HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

 The primary use of this solution is exclusively for VDI.

 I find the most valuable feature to be compression and deduplication. 

The solution could be improved in regard to space reclamation by adding automation. This should be added to the next release.

I have been using the solution for four years.

I have only had to adjust the solution four times in the time I have used it, it is stable. 

The solution is moderately simple to scale. We have approximately 1000 computers using the solution.

The technical support has been fantastic.

The initial setup was straightforward, it took approximately 45 minutes.

We purchased the solution as CapEx and we only pay support now. I find the pricing fantastic. 

My advice to others looking into the implementation of the solution is to pay attention to detail if you are on iSCSI. 

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

We use the 3PAR to host our SQL Database and Oracle Database. We also use it for VMware and vCenter.

We do not manage this product ourselves, so we are not familiar with all of the features that it has.

We had an issue a few months ago where we experienced a degradation in performance.

Every time you scale by adding more capacity, you need to pay for re-balancing services that cannot be performed in-house.

I would like to see an automatic re-balancing system or functionality for adaptive optimization.

We have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for almost five years.

This product is stable, aside from the performance problems we had.

We have added capacity to this solution between four and six times. Each time we did, we had to purchase services for re-balancing. It has to be done by a 3PAR engineer, rather than by our staff. It's a complex process. With some other products, you can just add a new disk to increase capacity, and you don't need to perform re-balancing.

There are three of us in the company who uses it.

For development, we have an IBM DS5000 storage system.

As it is for development, I cannot compare the two solutions. Our 3PAR is adapted for production.

The initial setup is complex because it needs a special engineer from HPE to take care of the setup and load balancing.

Our equipment is managed by a holding company. I request the load and capacity, and they configure it for me.

This is not an expensive product but every time you add capacity to it, you need to pay for re-balancing.

This is a product that I do not recommend because it is too difficult for people to manage, and it should also be a little bit cheaper.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use 3PAR as our centralized storage for database use, mostly. It's also data stores for our VMs. We have a few Oracle Databases running on 3PAR and we have our production VMs running on 3PAR, as well.

Before using centralized storage, we needed to make sure that we have enough physical disks installed in a server. Now, we know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers. Again, in our case, it's mostly the databases.

All-flash positions our organization for growth in a way, mostly for performance, because again, we're using all-flash for the performance that it provides, and we have critical databases running on it. It's providing day-to-day functionality, the way I see it.

• The ease of use, from one perspective
• The centralized storage
• The ease of copying, backing up, and moving data from one server to the other

I would like to see more visibility regarding issues - active alerting. I know that InfoSight is currently trying to do what Nimble did for its storage. If it were proactively alerting regarding maintenance or something that's going to go bust, it could be very useful for us.

All in all, it's a stable solution. From an availability perspective, we have it in both data centers. 

We found one huge bug when we implemented the solution, a critical bug that eventually crashed and shut down the storage, which is something that we cannot live with. But since then, a patch was provided for this issue, and over the last a year-and-a-half we haven't had any stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is problematic. We would like to scale with our current infrastructure but we can't. We need to actually buy additional components, not just add disks. We actually need to buy additional controllers and, eventually, another storage unit. So it's not good enough.

The technical support is not good. Usually, when we have a problem, it takes ages until we get a response. We need to escalate several times, using HPE and the partner in Israel to make sure that we get the appropriate response. Usually, what we know or what we find out right away, is the same response that we get from support a week or two later - that something is happening. And only a month after that do we get a good solution that we can do something with.

From a technical perspective, we understood the benefits of having centralized storage. From that point on we looked for what was supposed to be the right solution for us. Eventually, we zeroed in on the 3PAR solution and not the competition.

The initial setup was complex. It's not a straightforward integration. There are a lot of parameters that you need to configure, and each parameter affects a lot of other things. Even though we used a partner for the implementation, after the installation in the data center we needed to rebuild everything and reconfigure everything several times. At the beginning, it wasn't good. Now we are stable so, except for the performance issue, everything is working as we expect it to work.

We used an integrator. The guys are great, responsible. They did what they were supposed to do. They worked with HPE regarding the sizing of the storage solution, and it seems like someone there didn't do his job correctly. I don't know if it was HPE or the partner. But eventually, we had a problem.

It's a much more expensive solution than just buying local disks. On the other hand, it provides us a centralized point of management for all our storage. I can't tell you the exact ROI, but the simplicity and the centralization of the storage probably provide us with some kind of a return.

We looked at NetApp. We also evaluated hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix, but it was not relevant at the time. And we were approached by HPE regarding SimpliVity but it was not relevant as well, at the time.

We went with 3PAR because, at the time, we were convinced that this would provide us the solution that we need, from several KPIs that we were looking at. We were promised performance that we didn't get in the end.

Check the performance and every technical aspect that you can, as much as you can. Don't trust anyone else telling you otherwise. Test everything yourself.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that having centralized storage is the right way to go and that sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected.

What every IT guy will tell you is that we disable the dedupe, mostly because of the hit on the performance. Regarding InfoSight predictive analytics, we tried to use it. It was not that predictive because it doesn't give as much information as we were told. We had actually turned it on and we had a few critical issues but we got no alerts from InfoSight regarding them.

It increased performance for a while, but then, as we grew, and we did not grow significantly, performance dropped down. For a few of our critical, online systems, we went back to using the physical disks and not the centralized storage.

It was supposed to improve throughput but it was not enough, not as much as we were told before we bought the product.

We have talked about using the flex-capacity offering, HPE GreenLake, but we haven't used it yet.

From our experience, I would rate low, but I don't want to rate it low because from a technical perspective, it's a stable solution, it works. I would give the product a seven out of ten, even though our experience has not been that good. A seven is fair at this point.

It is for the storage that we use. Our entire banking system is on it, which is mission-critical.

It has provided us our solution for VDIs, so it has been working very well.

Any infrastructure is an enabler that provides services for the applications that you run.

The ability to have a solid state and deduplication on that solid state.

The deduplication functionality is great. We have seen a lot of benefits in the deduplication ratio. So, it has proven that it is a good cost savings.

It is easy to manage and performs very well.

There is always the case where there are the little things that bother you, but you live with them.

There are features that we would like to deep dive into more, but that is where the consultants would come in and help.

We are using Synergy, so it is the next evolution of blades, which has been great. We have had no complaints, except for the problem with the Spectre vulnerability.

The scalability is great, because if we need to, we can just turn on a blade and start paying for it. Also, if we want, we can shut it down, and the next month, we don't pay.

The technical support is good. We haven't had any major issues where we have had to call them, as of late, so it has been fairly good. They help us when we do our upgrades, but that has been going well.

At the time, we needed a better solution than our previous solution (Dell EMC) for storage, so we looked to HPE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We been setting up 3PARs for 10 years now. It is like second nature for us.

The straightforward setup also applies to experiences with Synergy and Flex Capacity.

We mostly deployed it ourselves. We also had help from HPE, because we purchased directly from them. Our experience with HPE was great. This is the case when they give you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services.

We have seen ROI.

We did not look at other vendors beside HPE. We were one of the first adopters of 3PAR. We had one of the old T800s. We were early in the adoption of HP 3PAR.

Management made a decision to go with 3PAR, because HPE came and made it appealing.

It is a great solution. There are others out there, but we have always been using 3PAR. We are pretty happy with it.

We are using the GreenLake Flex Capacity offering. At first, the service was great, because we had a configuration that was meeting our needs. However, when the issue came with Spectre, and then the L1TF vulnerability came out, those really affected us, so hopefully we will find a solution that meets our needs going forward. That is what we are looking at now.

We just started getting into InfoSight predictive analytics. It is something that I want to explore more, and something that I want to get going.

I can say that, "All-flash is the way that the future will be."

It is our primary storage for all of our data. Everything from personnel systems to file shares, print services, and databases are mission-critical applications that we run on 3PAR.

It has allowed us to set up a fully functioning disaster recovery site with replication, which we have been able to configure between our 3PAR systems.

The solution has helped improved our throughput. It has helped our organization with our DR site and connections to our blade systems.

The replication that you can set up between remote 3PARs is its most valuable feature.

I would rate it a ten (out of ten) for its ease of use. We haven't had any issues when we have had to build anything out on it. There have been no major issues, as far as outages or hardware issues.

The GUI was a little hard to figure out how to use.

The stability has been great and solid, so far. We haven't had any hiccups or any major outages.

The scalability is very good. We are planning on adding another rack of hard drives.

The technical support was very knowledgeable when we first set it up. Outside of that, I haven't really had any experience with them.

We had an old HPE SAN. We compared one 3PAR to the SAN. Then, we wanted to set up replication between our DR sites, so we purchased another 3PAR.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment.

Our organization issued us an HPE 3PAR. There really wasn't any market research with other vendors.

It is a solid product. It works really well for our situation and what we need at a disaster recovery site. It is fairly simple to set up.

We do not use InfoSight.

Virtual machine data storage. It's serving one specific business need.

It is performing as expected. It hasn't been fully exercised as we're still moving production onto it.

We are still transitioning to it.

We're utilizing the Peer Persistence. 

Also, we haven't had to fully embrace it yet, but the predictive analytics, where we're getting notifications prior to a failure - we've gotten some during our PoC and testing - has been helpful.

It has shown a lot of stability. We have a pretty rigorous QA process and there have been some minor issues and some things that we've had to work through, but nothing that has been unpredictable or unexplainable or just flat out faulty. It has been pretty reliable.

I'm not too familiar with the scalability, I haven't to expand on it yet. But, from what I understand, scaling it should be easier than with typical storage platforms. We did recently just add a shelf of disks, which didn't take too much effort. I think it definitely has good scalability, but I don't have too much hands-on with that yet.

Technical support has been pretty good. We always have to work hand in hand with our HPE support teams, we have to provide data and logging and feedback, etc. But typically they're pretty responsive. They dig into issues and but you have to work with them. You can't just throw a problem at them and expect them to fix it, you have to keep an open line of communication, give them the data they need, and work with them that way.

We were in a position where we could reinvent our wheel. We had an older, aging architecture and we needed to update. So, as much as it is a replacement and an upgrade from our existing equipment, it is also brand new. It's a complete transition from where we were to this. It's hard to look at it as a transition when there is that much stark difference. When we get over to it, there's going to be a clear benefit upgrading from what our legacy networks and servers are.

When evaluating a vendor our criteria include

• price
• customer service 
• quality of the technology 
• whether or not it can serve our needs.

I think once you know the system, the setup is pretty straightforward. Being somewhat unfamiliar with it going into it, it can appear complex. Once you understand the key concepts and the configuration points that 3PAR is using, I think it becomes easier.

We worked at it for at least two weeks, but we had other priorities than just setting it up. We were exploring, poking the box, so it wasn't just an out-of-the-box, get it set up process. The out-of-the-box, basic set up was about a day for rack and stack and then maybe another day or two - once we knew which configuration we needed on it - to have it fully implemented.

Clearly we see value. It is serving a specific purpose for our hardware solution. When our full solution is implemented, there is a clear return on investment, not just for the storage component but for our compute networking components that are part of the larger architecture picture that 3PAR fits into.

Our organization already had an established relationship with HPE so, in this particular case, we weren't in a position to shop this piece of the solution around. We stuck with HPE after making the other decisions.

It's a very good solution. It doesn't come without some of its own quirks. We had a few struggles to get certain things working and HPE worked with us through them. Not everything was well-defined in the HPE White Papers. It definitely required working with HPE engineering and the solutions architects to get through that. That being said, the promise of what 3PAR was supposed to do for us, we were able to achieve that.

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.

It is performing great. We are using it for our data store and everything, so that is 3PAR mainly using it. It is a school, so we use the management system and all the virtual machines on the 3PAR.

It is fast and stable. It is really helping us a lot in terms of data store, etc.

The Call Home feature is really a great feature, so I do not need to monitor the 3PAR. The 3PAR team is monitoring it and letting me know if there are any problems.

I am not sure because I am not an expert in 3PAR solutions. I do not know what the new features are. Already what we have, it is huge for us.

We have been using it for more than two year with no issues at all. I think it is really stable.

Right now, we have only one. If I need one more, then I buy one more box and attach it to it. I can scale up to whatever I want. I am not nervous about scaling up at all.

I hardly need to call their support. 

I did for when we were going to upgrade our 3PAR, because initially the 3PAR has some blank space for hard drives. So, we ordered additional hard drives over there, so that was a time they need to come up and update all the framers and everything before we were doing it. So, it was already taken care by the 3PAR team, and it was excellent support, too.

We were using a different HP storage. I think it was MSA 7000 series storage that we were using. Right now, it is 3PAR.

It was pretty much straightforward, because our network is not that complex.

We were looking at competitive product just from a financial point of view to have multiple quotations. So, that is why we looked at a different vendor, but as an IT team, we had 3PAR and HPE on the mind already.

Go for 3PAR, straight away as I am very happy with this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a school, we always have low budgets. We are a nonprofit organization. We do not have too much budget, so we care about prices, discounts, and especially about the product quality. The last 16 years, we have been an HPE customer. We are very much happy with HPE products.