HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

We use the product for virtualization environment. 

I am impressed with the product's online upgrades. 

The engagement of the tool's vendor is costly. 

I have been using the tool for five years. 

The product's support is both good and bad. 

Neutral

The tool's deployment is straightforward due to experience. Initially, it was difficult. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. A stable and performance-oriented product. 

It's a very convenient product. I find it easy to use.

It's very flexible in terms of management.

It's an enterprise tool.

The integration is good. We've integrated it with other UNIX platforms and Windows platforms.

The solution is easy to install.

The pricing is okay.

I'm not sure how good the security is. 

While the stability is pretty good, it could always be improved upon. 

I've been using the solution for almost four years at this point. I've used it for a while. 

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable and a company can expand it if they want to. 

We only have 100 people that actually use the solution. 

The support on offer is very good. We don't have any issues with them. They are helpful and responsive and we are satisfied with the support we get when we need it. 

We did use Hitachi last year.

The initial setup is not overly difficult or complex. it's pretty simple and straightforward. 

The deployment is fast and within a day you can have everything up and running. 

We have engineers available that can assist with deployment and maintenance. 

We had support from HPE directly. They assisted us in the implementation. 

We're using it as a SaaS. The pricing is reasonable. It's not cheap, however, I don't consider it to be overpriced. 

We have an annual support contract. It will contain a certain percentage of the storage cost.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I've been pretty happy with its capabilities. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

We don't have plans to leave this solution any time soon. We'll likely have it for the next two to three years. 

We use it on a project basis and based on the customer's requirements. We use the HPE systems in data centers with servers and virtual environments. This is the most common use case.

I like that it's stable. This is the reason why we're using these products. We work in the broadcast market, and stability is very important. HPE has global services, and that's also important. Dell and HPE are some big companies, and their solutions are robust and stable.

From an overall perspective, all the latest technologies can improve support and performance. This is very important for us.

As a company, we have been selling HPE 3PAR StoreServ for more than 24 years. Personally, I've been dealing with it for more than 18 years.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine.

Low latency storage for production trading systems.

We have multiple trading platforms which are trading different products regionally. The complexity comes when we are applying those trading algorithms globally. It has to be efficient in executing those trades, getting the right prices for the customers with the right spreads for the customer. You have every global FX currency that is present plus equities and future options. If you put all these things together, it gets quite complex.

We have been extremely happy with 3PAR so far.

We have more uptime, better trade times, and less hassle opening tickets with HPE.

• Remote Copy Groups
• Peer Persistence
• Redundancy
• Fairly easy user interface
• InfoSight

It's a very stable platform. It has been running pretty smoothly. It's one of those things where you set it and forget it. We tweak it here and there and we add things to it a little bit, but nothing crazy.

We haven't really had to add anything to it recently.

Technical support is very good. They're very prompt. They know about stuff before we do sometimes.

Last night was a perfect example. We had a problem last night and before we knew it, there was an email and then, about 15 minutes, later HPE Support sent another email saying don't worry about it, it corrected itself, nothing to worry about.

I would think we are seeing return on investment. I'm not sure of the exact numbers.

I've had a great experience with it and I would recommend it to a colleague.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's a very stable platform, it's very easy to learn how to use, has an easy user interface, tasks are very simple for an admin. As I said before, you set it up and you don't have to worry about it after that. With HPE you're in good hands.

It has provided a robust technology which provides us with fast access to the data. This is one of the areas where it has improved our company.

3PAR is very fast and robust.

I have been looking into additional functionalities of 3PAR but at this moment we are very satisfied with the basic functionality.

It's stable. I can't recall any problem with the 3PAR technology.

It's scalable. We are creating a plan, with our HPE partner in Brazil to duplicate our 3PAR environment because for us it is very important. It's the base of our data center.

Support Is very good. We get to resolutions very quickly. Our partner in Brazil is there for us every time.

I give it a nine out of 10. 3PAR is very good, but not perfect.

The primary use is our new datacenter. We're using it to increase performance. 

It's performing really well.

Having moved over from a LeftHand, which was seven or eight years old, there's a massive boost in performance. It has definitely improved the speed, the responsiveness, of all our applications, which is always good.

• Generally, the resilience and the redundancy of the system.
• Speed has obviously helped.
• We do a lot of replication, as well, with our other 3PARs, so it's keeping that data synchronized.

Just generally the management - which I know, they introduced a few new tools yesterday, here at the HPE Discover conference. Generally, the management of the multiple systems that we have. That's really the only problem, always having to go to all these separate tools to manage everything.

The stability is so far so good. It has been pretty seamless. We've used it now about eight months and it's been stable since then.

We planned for scalability so we bought four enclosures, which was overkill, but it's planning ahead.

We switched mainly because of the end users, the customers, the guys that use the systems and the applications. They're the ones who start screaming when things are slow. We used to have that problem, where things were slow due to the storage bottleneck. But now we're finding other bottlenecks, so it's good.

It was straightforward. I was in the datacenter with one of the HPE engineers and we went through everything. He was knowledgeable, he retired about a week after he set it up. So he had a lot of experience.

We did try a few other vendors during a trial period. We simulated failovers just for fun, just to see how quickly they respond. Some of them had issues getting parts to us immediately.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• reliability 
• availability of parts. 

I give an eight out of 10, from working with it and using the features, but also seeing what some of the other competitors have out there. One of the big ones is Pure Storage which I was a big fan of. So, they were the competitor to the 3PAR, as well as Nimble, which was obviously acquired.

It came down to costing as well, in the end. But to be fair to the 3PAR, it wasn't comparing like with like. It was comparing an all-flash array with a hybrid 3PAR array.

Try to decide quickly. Have your criteria and stick to your criteria, rather than trying ten million different solutions and taking years to implement. That was the biggest issue we had, the fact that there are so many different vendors out there. If you're trying to create a proof of concept, it just eats away at time. At the end of the day, there are a lot of nice things with the 3PAR that made us select it. Try not to waste too much time trying everything.

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.