HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

We're a big user of the adaptive optimization environment, so we have a tiered storage environment. We have SST, which is about five percent of the total environment. We have the 10K drive, which is about 25 percent of the environment and the remainder is the inline storage as drives being four terabyte drives.

We have an awful lot of data sitting in our environment. We have about 1.2 petabytes of storage sitting on the 3PARs at the moment replicated. We'd really like to get into data compression to do duplication on those devices. At this stage, we can do that on the SST in the environments but we can't do it on the remaining storage. We'd really like to be able to see the storage data being migrated across those tiers and do duplication as much as possible, not just on the actual SST layer itself. The other features I want to look at, at the moment is the storage federation, we'd like to start clustering out our devices so we can spread it across more storage arrays. I'd just say, it's been a very good choice and it's been certainly one of the foundations stars for a very successful project for ourselves.

Once we put it in and got comfortable with the product, it's been extremely stable.

Technical support is very good. We have a product support agreement on those systems, so the HP support teams are constantly monitoring them and reporting back to us the state and health of the systems. Yeah, it's a very good service from a proactive point of view, so we are hearing things from the support vendor, rather than us going to them constantly to say there's something wrong or we need some attention.

We went through a very exhaustive testing environment and selection process to make sure we were getting the best platform to support our metro storage cluster. We have achieved all the goals we've set out to attempt, so I can say with some confidence that it is a carrier grade class piece of storage and from the point where we put it in we've run without fault, without outage and we're very pleased with them at the moment.

The performance is a good feature.

We have consolidated our storage solution from six EVA's of various ages into a single 3PAR array.

The support needs to be improved.

I've used it for three years.

The only issue I run into with HP storage is that they are not really focused on parallel file systems. It's not that their hardware is incapable, it's that HP's knowledge and support in this space is extremely limited and they are not interested in developing it.

No issues encountered.

The array was fully built out when purchased. The only scalability available is to stripe the file system across a second array, which is a very viable option.

The pre-sales team is 8.5/10, however, post sales team is a 3/10.

The parts replacement is good, however, as for serious technical issues, getting to someone who actually knows enough to help is usually a challenge. This is especially for areas that HP are not interested in developing.

We migrated pieces from various storage technologies - EVA, Nexsan, and an old EMC Clarion. They were all EOL and 3PAR appeared to have the performance to consolidate all the workloads at the right price.

Any time you're setting up a parallel file system, the setup is going to be complex. I'd say it was no more complex than any other. However, HP's limited experience with parallel file systems on their hardware (especially at the time we purchased the 10800 three years ago) was limited so a lot of performance tuning had to be done prior to releasing the system into production.

We did it mainly in-house, but HP brought in a partner for the rack, stack and cabling. I then did the implementation with limited guidance from HP engineers.

I don't know the financials, but we were able to quadruple the production output by shifting the work to the 3PAR array.

I don't have an idea of actual numbers, but I do remember at a high-level meeting, stating that a three year lease, including hardware support, would cost us about as much as we were then paying for support for the six EVAs that we owned.

• DDN
• EMC
• Isilon

3PAR is the best storage product HP has ever sold. It's not cheap, but it's definitely one of the better block-level storage products out there.

The 7200 and 7400 are both easy to manage. The reporting suite is a must and gives you all the information you need to manage storage. Thin suite helps you manage how the storage is used and reclaimed, and one of the best features is the new AFC (Adaptive Flash Cache) which combined with AO (Adaptive Optimisation) really helps performance.

We have implemented two 7400 arrays replacing older EVAs with replication, we used to use CLX (Cluster Extensions for EVA) for the Windows machines, but we never had anything but manual failover for the VMware environment.

With the 7400, we implemented Peer Persistence and this removed the requirement of CLX and also gave us a similar site protection in the VMware environment meaning that we no longer have to do a manual failover.

Majority of the day to day management can be done via the GUI, but certain functions have to be setup via the command line interface such as AFC.

I have used the 7200 for over two years and the 7400 for around six months.

Deployment and migration was quite straight forward.

Both versions are very stable. The 7200 has not had any downtime since it was put into production back in November 2012.

The products that we bought both scale very easily, and were bought knowing what the maximum was (which increased on the 7200 from the time of purchase).

It's very good for the amount of times we have been in contact (not much as there's no need to make contact).

Tech support is fantastic. It seems that you have your own personal support, as we are notified whenever a new firmware/patch/update is released, and we have had the remote support team upgrade the firmware numerous times. We have had only two failed drives on the 7200, and each time the process was simple.

Prior to the 7200, we had a HP P2000 storage array, and this proved not able to cope with the workload (it was designed/implemented and used to be managed by another company) since the 7200 has been installed, there haven't been any issues.

The 7400, replaced four EVAs (two 6500s and two 8400s) and we switched these because they becoming instable causing various issues. They also lacked the failover ability for our virtual environment (without having to buy SRM).

The initial setup was straightforward as it was planned for. Also, the installation document that was filled out had all the info required to make it that way.

Both installations were carried out by myself.

For the 7200 there has been no downtime in over two years and this is priceless, whereas with the old P2000, which wasn’t designed or setup properly, we had multiple downtime periods.

For the 7400. each of the 7400s replaced an EVA 6500 and an EVA 8400 taking up three racks of space, which was condensed down to a single rack. For the first two months, we ran purely on the FC tier (tier one) and the performance was better than both the EVAs. We have three tiers of storage SSD, FC and NL and now the AFC and AO in place, performance is fantastic and we have plenty of capacity.

• EMC
• IBM

After spending months of looking at products and choosing the HP 3PAR’s the best advice is to:

• Plan the installation and migration – this saved us time in getting the new storage in production
• Think about all the features you require as they aren’t expensive and probably will save you money (Peer-Persistence was a good one for the 7400)
• Don’t buy for years – as they are easily upgraded the capacity should be sized correctly.

SSD, SAS and SATA disks in one box, transparent failover between datacenters, delivers performance as promised.

Less data is stored in silos, more is kept in this central solution with advantages of raid, tiering and backup. We are looking into Flash, we already own some violin boxes and have a small capacitiy of SSD disks in the 3PAR.

Monitoring and reporting.

6 months, it’s predecessor HP 3PAR T400 for 6 years.

Small bugs in the GUI that were resolved in the latest version.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

9/10.

9/10.

No, we owned its predecessor and were very happy with that.

Initial setup was performed with a reseller, but you should have some idea about how you would like to ‘shape’ your environment. All can be altered afterwards if you would reconsider.

Vendor team. I would rate them 8/10; An HP technical expert was needed for some configuration add-ons.

Yes, comparable systems from Dell, EMC and Hitachi.

Organize a couple of meetings with the technical staff to build the storage array that will meet your demands. Knowing in front which type of RAID you will need and the type of IO will benefit you.

As a partner, we use it to run databases and for virtualization. Another use case is the cloud.

All-flash provides optimization through deduplication and compression and provides high performance for both databases and virtualization. It has increased IOPS by 200 percent. In addition, it has reduced deployment time by ten percent.

One of our customers, using SAP, had 16 terabytes of data. When we implemented this solution for them, their storage was reduced to two terabytes.

• High-Availability 
• Security
• High performance

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

It's stable and uses Call-Home. Support is 24/7.

The 3PAR solution has a problem with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. It's predictive. If my customer has a problem, they inform the customer of the problem and send any necessary parts. They also email the customer to let them know when they need updates.

The initial setup is easy.

We see ROI after six to eight months, by using all the capacities of all-flash, including deduplication and compression.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good.

In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

We use it for our file shares, our virtual hard drives, and for all of our Hyper-V clusters. It stores everything, like backups. 

We have virtualized almost all of our servers, except the ones that require high I/O, like maybe our SQL Servers. Everything else in the entire organization runs off of our 3PARs.

We actually aren't all-flash, but we do have flash drives for our hottest data which is used most often. This definitely makes everything much more efficient.

The 3PAR arrays replicate offsite. Everything is safe and optimized. There's automatic promoting and demoting of blocks, moving hot ones to the flash storage and the less used ones onto Nearline storage. This optimizes everything and uses the resources to their best ability.

It has increased performance since we added the flash drives. Originally, we had 2-Tier storage (the Nearline storage and SAS storage), but adding the flash storage really improved performance by maybe 30 percent.

We can cut a VM quite quickly, so we can probably stand up a workload in half an hour. So, the time to deployment is quite good.

We have been able to back up our data more frequently now that we have everything on flash. It responds a lot faster, so the IOPs are a lot faster.

The failover/failback: Just to keep our mission-critical stuff running all the time.

The solution’s deduplication functionality has helped us save a lot of space. People save their files over and over again or email them around, then everybody has a copy of the same thing. Therefore, the deduplication is very helpful.

if it were easier for us to manage the product ourselves without having to get HPE to connect, because it sometimes it does take a bit to get the scheduling worked out with the HPE support. If it were simpler, then it might be easier for us to handle it ourselves.

The stability is very good. We have HPE connecting in remotely to help us with any of the major firmware updates. This keeps everything running great.

It has not failed us yet, so it is very highly available and error free, so far.

We could add more drive cages, so I'm sure it's quite scalable. We haven't hit our limits yet, so we haven't had to do that. However, it's supposed to be quite scalable.

Technical support is very good. We bought the support package where they will connect remotely to help us with upgrades and firmware changes. So, it's very solid.

Previously, we had all sorts of different storage arrays, e.g., the MSAs, which are also from HPE. We also had just servers with hard drives in them scattered around everywhere. Now, we have centralized everything onto the 3PAR arrays. 

It was a little complicated to set up originally, as it takes quite a bit of rack space and we are a small organization. Once it was set up, it was well worth the effort.

We bought through a reseller called PC Corp in Alberta, Canada. PC Corp was very good.

I would definitely recommend it. It is a good fit for our organization, and if it works for you, that would be great too.

File Persona is now included, so we might explore doing file shares straight off of the 3PAR array.

We do not use HPE GreenLake.

Biggest lesson learnt: The initial pain is worth it.

It is storage for our SAP environment. SAP is the mission-critical application that we run on the solution.

The snapshotting capability allows us to do a database replication very quickly. As a result, we have some applications which need a fresh copy of the production database everyday, and we are able to give that to them by eight o'clock in the morning.

Its snapshot capability is the most valuable feature, because replicate our databases from production to nonproduction for development. This allows us to do it very quickly.

The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent.

It has latency issues.

It seems pretty stable. Once we got over the birthing pains, it has been pretty reliable.

As long as the array is not full, it is available. We filled it up.

It is very scalable. We can grow it up to the size that it will contain. Then, we have to move to another array, a bigger one, if we have to. However, my understanding is that is a pretty seamless process.

We moved to 3PAR from a different array, which was a smaller array with fewer controller cards in it. So, 3PAR did not increase our performance, and it has increased our latency by at least double.

We went with 3PAR because we have HP-UX systems. Since we already knew HP-UX, they offered us a significantly cheaper solution than the one that we had for storage.

The first array that they sent us was in some type of a factory mode. We didn't find that out until we loaded a bunch of data onto it, then we had to back it all off. We had to replace the array, which was sort of painful.

We are actually a federal customer, so we get the HPE Federal direct team helping us. Our experience was good, except for that one problem with the first array.

We evaluated Dell EMC, HPE, and some other competitors. We went with HPE because of the price point.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using 3PAR is the snapshot capability.