HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

3PAR is our primary storage for everything aside from VDI, which is where we are using our Nimble.

We use everything from point of sale to database. Those are the two big mission-critical applications. There is also virtualization for servers.

It makes for less administrative overhead.

The solution has improved our throughput by helping us keep up with the demand and acquisitions that we have been going through.

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

The quick, easy deployment, along with its administration, are its most valuable features.

I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team.

It has been a lot more stable over the past year that I have using it. Early on, we did have some issues, but working with HPE, we were quickly able to fix all that. Since then, it has been very stable.

It does help with the growth, mainly in some of the point of sale systems that we need.

I would rate the technical support about a seven or eight (out of ten). They have been pretty good. The response time has been pretty good for any issues that we have had. From a hardware standpoint, we haven't had that much. It has been more from a software side, and we have had some pretty good responses from HPE.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is quick and very intuitive. You can turn it on and figure out pretty much what you need to do right away. You don't have to have too much hand-holding for it. So, it's fairly easy to use.

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

It has reduced time to deployment by about 30 percent, mainly from the virtualization server standpoint.

I have used a number of different storage solutions, and the HPE products are probably the best from an ease of use and administrative standpoint. 

From my experience in the past with other storage solutions, it is very easy to use with pretty good support. So far, from what I have seen, I do like it.

It is a real good solution. It is probably one of the better storage solutions for large enterprises and main back-end storage that I have used in the past.

We do the InfoSight predictive analytics. We have just gotten into it with the 3PAR storage, as we have mainly used it on the Nimble side.

We actually don't use the deduplication right now. That is something that we have looked into, but haven't implemented yet.

Low latency storage for production trading systems.

We have multiple trading platforms which are trading different products regionally. The complexity comes when we are applying those trading algorithms globally. It has to be efficient in executing those trades, getting the right prices for the customers with the right spreads for the customer. You have every global FX currency that is present plus equities and future options. If you put all these things together, it gets quite complex.

We have been extremely happy with 3PAR so far.

We have more uptime, better trade times, and less hassle opening tickets with HPE.

• Remote Copy Groups
• Peer Persistence
• Redundancy
• Fairly easy user interface
• InfoSight

It's a very stable platform. It has been running pretty smoothly. It's one of those things where you set it and forget it. We tweak it here and there and we add things to it a little bit, but nothing crazy.

We haven't really had to add anything to it recently.

Technical support is very good. They're very prompt. They know about stuff before we do sometimes.

Last night was a perfect example. We had a problem last night and before we knew it, there was an email and then, about 15 minutes, later HPE Support sent another email saying don't worry about it, it corrected itself, nothing to worry about.

I would think we are seeing return on investment. I'm not sure of the exact numbers.

I've had a great experience with it and I would recommend it to a colleague.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's a very stable platform, it's very easy to learn how to use, has an easy user interface, tasks are very simple for an admin. As I said before, you set it up and you don't have to worry about it after that. With HPE you're in good hands.

I am with a healthcare system. It is for our electronic medical record.

It has been fantastic. No issues.

It is all a part of the GreenLake offering that we have, which includes monitoring, performance, and being able to accelerate delivery with the platform. This is most critical for us.

The most valuable features for me are the simple management of the platform and its performance.

It needs the addition of InfoSight, which is the most critical, along with predictive analytics and AI.

It has been rock solid for us.

It has been rock solid for us.

We have not used their technical support.

We took a look at what our current challenges were with just traditional compute and storage, and we were not fully integrated with those solutions. This solution allowed us to standardize on one platform and be able to deliver it in a quick way. That was all around the most beneficial.

It was straightforward, simple, and easy to set up, along with the OneView tools, for managing both compute and storage. It took a couple of days to set up, and two to three days to get familiar with the interface.

With our electronical health record, we are one of the few customers who are able to offer it as a service to other hospital systems. We are able to deliver these services to our customers, not just within our current business, but future businesses.

My recommendation would be to engage professional services, if you have questions. We sat down and went through a very extensive (six to eight month) evaluation from the components. We visited some labs and other sites. 

Take advantage of what HPE offers as far as professional services, and this will help you make the right decision.

We did evaluate other solutions. We chose 3PAR because of the converge system, the all in one solution.

It has been very beneficial for us.

The most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• Resiliency
• The data replication features
• An all-flash array 
• Performance.

We use it mainly for our virtual environment.

Performance-wise, it's pretty good. You can't say we have the high-end version, but the one that we have does meet our requirements. Overall, we are happy with the performance.

We like something called Virtual Volumes and how we can do thin provisioning. These are the main things that we usually look for.

Redundancy-wise it's quite good. We've got redundancy at each level.

At the present time, there is nothing we see that we are lacking.

It is pretty stable. That's the reason we bought one more 3PAR. We just had the 7400, but got the 8200.  We may procure the 8400 as well. Overall the platform's quite stable.

In terms of scalability, it's quite scalable.

The support that we receive from HPE is pretty good and that's one of the major factors. Sales - anybody can come and sell it - but the main thing is support. After sales, support is the main thing and they've got a really wonderful team back at our place.

We were predominantly an HPE customer, but in the middle we had other vendors also come in. But, gradually we are going back to HPE.

From a technical perspective, I'm not directly involved. I'm mainly from a management and overall overview of the system.

Nowadays, from a storage point of view, there are so many vendors in the market. So cost is one of the factors that pushed us to go with HPE 3PAR. Cost-wise they're pretty competitive.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• stability
• after sales support 
• cost.

The experience that we have had with HPE is pretty good.

Product-wise, it's good. It differs from environment to environment. What we require, for the criteria of our environment, is met quite well.

I would say do a PoC. Have a look at the solution. It's pretty stable, scalable. I don't see a problem, why anybody should not go with HPE. They've got multiple solutions in terms of storage also. 3PAR is not just a single solution. They have, they can cater to a hybrid. A lot of things are there. SSDs, a normal SATA disk, high end or low end. So it depends on what your requirements are. You should be doing a PoC just to confirm that it is it.

This product does not impress me anymore.

This solution should have better reporting and alerting. Deduplication and compression should function without a performance hit. The 16TB LUN limitations should be fixed.

I have used this solution for over seven years at many different companies.

There is a performance hit for a few hours or days every time you add additional storage until the additional storage is added to the pool.

The main issue is the 16TB LUN limit. This bug has not been addressed for years!

I would rate the level of technical support as average.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was average.

For the price you pay, there are far better products out there.

I evaluated Pure Storage before choosing.

Do not buy this solution. It lacks the innovation required to compete in the market.

The data deduplication is one valuable feature. Another thing is the fast storage possibility and the whole clustering mode. Because we have a dual data center set-up and we wanted to have a high availability solution, we chose HPE 3PAR.

This has helped our organization with fast storage and the whole administration which is handled quite automatically. In this way, I can save one full time equivalent (FTE) a year in my team, so that alone is a great benefit.

I would like to see a more stable deduplication because with the deduplication we have right now, the percentage that we can save is not as high as we hoped for. The second thing I’d like to see is a more scalable and faster storage possibility without the main licenses increasing in cost. Now that we are in a full flash set-up, we want to go to a set-up where we can use flash and slower disks. While that set-up possibility exists, there is a whole license step-up that has to be done. It takes too long to do all the licenses. The license and the flexibility towards licensing needs improvement.

The stability, “knock on wood”, is okay. My feeling is that this solution is rock solid stable.

We are on the verge of the next step up. We implemented last year and now we are going to double the capacity. Based on how it’s going so far, it will be an easy step up.

We rely on our partner for technical support. They have a direct connection with HPE for the support. So, at the moment, we have no issues.

Before we were using the EVA solution and HPE LeftHand. We had a large IOPS problems with our ERP system. They weren’t stable enough and they did not have a proven record for us. Our ERP system has a large database, lots of IOPS, and these solutions couldn’t handle it. That was why we changed to HPE 3PAR that has a full SSD solution that could handle the IOPS. The main competitor was NetApp. We chose HPE because of the stability. We know HPE, we have a multi-year contract with them. We looked at several reference cases and those convinced us to choose this solution.

When looking for a vendor, stability and a proven track record are the things to look for. I would absolutely recommend it. When you need fast storage, high capacity, and deduplication, it's a good solution.