HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We went through a whole data center refresh cycle and one of the things is that we needed to look at our disk system. Everything was for spinning disks, so we decided to make the leap to an all SSD data center. We brought in all the competitors, went through an RFP process and 3PAR came ahead. Some of the main things, for us, that we were looking for was the Veeam integration, i.e., the ability to set I/O limits (floors, ceilings, etc). That was the one thing that we were missing and the customer experience was suffering because of it; we were having all these I/O bottlenecks so we were spending more time having the disk manage us, rather than us managing the disk. It was a huge struggle for us.

A little bit of a background about us. UBC is the largest university in Western Canada, we have over 6000 VMs and what we do is Infrastructure as a service for all the higher education in British Columbia. That is around 25 or 26 other institutions, so they look at us for their infrastructure and we provide it. We're not for profit so cost is really important to us because it's publicly funded and it's the tax payer's money.

We wanted to make sure that we found the balance of the experience, cost, supportability for a small team to do this and 3PAR came out ahead with that. It wasn't just the technology, it was, also the relationship that we had with HPE over the years. We don't really have time to fiddle around with things because we're a small team we just want to get to the point and move on and do the next thing. Even though we're not for profit and we're a university, the customers still have the same demands as a bank in all this; they're servicing students and students are young people who just want to click on things, and they just want things instantly as they've been trained with an iPhone (you click, download an app and it just works). They don't have the patience so that trickles down to our team, which then trickles down to the vendors. It's like show us what you can do and go through the list if it doesn't work, then it's out.

The other important thing, in my opinion, is that the relationship is also very important. Technology problems you can be overcome, but relationships issues with the sales teams and resellers really can't. If you have a poor relationship and no matter how well the technology works, that's still going to impact it. HPE has been a partner with us (we do have a lot of partners), but they have been a loyal partner with us and really wanted to know what our problems were and how to resolve them. They get down to the point, such as how do we solve your problems and they understand when we went through it. It doesn't feel like we're being sold, but instead like we're kind of working together.

The one thing that we've always struggled with are the file sizes. With our competitor, we have had issues with the file sizes (I'm talking about the VMDK sizes) and how big a drive can be. HPE 3PAR, still, has a limit of 16 terabytes for VMDK limit and I think there is more to do in this aspect. There are ways to go around it but we still want DDUP and the compression functionality, if we want to turn those on we have to stay at 16TB. We're working with them on that and it is our biggest hurdle right now. Five years ago, 16 terabytes was big, but not anymore, i.e., not with current file servers. We don't know what the users are doing on the other end, because it's the Infrastructure as a service so we just get the feedback. I want to make a 64 terabyte drive and we need to work through this right.

Actually, we're new with users of the HPE 3PAR solution, this is our first 3PAR and we have just acquired it three months ago.

We're really happy with the stability of the product. Everything's self-service, so our whole cloud-front is fronted by the vCloud Director. The goal with this small team is self-service, so we just publish the new tiers and people start using the tiers. There haven't been any complaints. There are a few technical things with them, we think are to do with the software that we will work through with them, provide feedback, and see how it goes. It has actually exceeded in quite a few spots.

It's VMware so they're all data stores, and data store moves are non-descriptive so we can just keep providing more data stores and then, the software figures out where to place the workloads. If the customers aren't happy with the current performance tier that they're on, then they can self-move to a higher tier. SSD's are coming down in price, it's a usable price range now and having an all SSD data center is actually functional.

Technical support is good. It's the standard HPE support where you go through the tiers and if you've worked in IT for a while, you know to mention the words as how to move up. For example, you can ask for the duty manager and then you'll get escalated. However, we haven't got to that point yet. It's pretty new, I'm sure that with anything new we seem to push things to the limit, so it will get to that. I can't say anything negative about it.

They sent us a team to work with us for the setup process. They still kind of managed the firmware and upgrades right now. It is pretty new and simple to use, it wasn't hard to figure it out. They sent one of their post-sales SEs to come in and go through the training. In two days, the team kind of got it. It's mostly that one of the goals to go back to a small team is we want something that is set and then to forget about it; we don't want to sit there all day and manage it. We want to put it on the floor, be able to do capacity planning, alert all those pieces but we don't want to manage it.

Traditionally, we were using NetApp. We did look at IBM, Lenovo, Nimble and all of them. Actually, Nimble didn't come to the table, they missed it; so IBM, Lenovo, and Dell are the solutions we looked at.

They missed the thing, it's hard to describe because earlier we used to strongly believe strongly in just using NFS for ESX since it was easier to manage. However, with SSDs, NFS actually puts in a little bit of latency in it because you have to change that protocol thing. When we wrote the IRP, we made sure that everybody could reply and I think they missed it. There was some sort of miscommunication, so basically, everybody was on that chart.

When we are looking at a vendor, it's a mixture of everything. Basically, for our IRP, the feedback from the vendors was good, this is our problem how would you solve it. These are mandatory and minimum requirements whilst selecting a vendor, these are highly desirable, and we broke it all down so that they could fill it all in. The feedback was good, it was easy to fill out but there were somethings that some players could do. Veeam was big and we use them for all our stuff, but not everybody integrates with Veeam. The alerting capacity planning and all those things were a big thing for us too.

We're not fully pushing the envelope on it, but there are no complaints. Everything's good, the team has been good from the support to the setup to the post-support setup, to we've actually opened a ticket to do their firmware upgrade part. They gave us the plan and broke it down as to what they're going to do and when they're going to do it. Things have been good.

Transparant redundancy for VMware virtual machines, because this makes it possible that storage switches over from one system to another without interruption of the VMs.

Automation of the failover allows the IT department of the hospital to improve the availability of systems.

From a personal point of view, what would interest me is a mechanism that detects file-rot, i.e. that detects whether a file or sector has become corrupt; for example, as a result of copying the sector to other locations from the original location.

On a file basis, this is implemented in ZFS, where for each file, some error-check is calculated and stored. Periodically, the file system can be scrubbed to detect corruption early, so that a corrupt file can be restored from backups.

3PAR is based on block-storage, so this feature would have to be implemented at block-level.

We have been using the product since the beginning of 2014.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used HP EVA previously.

The setup was fairly straightforward because we emphasized simplicity as an important purchase criteria.

Other systems evaluated were Dell EqualLogic, Hitachi, IBM, Netapp.

Don't buy either the oldest or the newest technology!

To me, the deduplication features and compression are really helpful. The all-flash integration is valuable. It's high-density storage, so the total cost of ownership of the solution is good for a company.

It's easy to manage. There is less need to manage the storage and we are more able to focus on the business.

Product improvement is a matter of the orientation of storage solutions in the market. Product improvement will follow the market trend and HPE will follow market trend about storage solutions.

It's I think a five-9s (99.999%) solution, so it's very stable.

It can be scaled to more than enough capacity. So, it's okay.

Technical support is useful and helpful.

We did use previous solutions, but it's a matter of quality and it's a matter of economics and that was the choice.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We looked at Dell EMC and HPE. We chose HPE because of the product portfolio that they keep alive and evaluate and improve. The one we chose includes all the features and capabilities that the company makes.

I suggest to sometimes be disruptive in the choice of storage solution and don't always focus on the continuity. Sometimes discontinuity may help. When picking a vendor, reliability is important. Stability is important as well, but in the matter of looking at the future.

The most valuable feature is its tiered approach to data structuring. We can quickly move data that's stored on slow disks to faster disks if the demand arises. That's good value for our company.

We've recently embarked on a large-scale convergence project where we've consolidated about 250 physical servers to virtual servers. Those virtual servers are hosted onto 3PARs 7400 systems, which are located in two data centers. They give us high availability and real-time access to data in both locations. In terms of the value for business and the value for us, it's given us the facility to have a business continuity plan, which we never had before.

Data de-duplication is something that's lacking in 3PAR. We use HPE StoreOnce systems as part of a backup solution. StoreOnce systems, they use a SAS disks, which are spin disks. They have about 80% de-duplication ratio, which from a backup perspective, that gives us tremendous capacity to back up to disk; not to take to disk for 12, 24 months. When you compare that to 3PAR, 3PAR doesn't have de-duplication and this causes storage issues.

Technically that's not true. 3PAR has de-duplication on the SSD drives, but because it's a mixed drive chassis, the large proportion of data that we have comes in the first class of the SAS disks, which will equate to maybe about 70 or 80% for top data. They're not de-duplicated. I think that's a feature that HPE need to work on quickly.

3PARs are very stable. We've been using 3PARs both in the UK and our headquarters in France for maybe four years now and we've not had any issues with the system, so they're a quite a reliable system.

Scalability depends on the situation. Whenever you try and provision these converged platforms, you've got to have an element of planning in terms of where your business is going grow for the next two or three years. It's interesting. We planned for 20% data growth on a 3PAR infrastructure over three years. What we found was we had closer to 20% data growth per year.

So if you look it from a data scaling perspective, we've reached the limits of our 3PAR 7200s in Europe. Thankfully for us, we've got 7400s, which gives you a lot more scalability in terms of storage. From a memory and processing prospective, they're perfect. So we have no issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good for the 3PARs you get. We've bought a 5-year support plan and we get to speak to the 3PAR technical support team in Houston, Tx. They're quite responsive. The 3PAR support plan, as well, is a reactive support plan, so we've got people from Houston who are looking at our systems and they inform us whenever a disk is filled. They send disks to be swapped out. They can be swapped out by our team or they can be swapped out by an HP person that turns up and does the job for you.

We're a large company of many, many small companies and we've realized through global projects that have an autonomous approach to IT departments, for example, where it doesn't work. That's exactly the same when it comes to the architecture behind your IT environment. We had to look at centralizing all of our systems, all of our platforms, so that we could offer a meaningful level of service to business. Without centralization, we couldn't guarantee the service of any of our platforms around the key business applications that the business expected us to deploy. That's how we knew to centralize all of our systems and platforms and host them on converged systems.

Initial setup was very complex. These systems are very complex, but if you buy a converged system from HPE, the converged system is part of the package and HPE provides you with the technical expertise to come out and build the converged systems for you. They're built and tested at the manufacturing plant. You can go and visit the manufacturing plant and see them if you want. Some people can. Then they're sent to your site and HPE sends experts to build the 3PARs on site and assist you with the build.

We have a global HPE agreement and it depends on the sort of size of projects and whether or not we issue and RFP when we got to other suppliers. If we do issue an RFP, then we're not tied internally to working with HPE. We can work with whoever we think's best for the requirement. But because we have such a good close working relationship with HPE and because they attend industry events, I'm always key to recommend to some of our peers and our colleagues around the world that they should be looking at this or that particular product.

3PAR's good from a medium-sized to large-sized enterprises. We're probably a large-sized enterprise company, but we have also small companies around the world where we wouldn't recommend the 3PAR for those sort of situations. We'd recommend applying a platform converged systems solution.

What's relatively common in most SAN environments is consolidation of storage under a single management interface or pool. The ability to quickly scale and expand storage as required, and to accommodate whatever deliverables you're putting out there. I think one of the advantages of 3PAR obviously is its tiered storage, as well as its visibility, deduplication in the flash is a big component. Just being a holistic solution that you can rely on as a cornerstone to the foundation for your underlying infrastructure. You have that flexibility to use it for your virtual infrastructure, grow it out to accommodate other storage requirements. It's a single framework or platform that you can use to accommodate pretty much all your storage requirements.

One of the features we use is Peer Persistence on the storage, so that's part of our core DR strategy, so that we have two data centers, we synch and replicate the data between the two centers. Then in the event of a disaster, because we're a virtualized environment, we can fail the storage over, and fail our VMs over, and we can be up and running. We test it on an annual basis, and we completely can fail all of one data center into another data center, and within an hour and a half, we have everything up and tested and back online. That's been our DR exercise.

Although there's been a lot of technical advancement, one of my biggest beefs with HP's drive towards OneView as a management platform for this point is really around their licensing. It's been somewhat cost prohibitive. Obviously with the new release of OneView in the near future, the licensing model is going to change, but for customers who may already have a heavy investment in hardware infrastructure, who were not previously licensed with ILO Enterprise, for example, and did not have those rights for utilizing OneView, having to backtrack and buy all new licensing in order to be able accommodate that, in order to be able to manage their infrastructure, it kind of takes away from the whole simplification of having everything under a single pane of glass if you're now forced to have to go back and relicense initial investments to be able to take advantage of that technology.

That being said, I will state that it does look like HP understands and has recognized that, and I think that's really why they're trying to make the advancements and the changes that they are in terms of having that. They're pushing it to be that kind of single unified management infrastructure component, and knowing that they want to push customers towards that, I think they also recognize that in order to do that, they have to put some incentive there to make it worthwhile for customers to make that investment and change in their management strategy.

From my perspective it's definitely a stable solution, it's easily scalable. It's really like any other kind of blade enclosure, you buy your chassis, you add the blades as needed. Really no real hardware related issues. You're always going to get your bad spurts, regardless of generation, but I think from our perspective, they'll correct me if I'm wrong, it's been pretty stable.

We didn't switch in terms of the technology. We switched to the latest 3PAR technology. We previously used 7400s. We wanted to move from a managed services to self-managing, and the contract was coming up for renewal, so that was a golden opportunity to swing off and do our own thing.

Really understand what your needs and requirements and future expectations are. Every vendor has a product that fits in the same market space, whether it be Dell, IBM or HP. I think it's really about what your long-term expectations and goals are. With 3PAR for example, if a lot of your underlying infrastructure is HP, it might make sense to go that way, to maintain that consistency. From a management an usability perspective, the full integration components, everything from your Blade, your Interconnects, your storage, your management platforms. Almost all the major vendors now are doing some form of deduplication, compression, storage tiering. I think it really comes down to knowing and understanding what you're looking for. Sometimes it's more of a business related decision and politics than it is an actual technical merit. I would say really understanding what your workloads are, what you're looking to get out of any investment that you make, and then taking it from there.

We need performance and this provides it. We also need affordable prices -- both at sales and post-sales -- and maintenance.

In terms of technical support, our local HP team supports my requests and I know we can turn to them to understand our issues.

In terms of the technology itself, it's not much different from other technologies. But what sets it apart if what happens after the sale -- maintenance and support.

We also need speed, and this provides it. We have strict SLAs, and 3PAR allows me to put the right people together very quickly.

I'd like their technical support to be better. If we need to go to level three, there isn't always someone locally and it can be time consuming to get someone with the right skills.

We installed it 12 years ago, moved to NetApp, then back to HP because of the maintenance costs.

It works 24/7. Our core business are our hospitals and clinics, which means we can't waste time on data center or service issues. So the real value is the 24/7, constant stability.

We've been able to implement it in both small clinics and big hospitals. It's scalable so we can manage it from the same data center with protected investments.

They support my team. We get second-level support from our local partner and third-level support from HP directly.

It was a straightforward migration.

If it is a first time investment, it's no problem. If it's a migration, then you need to take care of the migration risks as well. There should be no data loss because migration is risky.

Ease-of-use is very high on our list of features, as we are, like everyone else, trying to do more with fewer people.

The reliability is very high, as we have performed multiple firmware updates and some controller replacements all on-line with no downtime and no impact to our users.

Probably the most beneficial aspect from my viewpoint is that it has reduced the amount of time that I spend administering storage requests by at least 50%. This allows us to keep pace with the ever growing amount of storage that our users require.

The newer versions of the hardware have really addressed the minor concerns we had, specifically hard drive replacements which were tedious in earlier models due to shelf design. This is now a quick, easy task.

We have been using 3PAR for the last four years, and have a total of six arrays now.

Not really, as the arrays have performed with no down time or data loss since we first started using them four years ago.

10 out of 10. I've worked with HP support for over seven years in my current job and have always been happy with the level of expertise I have received.

My company has used HP storage arrays since before I joined.

Very straightforward installation and set-up.

HP services did the initial installation and base configuration of each of the storage arrays, and took one day for each array.

We use a reseller to purchase the 3PAR equipment, and we utilize HP professional services for installation and initial set-up.

I don't have an ROI as I am not really involved with the financing/budget side in any detail.

Licensing the features that we use was not overly complex to get worked out, and HP was very helpful in providing details on the features we needed to provide the functions we needed, which was primarily the synchronous replication between our sites.

We have evaluated other vendors over the years, but we have stayed with HP due to the high reliability and ease of use.

Work with your HP pre-sales people to determine which model of array will best satisfy your requirements. I've had very good relationships with all the HP technical and pre-sales that I have worked with over the years.

The most valuable features to us are the automatic failover, the peer persistence, and that ability to be able to be confident that if we have a data center outage, that our business will keep running. Those were the features from a business perspective that were the most important to me.

Some of the benefits that we're facing in using 3PAR, I did mention before, are around the ability to patch our systems quite easily. We can easily failover. We know that if there are any issues, we can continue to provide services. We recently had a power outage in Aukland, which tested our data centers, our mechanicals, and electricals in the data centers. It also helped us understand that if we did have a problem in one data center, we could easily file between the two very easily.

The stability of the system has been great. I think we've only had it since October. We had not had any problems. It's been great, at the moment.

It's working for us on scalability, I think. We're still to see how we go. We've got some issues at the moment on scalability. We need to grow our data quite significantly. We need to find something that is more scalable.

The technical support has been absolutely fantastic. The whole project, when it went in, was really a joint partnership between HP, VMware, and the University. Everyone worked really well to make sure it got in on time, on budget, and was successful. It was a good project.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we had a lot of issues in our data centers. We needed to increase our resilience and make sure that we could have our teaching and learning and research continue while we might have data center outages or if there was any problems.

The whole project seemed straightforward to me, as I was the business owner. I didn't see a lot of the technical issues going on in the background. It might have been a bit more complex for my team, but it was fairly straight forward. They managed to migrate 650 VMs without any outages. It was a Greenfields's solution. We didn't have any resilience for a number of our faculty machines. We had quite a number of data center outages because of some physical issues in the data centers. It was highlighted that not having resilience for our faculties, for their file services, and for their research, and for their cost material was not appropriate. We really needed to be able to put something in place so we could increase our resilience. It's also helped us to increase our security and all sorts of other aspects, and have all sorts of other benefits, not just resilience.

It needed to fit into our current infrastructure. We needed to make sure that whatever we put in place had as minimal effort required regarding staff work load. We wanted to make sure that it didn't need any manual intervention in order to failover. The peer persistence that the 3PAR has was also important to us to make sure that we had replicated data, and we could access it quickly and easily. Recovering quickly and little data loss were the most important things to us. We had a few vendors on our short list. The reason we chose HP was it fitted those criteria very well. I would rate the 3PAR system fairly highly because it met our requirements of what we needed at the time. We're quite comfortable using it. We're seeing less stress from teams around issues that we have had in the past.

It just depends on what your requirements are. You've got to match your requirements to the system you need. Very important, we do reference checks. We do make sure we get all our requirements. We do comparisons. We've got pretty strict procurement requirements and we stick to those.