HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The ability the use all available disks for different RAID requirements and also the replication is available out of the box. The ability to tune the volumes to spread across newly allocated drives.

Previously, we were with another vendor, and we suffered performance issues due to architecture limitation. With 3PAR, we were able to provide the business an acceptance level of performance which directly has an impact on user experience. We are able to keep up with application and user demands as response times are vital for the business to function competitively.

Better user interface compared to the current PC installed client. A browser based solution was introduced recently and improvements were noticeable.

I've used it for two and a half years. We initially did an evaluation with the 7200 unit. Having tested and being pleased with the outcome, we purchased a 7400 with two nodes, and subsequently upgraded to four nodes. The 7200 was moved to be used for disaster recovery.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It is quite straightforward, it is a completely different architecture as 3par is licensed based on the number of drives and after a point it’s capped, i.e. you only pay for the drives and support.

In-house, good knowledge of SAN architecture is required. All zones activity needs to be done by yourselves.

We would say two to three years.

Always purchase at the financial year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing, and also purchase the maintenance in advance. I purchased it with five years maintenance included.

I did evaluate five other vendors, one example Nimble, however, at that time they only had iSCSI model available.

3PAR is designed around the ASIC which eliminates the CPU bottleneck and RAID limitation in other vendors.

We would say 2-3 years. Always purchase at the year end of the vendor to obtain the best pricing and also purchase the maintenance in advance, for example I purchase with 5 years maintenance included.

HP regularly organizes events which are good to go to as they announce new innovations and share other customer experiences.

I like the adaptive optimization and that it functions as virtual storage and I don’t have to go in and carve things across spindles.

The biggest benefit is the ease of administration, since we only have one administrator – me. If I’m not there and others need to be able to allocate storage, I can give a step-by-step guide for my company to follow to do that; whereas if I had an EMC product, for example, we’d need two administrators. We’re an agricultural co-op so we have to run a very lean IT shop.

In future versions, I would like to see Peer Motion become bi-directional, and also able to function over the normal data ports and not require extra ports. I thought I was going to like storage v-motion, but I’m running into problems where Peer Motion doesn’t do what it was advertised to do.

It works as if we have a disk on that is currently our destination, and we wanted to put that on our source 3PAR. We have to tear down our Peer Motion and rezone a bunch of stuff, changing how courts are acting on the 3PARs, and rebuild a new Peer Motion configuration. Because of this, it’s a lot more cumbersome than what we thought it would be.

None. It's an easy system to get installed and up and running.

It’s very stable; rock solid.

It meets our needs. I don’t foresee a point where we won’t be able to meet our needs with 3PAR.

Excellent. We do have critical support, but for us, the cost of critical support is well worth it.

Two pieces. First, the 3PAR people (backend support) are kind of hit and miss, and it depends on who you get. I’ve had some great people and I’ve had others who seem to think it was their mission in life to frustrate me. As I understand it, most are based in Colorado but others are based in India, and it’s really hard to communicate with them at times.

We have what’s considered a secure site, and 3PAR can’t just remote into our SANs, and their technicians seem to take issue with that sometimes. However, the hardware people, meaning the field service engineers, are excellent.

Well, we had an EVA, which is another HP product, and our storage usage was growing so fast that we weren’t going to be able to expand that to cover what we needed.

It was very easy to set up.

We looked at Dell, HP, NetApp, and EMC. There are two big reasons why we chose HP:

1. The 3PAR product is a lot easier to administer because it’s a virtual storage that aggregates all the disks together; and
2. There were two virtual products for what we were looking for, but we liked what it did in terms of optimization better than Dell.

Support and service is a big one for us, we needed good support. Also, we had to make sure pricing was good. For our purposes, it’s the best SAN that we have found. The things that keep it from being 10/10 are things like Peer Motion and the back end service.

Unless you have a very specific kind of load that requires a super high-end array, which 3PAR is not designed to be, I would recommend you look at HP, as there’s a very wide range of what HP can cover.

Although the technology is packed with features, it's still very simple and intuitive to use at both hardware and software levels.

We are now using thin provisioned disks from 3PAR attached to hosts. Using this feature, along with chunklet RAID technology, we are able to reduce the overall physical storage by about 40%. This was a significant change, as we are now able to run more resources and VMs. Also, we are using adaptive optimization, which automatically analyses CPG (disk groups) and makes automatic decisions to move high I/O regions of CPG to faster disks. This makes the provisioned disks attached to hosts work smoothly under any load.

From my point of view, the part of this product that needs improvement is the reporting. I would like it to have richer graphic charts, more info, and more reports.

We have been using 3PAR for more than a year now. We are using two 7200 devices. The first has 48 disks, and the second is equipped with eight flash SSD Disks and 56 SAS Disks. We are using the flash disks in combination with adaptive optimization technology to cache high I/O regions from disks to SSD. We have no dedicated flash storage, but the solution we are using is working great. Additionally, we own ab old HP EVA storage.

We had no deployment issues at all. and everything was done smoothly and without any issues.

Since we deployed 3PAR, there hasn't been any downtime, or other issue with stability. The main production 3PAR uptime is over 360 days to date and without any degradation in performance or any other issues.

The scalability is superb. New disks can added without any downtime at any point, and any provisioned disk can be expanded on-line.

Customer service is good enough in our region.

Technical support is great! HP 3PAR has a service processor that is connected to HP support directly, so HP is monitoring the status of our 3PAR storage. When any kind of issue or a warning is picked up by HP, we are get e-mails from them with recommendations on how to solve it. HP support also predicts failure of disks, and sends e-mail about disk changes before a disk failure occurs. This is a great level of support, and having this means we have no downtime or performance degradation at all!

As I mentioned earlier, we were using an HP EVA storage device, and it was not giving the right speed or IOPS we needed. We started to look at different solutions, starting with NetAPP and EMC, to HP and IBM. As the price and technologies of HP offered was better than the others, we decided to buy HP. And now, we are very happy with this solution and it is a great product!

The initial setup went easily as HP gave us training before we started the setup and use of 3PAR. This was a great experience, as we were working hand in hand with HP technicians on the initial setup, first run, etc. We gained a lot of experience and knowledge from them which enables us to go further with this product.

We set up everything hand in hand. The HP team worked really perfectly, giving attention to every single detail. Also they were answering the questions we had at when we set it up.

ROI is high, as the money spent on each GB of storage is slightly lower than any concurrent solution. We also got virtualization done on this product, so we have saved a lot of energy and costs on physical servers.

The original cost for two storage devices, was around US$200,000. Both devices have been in production for a year now, and we have not changed a part of it starting from the physical disks. It just works! As for other costs, it consumes about 1KW of energy.

As I mentioned above, we had five or six vendor companies for storage. This was NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP, etc. We chose HP as the technology it has, had no real competitors at that time. Also the price was great!

For sure you should ask HP to present you the product and I think you'll love how simple and robust it is. It's a great product for mid-range, big companies, and banks. It's redundancy and expandability are great, and it is packed with a lot of features and technologies.

We use this product as our primary storage. 

We are in the manufacturing industry and we use the HPE 3PAR StoreServ to store our company data and then we can retrieve it as required.

All of the features this storage product has, work well.

This is a very robust product and it offers everything that we are looking for.

There is a slight difference between what we expected and what was delivered.

I have been working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past three years.

This is a very stable storage solution and we plan to continue using it.

This product is scalable and we have more than 100 users. We are planning to increase the amount of storage space.

We are satisfied with the HP Enterprise technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

HPE installed it for us and we did not hire a third-party consultant to assist with it.

This product is a little bit costly, although this is because it is a high-quality product.

There was a one-time cost when we procured this product and there are no monthly or yearly licensing fees.

We purchased this solution with an open tender and we invited several vendors to present their products.

In general, this product works well. That said, it is not perfect because there is always a difference between what we expect and what is delivered. There has to be a gap.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is our primary storage. We use it with our VMware environment and all of our high performance applications are stored on it.

I work for an equipment distributor, but we have various business lines: everything from earth moving to electric power generation. These are very different needs. Then, we have our accounting system which is on there, plus business intelligence. All these are different types of workloads.

We purchase the 3PAR that has flash tier and we can migrate between the spinning disk and flash. It seems to work very well. It self-optimizes. I do not need to worry about it. It does its job. It is the self-driving car. You let it do its thing and it gets you where you need to go.

It has improved the ability of the executives to get proper insights, because our old storage was not fast enough. 

It is worry-free. I do not have to sit there and tend it, because I have a lot of other things that I have to do. Once you set it, you can forget it until you need to go and add more storage. It does its thing and you can go do your work.

3PAR has StoreOnce and replication. I would like it if they worked together. Or, if I had Nimble and put that either in DR or a primary cohesive management, but still use the cool features of 3PAR, that would be awesome.

We have never had a problem.

It is good.

I have done two different upgrades with them. That is all I have done because the stuff is all working. 

Technical support was very helpful. They scheduled around me, then when it was time, we just met in a HPE room, they did the upgrade, and I saw everything they did. Then when they were done, we left the room and I was done. I had my stuff back.

We are using Tableau, and it is a heavy thing, especially when you start calling in a lot of data sources. At our old storage, it was iSCSI connected and not adequately responsive. Therefore, they had to trim down the searches, and as a result, they were getting less insight. Now, they get everything they want and in a timely manner. 

We were using Dell EqualLogic. The load from our VMware (when we first put it in was fine) had gone from approximately 20 virtual machines to 150 virtual machines on the same storage. The storage load had increased so drastically that we just could not keep up with it, so we looked at different things. I mentioned 3PAR is an excellent enterprise cost product. 

We switched because noticed there was a lag in our previous storage, then went ahead and got 3PAR. 

We certainly have seen value and everybody is happy, including our executives. They are very glad that things are working smoothly and they can get good insights and information from Tableau.

It is a little more money, but it is worth it because it does it better.

We looked at Dell's competing product. This is prior to them buying EMC. We looked at Compellent. We also looked at EMC and Pure Storage. 

We bought EqualLogic before Dell bought it. After Dell bought it, some things changed. Now I am afraid of buying a small player that might get purchased and the story changes. Therefore, we thought HPE is a very stable partner. Nobody will buy HPE. We can go ahead and trust that it will be a stable, supported product for the foreseeable future.

It does a great job and I do not have to worry about it. It worries about itself. It tells me if there is something wrong.

Go to Houston, the executive briefing center, if you can. It is very good because you get a very deep dive and you can ask questions to obtain information. I did it and thought it was helpful.

The solution allows us to provide solid capacity.

The team provisions and it has been wonderful for our environment. We manage hundreds of terabytes. It allows us to deliver more storage than other solutions. It allows us to have many files so we can provide better service for our customers.

Right now, we don't use a solid-state disk. We use a historical monitoring platform for a Telco. For the long-term storage, we don't need so much speed. However, now that we are dealing with the main BI and doing big data with that information, we will need to speed up really fast. Right now, we are thinking of adding some solid-state capacity, or even better, get a new, solid-state controller. That is the new initiative that we have been looking into.

We have not experienced any down times since we started 3PAR. For us, it was the right decision. It was the best way to provide a storage solution for our company. It has been running for over two years without any down time.

In terms of scalability, once we made the capacity planning in the very beginning, we did not need increased capacity. Our operation is stable. We manage a certain kind of volume of data. We don't need to increase so frequently. We have been working with the capacity with which we started at the beginning.

We have used technical support. They came most of the time, even if I didn't need it. I called and they sent some drives if I needed them. There were some pre-failure alarms that we needed to replace and they took care of it. Technical support has been working great.

We were using another solution before. We were spread over different locations so it was the most affordable solution we found.

We needed a new solution. We were working with a partner and they showed us options. We discussed price and we got the point between stability, reliability, and price. These were the main factors in choosing this solution.

The setup was straightforward. It was easy. Most of the activities were done remotely. The field engineer did a lot of it. The factory people get in and set up all the equipment.

We talked to Dell and EMC. We decided upon HPE because the partner with whom we worked hand-in-hand had been working with them for many years.

I would highly recommend this solution. The trends in storage solutions have been going through a lot of changes. They are not as centered on basic storage. They are moving to local and multiple nodes of storage. These storage-defined solutions have been evolving a lot over these last couple of years. It will be a harder decision to choose between one or another vendor.

I think the biggest thing about it is it supports mixed workloads. Instead of having to have different arrays or anything to support different workloads, you can actually support them all within 3PAR and you can, which I think is one of the key things. The other thing is it's virtualized and the performance on it is good.

I do a lot of research when I'm trying to find an answer to something, and I want the documentation to be clear. Tell me what's supported. Case and point, we just announced Direct Connect with 3PAR 8000, which we didn't have before. If you look at SPOCK, the information there was not clear and it looked like we actually had a big debate going. The support on it is very limited for Direct Connect, and it just wasn't clear. The feedback got sent and I think they cleaned it up, but I haven't checked.

If you have a bunch of mixed workloads and you have an environment, it'll support most customers' solutions. You can get a lot more storage in a smaller footprint, so for your data center, power cooling, and OPEX, it's a good solution.

Most valuable to us are the capacity, the scalability, and also the reliability.

The benefit of HPE 3PAR flash storage is the scalability. It generally has good reliability.

The SSD disks mainly did well performance-wise. Now that the cost of the system is reduced, it's more financially viable as well. We did have firmware problems with them over the years, but generally we're fairly happy with it.

We've been with HPE for about ten years.

Stability is pretty good, but we had a fiber channel previously, and we found that was a bit more reasonable than the HPE.

Scalability is very good. The 3PAR is very modular, so we can just install more modules as we need.

I give technical support a 9/10. If we have a problem, we log a call and they come back to us within half an hour. It is pretty good.

We were previously using HPE SAN, but we then went to the P4000, and now we're looking to upgrade our data centre again. So we're quite happy with their solutions and the help. We think it's one of the best ones out there.

The initial setup was complex. We had the HPE consultants in to work with us, and we had a few issues initially. But we managed to get them resolved.

We looked at IBM, Dell, and HPE. We went with HPE because we have used HPE storage solutions before. We have also used HPE network server equipment and we found them to be good quality equipment. Additionally, we found that working with them was quite a good experience.

We currently use the P4000, which is iSCSI. We will go for the fiber channel next time, which we have been comparing with the 3PAR.

When choosing a vendor, their reputation, and obviously the quality of the products, are important. HPE is pretty consistent with these.