HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

Mass storage. 

At the moment, it's performing very well, but we need to look to expand and innovate.

With the HPE GreenLake Flex feature, we can grow as required, and at present, we are growing faster than our requirements, so we need to look to develop and innovate.

Flexibility.

The ability to not only be integrated with hybrid IT, but on-prem.

Stability is fine.

At the moment it's under-scaling. We grew quicker than we expected. 

We know what our issue is and that's why we have to look at Nimble and what it has to offer us at the moment. At the moment, it looks like the solution that we're going to be moving to.

We've been using 3PAR now for the last three years. Prior to that, the EVA 6000 for five years.

We scoped out and scaled 3PAR for three years. We're now approaching that three-year mark, so we're here at the HPE Discover conference to re-approach and scale and future view for the next three to five years.

This is just my initial view, but I'm going to give it eight out of 10. I need to do a lot more in-depth research into the product and how it's going to benefit Aldermore Bank.

Stick with what you know and rely on your instincts.

I think the storage is very good, the way it stores, the thin provisioning it provides, and the data protection. And it's easy to deploy in any environment. We are using VMware. So for me, it's a right click and it's deployed. We can configure and create LUNS very easily with 3PAR management, and the interface is very user-friendly. Easily understandable.

For me, now, it's a stable product.

Of course it will meet our needs going forward. We have just utilized maybe 30 to 40 percent. It should be scalable for up to five more years.

We have proactive support on it, the logs are being sent to the proactive team, they are working fine. Before we notice that there's a problem in the storage, or any part, any hard disk, they already notify us, and the part is already delivered. The engineer is already coming in, and the support is very good.

I think HPE is the best because of the after-sale support they provide. Not all companies provide that much support. I don't want to name any vendors on this, but some vendors, when you have a problem they will tell you, "Our engineer is not available," or "The product is not available," or "The part is not here, it will come in two weeks," and that sort of thing. But HPE support, I feel it is the one. Within four hours, the product is delivered. Within the next hour after product delivery, the engineer is available to support me.

All of our servers are HPE, and it links all of the 12 remote ports that we have in Saudi Arabia, so we have only one centralized datacenter. It is the building ground of Saudi Ports' authority, to be honest.

The backup batteries, the WPS, could be better. We have two different vendors that provide the WPS, and HPE is one of them. When we had the outage we shut down the entire thing and tried the backup generators. The electricity was out for 20 minutes and the HPE battery didn't last 10 minutes.

A little over a year.

The stability is good. We had one incident where the downtime lasted less than 30 minutes. So I would say that it is accurate, fast and reliable.

It is pretty scalable. When we implemented the solution we started with only seven ports and we began to add new servers. Then we started publishing new services to our clients.

The technical support is quick and responsive. They will prioritize things based on how critical the problem is. If they need to be on site, they will come on site. If they don't, then they will fix the problem remotely; just log in and do what they need to do.

We have not looked at other vendors because we are very happy with HPE. We are currently looking to upgrade within HPE.

It is affordable and trustworthy with high availability. It has never been down since I’ve been using it.

Everything I need is in already, but we could maybe use a bit more monitoring to get more insight into performance and where the bottlenecks are.

It is very good in terms of stability.

The scalability is nice. I need to expand the system by 70 TBs this year, so I just added more shelves. That's pretty easy.

I'm doing it all by myself.

We were using a slower solution, and then it went down a few times. So we were looking for something more stable.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We tried Fujitsu and NetApp.

Support is the most important factor to us when selecting a vendor.

I would recommend this.

Flexibility, in regards to the different disk tiers in the 3PAR, is the most valuable feature.I can manually move data between the different tiers (NL, FC or SSD) or I can let AO do it for me. Thus I do not need 100% precise planning in advance.

I can play with it real time, all day. There's no need for a very dedicated planning for the future because I always can change it.

Stability could be better. We have had it 3 years and we had three down times.

We scaled up in the past and we will scale up again next month. The last time the previous system engineer did this. I don't have experience with scalability.

The quality of technical support was inconsistent. I did not always find that they dealt with our issues on time.

There were HPE EVAs before and they were at the end of their life.

When looking at vendors, the most important aspect is openness; that they really talk open and are not just marketing.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

I don't know if other vendors were evaluated. It was before my time. But, there are still better products. I would like to have an HPE XP7.

Go and play. We have a lot of offices and backup sites so they can really get hands on. That's the benefit.

For us, the most important feature is reliability. It must be tough because we work in a hospital and we want it to be solid. It must work always, always, always.

We count on that it works and it's always on; at a quarter of the price. The price and the reliability are key for us.

We need faster disks, but their solid-state disk takes care of that. But they are expensive. I think the solution is to spend more money.

It is really stable actually. We never have unplanned downtime. It is really on call for us. We upgraded from the HPE EVA systems to the 3PAR and I think it's better than our last EVA system.

We have had to scale up a couple times now because our imaging is growing about 30% per year. We cannot plan it; we have to upgrade it. The scalability is really good. We just put in more hardware and it starts to run.

Technical support is not so good. They don't understand us and we don't understand them. We had quite simple questions and tend to be transferred somewhere else.

Actually, it was HPE old technology. We really didn't switch anything. It's HPE already just old hardware, so we just upgraded.

I was not involved with the setup.

We didn't consider any other vendors because we did an upgrade from old HPE hardware. We can trust it. The whole process works very smoothly. No downtime; that is important for us.

We like the system, so I can suggest to a friend that 3PAR is okay.

The great value is the integration with the hardware and the software which really has great features that they develop over time. The system we bought back in 2012/13 and installed in 2013 is no longer in the system we are using now in 2016. This is because the software evolved so much and features were added to the system we purchased three years ago. It still adds new features that which we can leverage on the day-to-day use and make the storage investment more profitable and the storage resources more efficient.

The things I keep asking for are certain features which are now available but not to all the systems that are on the market. Sometimes they say we don't think the hardware you have can sustain this feature. We don't let you try it if it probably can't sustain the feature. There are other features where they say they don't support it on this type of spinning media, we only do that on flash. We don't have flash on our RA, so we are out of that. We get so many other features just by a software update, like transparent frame level between sites which is a huge thing. There's nothing really to complain about.

We introduced this solution into our system in early 2013. We were one of the first customers in Germany and Europe who really received the new 3PAR 7400 storage systems. We transferred all our data from our previous system which was the HP EVA system to the 3PAR system. We did that not by means of the online import, but rather the MPX solution. This solution transferred it over the wire, at wire speed transfer, block for block, the data from the EVA to the 3PAR. Over a weekend, we had all the data for virtualization which was the MRV sphere, the file services on top of Windows storage. We were able to transfer into the new system so we can break down the old system, erect the second new system then have everything merge across the sites again, like we had before.

There is no doubt that the 3PAR system is the most stable system we ever had in the storage space. When I look left and right at other systems we had and others still have in the university, we never had any unplanned downtime. We never lost any data. It really does the job the way it should be doing it.

There might be some mishaps, but nothing that's out of the ordinary, like losing the website for three days in a row. There's nothing like that. Of course, you have to do all the work to maintain the system. That's hard work, and you have to do it, but the system really rewards you for doing that.

In terms of scalability, we did careful planning on that in the beginning. I don’t think we will outrun the system within its natural lifetime. Once it gets replaced by the next generation of systems, whatever those might be, it might be 3PAR, or it might be something software defined. We don't know because that will be in 2019.

The support at HPE is not great, but it is good. We have some fights about it. That's basically at the stages where we have a way to think how it should be done. Then HPE has a supported way. Then HPE has a way that will also work. Basically, our way is the way that will also work. That's kind of our fight, but at the end, we settle for the best of both worlds. They're typically deliver what they promise. There's no worry about that with 3PAR. On the StoreEasy side, it's a little bit more of a challenge because half the product is HPE, and the other half is Microsoft. You have a lot of components that play together and if you get to the line where it is stitched together, sometimes you have just these problems. Is it Microsoft? Is it HPE? How do you get that together and then run into all the troubles you are with having multiple vendors included into that, even though you purchased a product from HPE.

I think it is a complex setup. We didn't set it up ourselves. We had an HPE partner come in to set it up for us. Then we only dealt with the maintenance in running it. The hardware maintenance is done by HPE. Other than that, we do it ourselves now. I think that's fairly reasonable. Have somebody set it up professionally, explain to you how it should work, and then you can take it from there. That's the way it was in old-fashioned IT. This is transforming with all the cloud stuff that's going on, with all the automation. I think that's really getting to a different level going forward.

We looked at all the major competitors at the time when we chose it. We looked at the EMCs, the NetApps, the IBMs, and the Dells. In the end, it turned out only one, namely HPE, not only for storage but also for server and all the other requirements we had, was able to bring it to the market at a price point that we were willing to pay. For the 3PAR, of course, the transparency between sites is valuable. That used to be the huge feature for NetApp. At that time, they weren't able to deliver it in the way we wanted it. Also HPE had to wait about half a year to be able to deliver that. It was just a software update, some more setup, and then we were up and running. I think with NetApp, it would have been little bit of a harder journey.

In terms of choosing a vendor, there is a mix of capabilities. You need to find someone who is proven in the field, in general. But if you want to go for latest products, we bought a 7400 even before it was announced. There is nothing in the field. You have to have good partners with whom you can work and with whom you can speak. It only becomes apparent over the course of a project how well of a partner you chose. If you have a product where you spent several million Euros, there's nothing that will work on the first instance. There's not anything that will work, but there are some things that won't work on the first instance. Then every partner shines. You have to ask how they get these problems resolved.

We have been an HPE customer for over 20 years. HPE consistently delivered on target. They are always in a bidding process. They can never be sure where they will get the next project because they run against the Dells, the Lenovos, and all the others. You have to have the right portfolio, you have to have the right features, the right product, the right services around it, and you have to deliver it for the right price. That's basically it.