HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The primary use case is DR. We use it in the automation industry.

I has helped our organization with DR and replication of our VM environment and Oracle databases.

The solution has improved our throughput, which has improved our performance.

It has improved our company's performance.

It has an easy implementation and the support is awesome.

We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution.

The integration has room for improvement.

The stability is awesome.

The scalability is awesome.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. We have more places for Oracle applications, VMware, and servers.

We have had to contact technical support. We have had no problems with them. The support is great.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has increased our performance by about 40 percent.

This solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by 50 percent.

The performance is great. 

It is our main point of storage for many applications. We use VMware so we have all the hosts connected to the 3PAR and that's the central point of storage for our whole organization. It's definitely critical, we can't live without it because that's where all the servers and data are hosted, on the 3PAR.

The interface to manage it could be improved. I was looking at OneView. Something basic like that should be available with the 3PAR. OneView has all the bells and whistles, all the features, but I think something basic and similar to that should be come with the 3PAR, at least for monitoring managing it.

It has definitly been very stable. We haven't had any issues with the 3PAR for years.

We believe it will meet our needs in the future. In fact, we already did an upgrade to the 3PAR, because another company was moving to the same location we use and we didn't have enough space. It was really easy, we just had to add more hard drives and another chassis. It was very straightforward to do the upgrade and scale the 3PAR.

It was a matter of hours. Once the chassis was installed, and then the upgrade was added to the chassis - adding the drive - it took a couple hours to do the whole thing.

The support is very good, they're generally very responsive. I haven't had any issues with them in terms of responding in a timely manner to any request that I have had.

We came from the EVA which was the previous version and this is, hands-down, way better. It has a smaller footprint and is actually quicker than the EVA.

There has definitely been a return on investment. Usually what we do is lease equipment. We are leasing the 3PAR for three years, but after the three years I know we are going to use it for longer. I don't think that we are going to use it for less than five years, so at the time I bought the support for five years, knowing that after the three years with the lease, we were going to buy it out. We are probably going to keep it for five to seven years.

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.

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.

It's very user intuitive. It's not really that complicated as long as you have the basic knowledge on how SANs work. It's easily deployable and costs verses other brands is good. This size is also a plus.

It's more about the redundancy. Their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers, the 3PARs are just a perfect fit for the company. They're easily deployable and it's easy to provision storage to the blade server when we need to. It just works, it's a perfect fit.

There's a lot of stuff you can do with the 3PAR. Right now, we're using it for what it's mainly designed for - the provision storage. I'm still looking into all the other features like Deduplication and Flash Cache.

If we see that deduplication can fit into our infrastructure, and if it will benefit the company, then we'd definitely look into that option. It would be nice to have it as a core feature included in the product initially at no extra cost.

Everything is straightforward.

It's outstanding.

As long as you check the start-up manual, you should be able to deploy it pretty simply.

We went with the HPE product because we really didn't have the need for such a big SAN. The company isn't big enough to warrant an EMC SAN. We're a midsize business, so the 3PAR was a perfect fit for us.

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.

3PAR has CPG (common provisioning groups) which allowed us to create multiple RAIDs on the same disks, move LUNS between CPGs and between RAID arrays. No other storage had this capability.

It gave me flexibility in moving things around, for example, I could move the production LUN and test LUNs from RAID 5 to RAID 6 in order to have more redundancy disk failures.

I used it for six months, but am now at a company that is not using it.

It's very stable, and very fast. Creating virtual disks took literally one minute for a 100GB VM disk.

No issues encountered.

HP was very helpful all the way through.

10/10.

We used a NetApp N6040n, and we switched in order to have more flexibility on our storage array as CPG moved LUNs between different RAID arrays.

It's very straightforward to configure. You need to connect the service processor to the storage array and then finish the configuration settings.

HP technicians did the initial deployment and I did the initial configuration. Even without any training I was able to the update firmware to v3.1.3, perform the software configuration, configure the ILO and service processor.

We also looked at EMC but 3PAR was the cheaper solution, and it was more flexible.

It integrates very well with Windows 2012 as well as VMware.

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.