HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

Our primary cases for HPE 3PAR Flash Storage 7000 are: 

• Transport sector
• Four nodes, 1000 virtual machines
• Entire rack solution
• Partially flash
• 350TB (dense IO).

The bad news: In its initial firmware, both four-node clusters were locked down. The downtime was 17hrs, and once patched, it worked like a charm — no outage for two years. Whereas, IBM SVC had three outages (node crashes) with impact in the 2 yrs before

• Four-node performance
• No split IO groups as on IBM SVC clusters.
• Easy tiering (with a small % of cache) did a good job in a large scale environment of 1000 VMs on 350TB external Monitoring, giving a detailed dashboard. A nicely virtual appliance for remote callout support to HPE services.

• Made on three times a price comparison, and only on one occurrence, the largest enterprise infrastructure of all three was HPE able to compete with its competitors.
• It's way too expensive for the SMB market.
• HPE care packs like datacenter/enterprise provide highly automated reports and reviews.
• I liked the periodic SAN performance reviews which are highly detailed reports in about 100 pages and provide recommendations and a final score. However, the price is outrageous!

We use this for our highest tier level applications, our tier 0 through tier 2, so those are our mission critical and business essential type of applications. We want to make sure that we have the most critical things running on the best equipment that we have, and it is performing well right now. 

We have been working with 3PAR for almost three years now. We leased two arrays, struggling with it a bit. However, HPE did right by us and provided the resources (people, hardware, and additional storage) to do what we needed to do.

It has been reliable recently. In the past we did not have very good luck with it the first year or so that we owned it. Now that HPE has put the right resources, as well as the additional solid state drives, it has helped improve the performance and stability.

We are taking somewhat of a different approach. We are going more towards a hybrid solution in our data center. We are focusing more on developing our hyperconverged technology, and expanding it. We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward.

Tech support is great, and that is for any of their team who has ever worked with us. They are willing and committed to making sure the customer is treated the way we need to be. For example, they were there for about a month or so when we were having calls every day with them. 

Initial setup was straightforward and fairly easy. The hard part was that we were on EMC VNX and trying to get those converted over into the HPE 3PAR, that process took awhile, along with scheduling downtime to get some of the physical stuff migrated over to the new device.

We ran into some struggles when we were trying to implement it. We have two production data centers running Active-Active. Our arrays did not like talking, reading, and writing to each other. Therefore, they were causing some hiccups, but after several phone calls and meetings with HPE reps, and some additional storage, we were able to get it working exactly where we needed it to.

I would have rated it higher, but there was a length of time that it took to resolve and get the product working the way we wanted it to. This happened on day 60 rather than day one.

We're using all-flash 3PAR to set up a private cloud hosting platform within our company; so for the amalgamation DCC work, bringing smaller datacenters onto the sites. We use that as our primary storage. We use RCG technology to replicate across our two datacenters.

 It's seamless. We've had no issues at all.

Certainly now, with the all-flash arrays, the performance that we get out of those means that we can host far more VMs on a smaller virtual volume. We get much better performance out of those volumes now.

• The Remote Copy Group is amazing for the replication stuff. 
• We also use dynamic optimization to go between tiers. 
• The reporting, as well. We can quickly see performance per CPG and per LUN. You can drill right down to see actual performance to the virtual volumes themselves. That's really good.

We're going to start to explore integration with public clouds, and I know that that's something that's very hot in the storage space at the moment. That's something we're looking at. 

Apart from that, we're looking forward to going to the next firmware major release 331. And also the InfoSight stuff that's coming along the pipeline.

3PAR, for us, has been incredibly stable. We haven't had many issues at all, except at periods of change; in firmware updates, that kind of stuff. 

We have seen some issues prior, but those have been resolved very quickly by the engineer who's been working with us on the firmware upgrade. We've rolled back, fixed those issues, and then been able to proceed.

Really scalable. That's one of the reasons we're here this week at HPE Discover, is to have a look at what options we've got to increase the space in our 3PAR, because our platform's growing. Our storage will grow with it.

We use support all the time. Once you get to the level-2, level-3 guys, then usually they've got the right ideas.

It's getting better. I think escalation processes have improved dramatically over the last 12 months. We're engaged with our account managers as well, to help improve that process. We're quite strongly engaged with HPE about the technical review and support process. We have had issues in the past, I'm not going to lie. But it's getting better.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we're pretty much an HPE house. But I think the options you have to expand - within the storage space - you've got to have all those options. Especially performance. I think that's what we're looking for. And the support, as well.

It's an eight out of 10. It's pretty solid. We've had a few problems. But, from a performance point of view, our customers are very happy and so are we.

I'd take a serious look at it. I think 3PAR is a great product.

We are using it for the installation as part of our customer solutions. We are not end user, we are integrator, and we are using it in big IT infrastructure projects for our different customers, mainly for NATO.

They are reliable. They are fulfilling their requirements. They have the right features for our customers. It's the overall combination, together with the complete architecture of the servers from HPE.

There's nothing at the moment. Everyone is pretty happy.

From our perspective, and from our experience with the customer, it's a really stable solution. We have no problems with the customer, no negative feedback from them, and we have been relying for years on close cooperation with HPE in this area.

I think our customers will use it for the long term, even though they are now on the way to change. I think the special environment we are working in, they will use it for some years, and it is scalable.

The support from HPE in our projects is always very good. We have been working together for 15 years in this customer environment, and one of the main reasons to stay with HPE is the very good support we have had from all the HPE people over these years. That's one of our main success factors.

I give it a nine out of 10 because it fulfills what we need and, as I said before, it's reliable and it satisfies our customers. That's the most important point for us; to have satisfied customers.

It's consistency. And again, it's going through to HPE for everything. And I know that my blade, my DL and my 3PAR are all going to work seamlessly together.

What I like about 3PAR is just how easy it is to use. A lot of my guys don't do storage admin every day and yet they have no issues allocating the storage. From my perspective, it's really easy for me to be able to get in and do any troubleshooting with it and it's very consistent. It's a rock steady performer.

Upgrades on them are a bit tricky. For us to do a head swap on one is a full outer joiner storage frame, which is obviously not that easy to do in a production environment.

We have looked at various competitors, and we have swung away from HPE storage, and then back into HPE storage as well. We were looking at EMC for a while, we actually had some BMCs in our environment as well. Right now, they are running alongside our 3PARs, we do actually want multi-vendor storage for their environment, depending on what the demands are for the storage. We treat our 3PARs as our tier two storage.

Either go all Flash or at least a mix of flash and near line, you don't want to just get locked in with just near line or SaaS, because you're going to get locked in with slow disk and it gets really hard to upgrade after the fact.

We use 3PAR for data storage in a factory setting. We currently have about 200 users working with it across multiple departments, including production and finance. 

We choose 3PAR for its speed. It's so fast and reliable. I don't know what else to say about it. 

I've been using 3PAR for about six months. 

3PAR is stable. 

3PAR is highly scalable. 

One of 3PAR's advantages is that it's easy to find a qualified technician. It's such a common device. We are using it in Turkey. France, Spain, and other locations.

3PAR is our first all-flash storage array. We had a different storage solution before, but it wasn't all-flash.

Setting up 3PAR is somewhat complicated, and it took about a week. We need about two or three people for maintenance. 

HPE does the installation themselves. They were on time and fast.

We've seen a return on our investment, but it's hard to calculate it precisely. We plan to use it for the project for a minimum of five years, maybe more. 

We pay a yearly license. It's affordable. 

We use the StoreServ as our main storage device. We have one unit in the main site and the other in the DR site, with replication between them. We have a file server running, it hosts our database, and it acts as our Exchange server.

The performance is very good.

This product has come to the end of its lifecycle. We could keep it for many years but we are following the recommendation from HPE and are looking to either the Nimble or the Primera.

This is an expensive product, so the price could be reduced.

We have been using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ in our organization for about five years.

This is a stable product.

This solution is scalable. We have 50 users in our company and our clients have approximately 500 people who are using it.

Technical support is perfect.

We did a comparison in the market, and HPE was the best service providers for regular configuration and for the remote configuration.

Previously, we were using HPE MSA.

The installation, which included migration from our old system, took approximately one week.

The HPE partner installed this solution for us.

We have an IT member in our organization to maintain it, but we have a support contract with a center that is a supporter of HPE. They provide us with support and services. This is not only for storage but for everything that is included.

The SSD is a little bit expensive.

We are now thinking about transitioning to the HPE Nimble or Primera, although not this year. This may happen in 2022. We plan to continue using this solution for performance, and availability. We are following the recommendation of HPE. They have recently started to mention the Primera and Nimble, which is why we are studying them.

We are not looking as much at Nimble because we are interested in the 100% availability that Primera has. The Primera is a little more expensive than the Nimble, so this is something that we have to think about.

This is a good solution and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.