HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It has kept our operations robust.

What I like is the flexibility and the pricing of the storage compared to other enterprise storage solutions. Also, the technology - they use chunklets, they spread the data out and offer resiliency.

The product is sturdy, it's robust, it fulfills its purpose. However, if the support guys or the installers, those who are deploying it, would show us all the features, I think that's would improve things.

It has very stable. We had one or two hiccups initially, but the HPE engineering team took care of them.

For us it's scalable, absolutely. We are not using it that much. It can scale beyond our needs.

Support is the biggest downside. I'm not so happy with support. I'm happy with HPE's products. HPE being an engineering company, they provide world-class products. But where we are struggling is with the services, the timeliness and how they deliver and support those products.

We were an XP7 shop and we went from that to 3PAR.

The setup is becoming more straightforward now. Initially, we had hiccups during the upgrades and they caused some outages in our environment.

Now, the upgrades are doable at the customer level. They're point-and-click. They have brought the administrative functions down to the user level.

We actually bought the most recent model six months ago. We bought two units, and that was based on our ROI analysis.

I rate the product itself at nine out of 10, but support gets a four out of 10.

Our primary use case is data retention. We also use it for test environments and deploy systems for customers as well. The performance from it has been excellent, from what we have seen so far.

It has improved our throughput in terms of workloads.

The flexibility and the intelligence inside of it.

The stability has been great. Of course, we've had limited experience with it so far.

Scalability looks excellent as well.

We used older HPE solutions. We worked with our HPE rep. He described some of the functionality and we could see how it fit into our organization.

Our most important criteria when evaluating a vendor are

• performance
• support.

We went with HPE because we had worked with them and they met our requirements. Those were the main drivers. They had proven support and reliability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but it was straightforward. It took about two days.

We evaluated some other vendors loosely, but we were more focused on HPE.

In our limited experience so far, it has been excellent. Support has been fantastic, the setup process was smooth.

Right now, we are finishing the proof of concept stage. We're using it as a data store for a virtual infrastructure for telephoning applications.

Thus far, it's met all of our expectations and has actually has exceeded them a bit. Once we got it up and running, it seems like it runs pretty rock-solid. There have been a couple hiccups here or there related to how some of the fault tolerance features work. But overall, it's performed very well.

The hope is right now it's going to empower us to lower mean time to resolutions. Since it's being used to support a virtual infrastructure, that gives us access to all of the benefits of a virtual infrastructure. So, instead of spending hours trying to rebuild or to fix a broken server, we can instead wipe it out and throw up a new one and we're up and running again.

I like the speed capabilities that it provides. The deduplication features definitely have some huge potential. The latest firmware, where they've enabled compression for workloads that aren't very good for deduplication, I can definitely see huge potential there. It's just going to be a matter of how much time we have in the lab to test all of them.

Automated reporting, real-time reporting would be excellent. Right now, most of the reports are ad hoc, so I have to say, "I want this report." I believe you can schedule them and have them go out to an email address, but it would be nice to have an actual dashboard where I can see in real time, "Ok, this is what everything looks like." It may be there and we haven't seen it yet. It hasn't been the primary focus. We're still in the process of engineering a solution.

The "hiccups" I mentioned above did not cause downtime in any environment of consequence. It went down when we were trying to break things. When we tried to break it, it broke. But thus far, otherwise, it's been pretty darn solid.

I can't really comment too much on the scalability. Most of what we're using right now is still a relatively small deployment. I don't see anything that would cause a problem with scaling outwards, and the system is made to scale. We're probably going to be doing our first augment next year, but we haven't really focused on it yet.

We've been working directly with our product management group to work through any issues that we've encountered. There has been some stuff, but it's mostly related to it being a proof of concept, or the gear being proof of concept.

For the most part, whomever we've been dealing with, they've been knowledgeable and helpful. 

There were one or two small issues where it would have been more helpful to talk directly to a subject matter expert. We're an engineering organization, so sometimes it's very difficult and we're asking for a very specific thing, and sometimes not talking to a subject matter expert right away can be frustrating, it feels like you're getting deflected a little bit.

But as of today, most of those issues have gone away, and we've gotten answers to all the questions we've had, eventually, so overall it's been a very good experience.

We worked hand in hand with our product management team to try and determine what the best fit was. In the past, we worked with HPE MSAs and HPE P2000s.

This was a logical step forward without going into any really crazy high-ends like Hitachi or EMC type of SAN which has all of its own problems that you get when you go in that direction.

The initial setup, when we first got the gear, was actually done in coordination with HPE. They had installers on site. We didn't have that much to do. The next parts of the setup went very smoothly, integrating with Synergy.

We didn't so much evaluate other vendors. For different types of workloads we're looking at some open source solutions like Gluster, Ceph. There are a couple of other options we've looked at.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is support. We're in the telephone sector, or carrier sector. If we have an outage it's going to impact millions of people. So sitting on hold for 15 minutes isn't acceptable, especially when it could mean 911 calls aren't being made. That's really key, we need to be able to get to someone who knows what they're talking about immediately. So far, we haven't had that huge of an issue with HPE hardware.

I give it an eight out of 10. Still extremely good. Way better than most. A couple rough edges that could be buffed out. We're about 90% of the way to where we want the solution to be. When we're there 100%, and we have it working exactly how we want it to, I think my score would be a little bit higher. 

I would tell a colleague who is looking at similar solutions that this is a worthwhile investment to look at, so long as you have the ability to test it appropriately and make sure that it works for your workload. Read through all the best practices, make sure that it will work for you before you try and do it, so you can actually give it a fair shot. But overall, give it a shot. I would recommend a proof of concept.

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.

The features I like are the reliability, the cost, and support. It is quite an expensive kit, but the support we get and the reliability is what we pay for, and that's important to us.

The scalability has improved our organization. We can add to it, and we can future-proof it in that regard. It's flexible in that we can grow it or shrink it as our business demands require. It allows us to be flexible. Since we do have peaks and troughs in our data storage, we need to be able to either add, take stuff away, move things around for projects, and that's just what they can provide.

I would like to see, obviously, regular disks and more storage on them. I would like to be able to fit more data into the same amount of space or smaller. That's always where disk storage is going to go. They continue to innovate on the disks, bigger capacity disks in the same amount of space so we can get more storage for the same amount of room of physical space.

The stability is excellent. It has been very stable, and we do give the storage quite a good workout. It's busy all the time, most of the day, 24/7, most of the weekends. Our account manager says it's one of the most worked three-part storage devices he's seen. We do use it a lot. It's been perfectly stable, and we have, “touch wood”, not had any particular bother with it.

We absolutely have used tech support, and they have been great. They're very good. Luckily we haven't had many issues, but when we do, we contact tech support. They're usually very good at getting back to us, because it's automated tech support. They will actually call us, and tell us there's a problem before we even notice it ourselves.

We were using an HPE product, and that basically folded, as it got quite old. We went and looked around in the market for what is current, and HPE came along and said, "We can do that. Our replacement for this unit is now the HPE one, and this is what we recommend." We got some consultancy from them just to go through our requirements and our needs. They did lot of graphs and showed that it was right for us. It was recommended to us by them.

We considered Dell before HPE. We chose HPE due to its reputation. We had a relationship with HPE previously, and actually they were able to come in and recommend, and actually spend time with us to sit down and ask what our needs were, analyze, project and give us both sets of figures of what we need, how quickly to fulfill them, how long it would take, and that sort of thing. They were able to come in and do this. Other vendors really just tell us, "Here's what you'd like." That certainly won't do as we need to have some details in pre-sales. This solution does fit our needs very well. It is flexible, and we get good support with it. It's stable, and it works, and so I'm happy with it.

When looking for a vendor, look for reliability, backup, support, and reputation. It's got to be someone we know who has a good reputation in the industry. We do go with some newer sort of vendors as well, but we like HPE for their reputation. We know their stuff is good because we've been using them for years.

It's a definitely an easy to use interface. It's also easy to learn. We're currently moving over to more HPE solutions, so it was an easy transition.

Ease of management at the device level. Having the volume sets is a lot more efficient than we do on some other systems, so it's easier to group by host. That was definitely better than the other systems.

One big thing I would like to see is to be able to promote a virtual volume while it's still exporting. That's something a lot of the arrays are doing, other vendors, and 3PAR is kind of the only one that's not doing it. It's kind of the only thing that is not there. Everything else is great.

We've been pretty good so far.

We have a few arrays. We have scaled up a little bit. It's been pretty easy to rebalance the arrays while we were scaling. I'm overall happy with that.

It depends on who you get, but sometimes they can be a little bit annoying, depending on the case, but usually they've been pretty good and pretty responsive.

We're a pretty big data center, so we have a lot of EMC and IBM products. We're kind of starting to spread out though. I like 3PAR, that's what I'm in charge of.

EMC definitely has a better support structure. HP is not bad, it's just that with EMC, the their relationship with the customer is a little different than HP's. That's really the only thing that separates it. Performance is performance. 3PAR gets the job done.

It's definitely on the easier side when it comes to storage arrays. It's definitely a smooth array. It was smooth to get up. Smooth to expand.

Know that the raw usable is actually raw and not a lot of arrays come with their usable being RAIDed already. Say it says 270 terabytes, that's raw, and it's actually if you use a RAID5 you got to take a 20%. So you have to adjust for that when you're planning size. Everything else is straightforward.

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.

We host and store everything we have in HPE 3PAR StoreServ. We created the laws and connected them to our servers, and on those servers, we have VMware as a hypervisor. We make backups of all the data from the servers.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has a good interface, it is user-friendly and easy to use.

I have used HPE 3PAR StoreServ within the past 12 months.

The solution has been working perfectly, we have not had any issues since we purchased it. HPE 3PAR StoreServ is highly reliable.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is scalable.

Here in Algeria, we are facing a lot of trouble finding partners and getting support from HPE. There should be better support here in our country.

Recently we had an issue because we added some hard drives to HPE 3PAR StoreServ and we needed to upgrade the VMware to allow support by HPE 3PAR StoreServ hard drives.

We were discussing with our IT manager if we were going to stay with this solution or are we going to use another solution for a disaster recovery plan because we need a disaster recovery plan.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten.