that data right now to see what decisions we will make in 2019. I am assuming we will maintain at least some 3PAR, but we may have to compliment it with something else, based on the demands we have around our data.

From my experience, tech support has been good. I'm not directly interacting with support due to my role but the feedback I've received has been good.

This is a question better answered by the guys who actually support it, but it's my understanding that the upgrade process is pretty seamless. They scheduled it over a weekend, they rolled the upgrade through, and it works pretty well. Occasionally, there are glitches they need to work through but, from what I have observed, they're minor.

The process doesn't drag on. It's just planning, scheduling it, change tickets go in, and then they run it. It's a process that pretty much takes under a day. And then, after implementing, it's a matter of watching it to make sure everything is smooth after the upgrade finishes.

It has provided a robust technology which provides us with fast access to the data. This is one of the areas where it has improved our company.

3PAR is very fast and robust.

I have been looking into additional functionalities of 3PAR but at this moment we are very satisfied with the basic functionality.

It's stable. I can't recall any problem with the 3PAR technology.

It's scalable. We are creating a plan, with our HPE partner in Brazil to duplicate our 3PAR environment because for us it is very important. It's the base of our data center.

Support Is very good. We get to resolutions very quickly. Our partner in Brazil is there for us every time.

I give it a nine out of 10. 3PAR is very good, but not perfect.