HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

It's advantageous in terms of the cost, in terms of the performance, and taking up less space. We are exploring more with this storage.

It has features which are really giving advantages to our company, because we as a service provider are providing the services, infrastructure, and applications - or software as a service - to other entities. In that case, a virtual domain has been introduced in 3PAR and we can create their own pool where they are able to manage their own resources, instead of we, as storage admin, getting involved in that.

The features we need to provide to the different entities, it's meeting our criteria. That is the reason we went ahead with 3PAR, and we implemented it in the environment. So far, so good. People are asking for the services and, yes, we do provide the services through the 3PAR. 

And IOPs which has been gravely needed in terms of the back end and in terms of the front end, to meet application needs, I'm glad it's meeting up. So we are not encountering any risk at all.

So far, no disaster has happened, so I can't comment any more than that on the stability.

Since it's going to expand to a 240 disk maximum, in terms of scalability I have to go for another controller with the nodes and stuff. But based on the model, if you go ahead with a good different model, it supports more disk space in your enclosure areas.

So far I've only opened one case, in the beginning when I implemented a 3PAR in my environment, and I can say I'm satisfied.

It is straightforward. It's user friendly.

We did an evaluation comparing it with the EMC, and we determined that it's better to go ahead with this.

This product does not impress me anymore.

This solution should have better reporting and alerting. Deduplication and compression should function without a performance hit. The 16TB LUN limitations should be fixed.

I have used this solution for over seven years at many different companies.

There is a performance hit for a few hours or days every time you add additional storage until the additional storage is added to the pool.

The main issue is the 16TB LUN limit. This bug has not been addressed for years!

I would rate the level of technical support as average.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was average.

For the price you pay, there are far better products out there.

I evaluated Pure Storage before choosing.

Do not buy this solution. It lacks the innovation required to compete in the market.

Manageability and reliability are the most valued features of 3PAR. We've had no issues with it. We did a lot of research before we installed it. The other three companies we looked at were top of the line.

We did not lose connectivity, as we did with the other units. We've had no failed drives. The system has been up and running for almost four years now and there has not been an issue anywhere.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We've added quite a bit to it since we started.

We have used technical support. They were great.

The system we had prior to 3PAR had a lot of drives. We didn't lose any data, but it was just not reliable.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We looked at two other vendors. One was Compellent and one was EMC. Through our research and talking to various companies that were already using 3PAR, it was determined to be the better product.

When selecting a product, reliability and support are the most important requirements.

It's a very reliable product. I would advise them to get it.

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 went with 3PAR because we primarily use other storage solutions for our main production products. We chose 3PAR for one product because it runs on OpenVMS and it's only certified to run on HPE. That's why we went with 3PAR. It was a smooth transition over. It went pretty stable. We got an outside HPE VAR to help with the rollover. It's been very stable since we moved to it so.

It's a mature product. It's been working fine.

It's been about eight months.

Hard to say with that product line. That product line, it's much more mature. It doesn't grow that dramatically, so we planned ahead with a five year window, to be on that platform. It's running fine. We're not running into any hurdles right now.

We have an HPE VAR on the openVMS side that helps us too. We kind of reach out to them if we do.

We switched from a really old legacy platform storage solution that was just into life. We were running it on Data Vault which was an HPE product.

We switched from a really old legacy platform storage solution. I'm pretty sure we were running it on NetApp at the time.

In most cases Pure Storage is better. It's better overall, and allows us to scale up faster, the cost of ownership's lower, and the replication across areas is good. 3PAR is not bad either, but Pure Storage is just more competitive.

I would also evaluate others hard. We use Pure Storage in other areas a lot.

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.

There are several valuable features, including the easy-to-use application and straightforward end-user tools. That's been helpful for me and there's nothing complicated to learn. The reporting and charting are also actually quite good. I use the reports when I want to see performance, like how the discs are performing and how the AL is moving data to and from tiers.

I think it leverages our investments of using this multi-tiered storage approach. We have SSDs, we have SAS, and we have inline SAS, so we're able to have a lot more teams running in one environment rather than having to build separate environments, and understand which applications need high performance and which don't need high performance. 3PAR does that thinking for us using it's adaptive optimization. It's been successful for us. The technology is sound, they used 3PAR quite heavily in our organization. It's been a quite good experience.

It needs better statistics and configuration. The system allows too much human input. It's automated enough, but it wants you to determine some of the settings. If you do them wrong, you can make a very good system perform badly. If you do it well, you can make an under-permissioned system perform very well. There should be more best practices that they suggest, not "okay, what do you want."

I'd also like to see better real time performance rather than charts and graphs you've got to go in all the time. It'd be nice to have something running all the time, like a real tool from which you can actually see performance of what's actually happening rather than having to go in all the time and generate them. Real-time notifications, real-time performance statistics. They have those, but they're all command line and I can't keep the session running all day on some screen. You have to go in to get them and you can't really provide a thumb display for customers to see.

Deployments haven't been an issue.

It's been quite stable. There's been things that have broken for us, like discs and some other ports, but the system still works.

It's been quite scalable. Since we bought this one in the summer, we've expanded twice, so it's quite scalable. Now it's over 200 terabytes and 176 discs, I think. The maximum is 250 on this one. It's not the biggest 3PAR, but it's quite powerful actually.

Technical support has been very good. The guys on the line are knowledgeable even at level one.

The initial setup was straightforward. I don't think it was too complex. We've used other technology that's much more difficult to use. I haven't had 3PAR experience before, mostly Dell and Hitachi and some other EMC.

We evaluated Hitachi and we chose HP because of the price and ease-of-use.

Plan what the I/O needs are. You need better statistics before you buy something. Really plan to see what the loads are.