HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

Transparant redundancy for VMware virtual machines, because this makes it possible that storage switches over from one system to another without interruption of the VMs.

Automation of the failover allows the IT department of the hospital to improve the availability of systems.

From a personal point of view, what would interest me is a mechanism that detects file-rot, i.e. that detects whether a file or sector has become corrupt; for example, as a result of copying the sector to other locations from the original location.

On a file basis, this is implemented in ZFS, where for each file, some error-check is calculated and stored. Periodically, the file system can be scrubbed to detect corruption early, so that a corrupt file can be restored from backups.

3PAR is based on block-storage, so this feature would have to be implemented at block-level.

We have been using the product since the beginning of 2014.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used HP EVA previously.

The setup was fairly straightforward because we emphasized simplicity as an important purchase criteria.

Other systems evaluated were Dell EqualLogic, Hitachi, IBM, Netapp.

Don't buy either the oldest or the newest technology!

The most valuable features are having the proper contacts, getting a better price, and becoming certified. For example, our partners get certified because we are the only partner who has the most certifications.

It has helped us work much better.

HPE Mexico takes a lot of time to register and deliver. After we negotiated the final price, HPE releases it and then it takes 48 to 72 hours to deliver it. This is not the best deal.

for the last 4 years

The stability is great for our customers and for us. It's perfect.

The scalability is sufficient. We are expanding our operations now.

I have used technical support and I would give them a rating of 8/10. Their staff just came from university and they are still getting experience.

The initial setup was very complex, because it was our first installation.

We didn't evaluate any other solutions besides HPE.

Of course, you should go for it. We are an HPE shop and we have to focus on that. We have to focus more on the competence and less on the financial considerations.

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.

For me, the most valuable feature is its flexibility. You don't have to pre-plan everything. With more traditional storage systems, you had to decide on the size of your RAID groups and what RAID groups you wanted. A lot of customers don't know that upfront. The nice thing about 3PAR is you can set it up and just let the system essentially tune itself.

Since 3PAR is self tuning and it optimizes itself to a better level of performance, then that translates to the application level and the business users can get their functions done quicker and more efficiently.

I think it needs to become even more automated, especially with all this new hyper-converged functionality, which is really easy to upgrade. It should also be self-healing. The upgrade process is still quite clunky for 3PAR. It receives an alert from itself and then tells you what to do. At the moment it's not that intuitive.

I've been working with 3PAR for about four years now.

We've had very little problems with stability.

It can scale as long as the customer's got the budget.

Technical support could be better. The guys you get on the phone generally are not very knowledgeable. It can often take a while to go through several levels of support to get to the solution.

Initial setup is relatively complex.

I think the license structure is quite transparent and fair.

I'd say are the main two qualities vendor must have is good product and good technical support. Obviously, they must also have a reasonable price.

3PAR is reliable. Although it takes a little bit of time to get set up, once you get set up, it runs itself. The other nice thing about it is that, the 3PAR scales from small to large nicely. Not like other vendors where you have to have several solutions for different size environments.

With our previous EVA system, we couldn't shift data between different tiers online. We have multi-tiered storage and can move them online between SSD and global SAS. With 3PAR, we can quickly move our large volumes and check or test something, and if it's not faster with SSD, we can just move it back.

We have zero downtime with 3PAR. This saves us a lot of money as the business stays up and running.

There is only one thing I would really like to see, but I'm not entirely sure if this is actually 3PAR-related or not. I'd like real-time reporting. We can get reports, but it's difficult to monitor the system in real-time, which is critical, for example, when something is running slowly. It takes us hours to find out what the system is doing.

Also, real-time reporting will tell me who the "top talker" is at any given time. This is something we go to Brocade for to use their fiber channel and open grid. The first thing it shows is the top 5 talkers so you know that one of those is mostly likely causing the problem.

I think that 3PAR will eventually have the fiber channel feature, increasing its cost. I don't see us buying the license for that, though, as we've already spent a lot of money on 3PAR licenses.

We've used it in production for one and a half years.

We haven't had a single problem yet. I'm quite happy with that actually.

It's not good and kind of stressful when you're at the first level. Sometimes we have a hard time explaining what our problem is. We have to escalate the issue to someone who really knows what they're talking about.

The initial setup with different tiers and adaptive optimizations was very easy after seeing the DQE. Migration of our data that first time was also very easy.

The pricing is fair, but you have to pay for every little feature, which is something I really dislike about HP. You buy the software, then the hardware, then the OS license, then if you want more, you have to pay more just to put your data on it.

For example, if you want to replicate data, you have to get the replication license. You can't just replicate data and I can't always get budget approved to do that.

We're really happy with 3PAR as it performs very well despite a few failing discs, which is normal. Upgrades went well and we haven't had any outages. We'd recommend it to others.

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.

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