HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It's reliable and it's fast.

They are constantly moving and will address an issue instantaneously. If somebody has an issue, HPE is very responsive because the 3PAR is one of the flagship products. I haven’t had any issues and they’re very on top of making sure that we follow through with code upgrades.

The 3PAR is very reliable. Most of our performance complaints went away after we put the 3PARs in. We also went from a 4 GB to 16 GB fibre channel, so it’s simple to manage and easily serviceable by our technicians.

We have had no issues with our 3PARs. We like them a lot.

HPE support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HPE stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set. I would also advise that users follow best practices with the 3PAR.

The implementation of it was amazing. It's easy and it's come a long way. The platform we had before was about four years old, so the technology's always going to be better. We didn't take that for granted. Overall I think that the ease of understanding what we needed and then procuring it and getting it, and then how quick it was to get it installed. It's just amazing.

It's really taken away a few headaches that we had. It's one of those things you know it's there until you get something that's built for what we want to do, it was matched to what our requirements were. It's provided huge turnaround for us.

I'd like it to be quicker.

So far, we've had no issues.

We know it's there. We made the decision to purchase it with the view for growth, and we know we'll just plug another array or another stack pretty quickly.

One of my engineers might have called, but I haven't.

It really came down to relationships. At the time it wasn't just going from EMC, it was also going from Cisco to HPE Networking. We went through a pretty good process, where we talked about our needs and requirements, and also comfort levels of technology change. Some of my engineers were a little reluctant to move away from Cisco. But HPE came and sat down and just said "We'll do whatever it takes. What do you need? What are your concerns?" Just worked with us in real detail: able to understand what our concerns were, where we were going, and making sure that the engineers were made comfortable. But also making sure, which was the last part which comes across the line, was that the technology was what we needed, was enough for growth. Whereas Cisco was just a "here's a quote, sent it to us" which I think for me swung me over to HP. The commitment to the customer.

Think about the next 10 years, where are you heading. Personally, I say HPE's a pretty strong organization. They send the right messages, saying the right things. They seem like a very digital company which is all about customer, and that stuff matters to me, whereas some of the competitors, they don't have that mindset. Cisco definitely doesn't have that mindset. I really think long-term about. Sure, Cisco had a lot more features, but we didn't really need them. So, that made the decision easier. For me, when I think about HPE, think about longevity. You want to invest in technology, you're almost investing in the company.

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.

Disk-utilization tier-ing (3PAR Adaptive Optimization)

The organization was able to consolidate disparate storage environments into a single chassis with multiple connection types, utilize the different disk tiers across all software/hardware connected platforms, all the time providing the fastest disk to the most utilized portions of storage as determined by the controllers.

While there is direct module integration with different Hyper Visors on the market, the actual software of those integrations do leave some feature integration off requiring both management interfaces. The greater this integration becomes the easier to manage the environment it will be.

I used it for three years.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

All the issues we encountered were due to human error.

HP technical support for 3PAR is excellent once you have navigated the call tree.

I utilized HP Lefthand devices and EVA SAN’s (Models 5000 and 4400)

The initial setup was complex in that requirements were not communicated well through the VAR and some parts needed to be sent back (PDU’s were of the wrong type) and the VAR assumed a Virtual Storage manager would be used, but a physical manager was both requested and required, which created an installation delay while the correct equipment was shipped.

It was implemented through a vendor team, originally out-sourced by HP, then followed up by HP in-house technicians.

The implementation did not have an ROI to calculate as the products being migrated off of were end of life.

• Dell Compellant
• EMC VMX

The biggest pro is the overall performance. Provisioning is easy and fast. With NetApp, we needed to run scripts, which was a much slower process.

In general, it’s been such a good fit for us, as it's fast, easy, and flexible.

Our biggest one was the overall performance. Our SQL servers are performing better now, and because it’s easy to provision, more team members can provision who weren’t comfortable doing so before hand.

It’s been very stable. In comparison to what we had before, it’s a 10/10 -- incredibly stable.

It’s very scalable.

Pretty good. Up there with a 10/10 so far. The few issues we had were resolved quickly.

We were using NetApp. We were seeing overall poor performance.

Straightforward. Wasn’t overly complex.

Major players, such as EMC. We felt HP was a better fit. We weighed it out and HP fit our needs better than EMC.

We were looking mainly for IOPS. We have a lot of SQL, so IOPS was important to us. We also wanted tiering to move things in-between tiers easily.

Come to the shows and get demos. Get your hands on it.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor for Flash Storage is partnership. Additionally, we value this solution for its performance and manageability.

During the migration process, we have had to troubleshoot less than in the past.

The stability is fine. We put disks in the system a couple of weeks ago, which went off without a hitch.

We haven’t had any issues with scalability

We haven’t had any issues. We wanted white-glove treatment and that’s what we got.

We haven’t had any issues. We wanted white-glove treatment and that’s what we got.

We ran on NetApp and had maintenance, performance, and troubleshooting issues.

The initial setup of 3PAR was straightforward.

We also looked at BMC.

The solution is great and I haven’t had an issue.

3PAR has CPG (common provisioning groups) which allowed us to create multiple RAIDs on the same disks, move LUNS between CPGs and between RAID arrays. No other storage had this capability.

It gave me flexibility in moving things around, for example, I could move the production LUN and test LUNs from RAID 5 to RAID 6 in order to have more redundancy disk failures.

I used it for six months, but am now at a company that is not using it.

It's very stable, and very fast. Creating virtual disks took literally one minute for a 100GB VM disk.

No issues encountered.

HP was very helpful all the way through.

10/10.

We used a NetApp N6040n, and we switched in order to have more flexibility on our storage array as CPG moved LUNs between different RAID arrays.

It's very straightforward to configure. You need to connect the service processor to the storage array and then finish the configuration settings.

HP technicians did the initial deployment and I did the initial configuration. Even without any training I was able to the update firmware to v3.1.3, perform the software configuration, configure the ILO and service processor.

We also looked at EMC but 3PAR was the cheaper solution, and it was more flexible.

It integrates very well with Windows 2012 as well as VMware.

• Reliability
• Support
• Flash storage - I wish we were using it

We have not had a moment's down time.

I would like it to be greener, with a lower power draw and generating less heat. That is not a comment on a problem with this SAN, it's something I look for in any hardware additions.

It entered into production in July 2012.

Nothing unexpected.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's fine, no issues.

Two years ago it was 9/10. Now, perhaps it's 7/10. The quality is still excellent but, like many other vendors, the primary support is on the other side of the world, and there is a time zone issue. We will schedule a patch and I'll see an email or a phone message that came in between midnight and three AM, with a question. You lose a day replying, because the engineers don't call with questions during normal business hours in the Central Time zone. This is not an issue if you run a night staff.

We also previously used NetApp and Xiotech, and switched to 3PAR as HP presented a solution that addressed performance, scalability, and, I'm told, it was cost effective.

The HP setup spreadsheet is a beast. It's much more extensive than any previous SAN, but going through the process addresses almost every issue that's likely to come up.

We were guided through this process by Sayers Consulting. They were outstanding, especially Bill Tohtz and Dean Flatland.

Yes, we looked at several presentations.

Set time aside to go through the setup spreadsheet.