HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The most valuable feature for us is the ease of 3PAR's scalability. We have 330 different organizations within our company; we do anything and everything. That's why scalability of 3PAR is so important to us.

It provides us with on-demand service. For example, if we win a contract but don't have access to a service facility until midnight, we have to be able to "flood in" suddenly to keep the services running without any downtime. We have to be able to keep the systems running instantaneously and don't have the luxury of, say, a three-month provisioning or a new-chassis swap. So with 3PAR, we're able to provide on-demand service.

It needs to provide better customer visibility of what's going on. For example, having access to a customer's ticketing system if only on a real-time, read-only basis could be a perspective that's extremely helpful. It's important that we have clear and open lines of communications with our customers, and 3PAR doesn't provide that yet to meet our needs.

I first got involved with 3PAR in 2006.

We have a large number of HP storage products and 3PAR is by far the most stable. We do have a couple of clusters that have normal, standard discs, and these are so stable. We wanted something high-end, and that's why we went with 3PAR. If something goes wrong, we know it's not a hardware issue, but rather the software configuration that's running on it.

I'm normally used to reaching the point of a system where you just can't expand it any further and need to do a step change, swapping out a base unit or something like that. With 3PAR, that problem doesn't exist -- you just keep adding to it and capacity grows in a nice, linear fashion. If I want to add just a terabyte, I don't have to add 100 terabytes. Expansion of 3PAR is very, very smooth.

From an ownership perspective, I like the technical support HP provides because they're better engineers. The tech support structure is also not as clunky as with other organizations and there's a better spread of skill-sets amongst techs. So overall, technical support is pretty good.

If you speak to your techies, as opposed to your managers, and ask them how easy it is for them to use and understand 3PAR, they'll say it gets a 10/10. The techies get it and they love it.

It has dynamic allocation. I have 16 terabytes of storage allocated to various nodes as external storage. It has met our needs. We’re looking for something similar with enhanced scalability. We have about 96 servers and want to increase that to around 200. We need a centralized solution that can easily scale and integrate different types of storage.

Integration with our existing infrastructure has been smooth, though we use a mix of Ethernet and fiber optics.

3PAR has been reliable. We've had some issues with batteries and power supply, but those are manageable. Most of our problems stem from older equipment. I have to contact them for any inquiries about storage or compatibility with new systems. This slows down our ability to make quick decisions. The process would be sped up if there were a direct line to HP for inquiries. Our funding can change monthly, which affects our ability to upgrade or scale.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ as a partner since 2012. We currently have about 400 terabytes and plan to upgrade to 2 petabytes.

I have experience with Dell storage solutions but found them more challenging to integrate than 3PAR.

I was responsible for sending a bare metal machine to CERN during the main installation, which laid the foundation for the setup. I needed to install the software myself. My role as an administrator began one month after the installation of 3PAR. I installed the software, calibrated it, and configured the RAID 6 format, among other tasks.

The learning curve is steep, but we are prepared for it. My experience with the software has been positive, and it meets our institutional needs.

We have several AI projects underway. One involves automatically collecting grades using robots at our HPE computing center. These robots gather data and collaborate to streamline the process. We also created a 3D model of the archaeological castle, using AI to identify features and detect any defects. We took photos and generated reports for that project to find ruins and other issues.

We’re working on protein-protein interaction solutions in chemistry. This allows us to simulate lab experiments at the computing center, saving time and reducing the need for in vitro tests.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The most valuable feature is definitely the way they've taken into consideration the tiered storage aspect of it. They've added a newer gen now; they were adding the faster A6 and whatnot to accommodate more workloads. That's been really great for us. The tiered storage solution they used was a lot more beneficial for our company. We have a lot of data storage that's just cold storage but it conveniently pulled back into a SSD, as well, so that helped us quite a bit.

With 3PAR, we got more insights. We could see where data is going; overall better performance as well from that standpoint. For the ProLiant servers, I don't know what to say about the series. I rack them and throw them in there. Once you put them on a rack, as long as you don't mess with it, they just run.

We haven't overly stressed it to say whether there's any stability. Once we expand it and do any replication, that's where we're going to see the stability but on basic operation of 3PAR, it's stable. You would expect that there's no quirkiness. I'm not seeing glitches in the UI, I'm not seeing too much in there.

The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. I find it amazing that I paid for extra for support for the 3PAR and I wait on the phone for 30 minutes. For that extra support, when I'm paying for the premium support; so it's US-side support, US-based support, I should mention. If I call the regular number without the extra support, I talk to someone instantly.

It's, "What care plan are you on? What care plan are you on?" That's the question of HPE, "Are you on the SA plan?" "Are you on this plan?" You got to dig through this matrix of plans to figure out which phone are we going to call. It's absurd.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only complexity we've really had for the initial setup was actually with HPE, in scheduling. We have to have an HPE person on site to put the 3PAR in so they can vet it and all that stuff. Getting him coordinated, it was a wreck. The first time.

We did look at EMC instead of 3PAR for a little bit. We chose 3PAR because I've dealt with LeftHand before. Then, HPE bought LeftHand, namely 3PAR. I dealt with their storage stuff previously a little bit. I like what they were doing and how they were doing it.

It was just one of those things. I knew it. I was comfortable with it but it wasn't necessarily a front-runner until we started looking at EMC and just how convoluted their solution was to get there. The price at EMC was expensive. We had all these tertiary software you had to purchase just to get to run normally. There's still that with the 3PAR but it wasn't as steep of a cost. I wasn't paying for this huge EMC name.

The most valuable feature is its tiered approach to data structuring. We can quickly move data that's stored on slow disks to faster disks if the demand arises. That's good value for our company.

We've recently embarked on a large-scale convergence project where we've consolidated about 250 physical servers to virtual servers. Those virtual servers are hosted onto 3PARs 7400 systems, which are located in two data centers. They give us high availability and real-time access to data in both locations. In terms of the value for business and the value for us, it's given us the facility to have a business continuity plan, which we never had before.

Data de-duplication is something that's lacking in 3PAR. We use HPE StoreOnce systems as part of a backup solution. StoreOnce systems, they use a SAS disks, which are spin disks. They have about 80% de-duplication ratio, which from a backup perspective, that gives us tremendous capacity to back up to disk; not to take to disk for 12, 24 months. When you compare that to 3PAR, 3PAR doesn't have de-duplication and this causes storage issues.

Technically that's not true. 3PAR has de-duplication on the SSD drives, but because it's a mixed drive chassis, the large proportion of data that we have comes in the first class of the SAS disks, which will equate to maybe about 70 or 80% for top data. They're not de-duplicated. I think that's a feature that HPE need to work on quickly.

3PARs are very stable. We've been using 3PARs both in the UK and our headquarters in France for maybe four years now and we've not had any issues with the system, so they're a quite a reliable system.

Scalability depends on the situation. Whenever you try and provision these converged platforms, you've got to have an element of planning in terms of where your business is going grow for the next two or three years. It's interesting. We planned for 20% data growth on a 3PAR infrastructure over three years. What we found was we had closer to 20% data growth per year.

So if you look it from a data scaling perspective, we've reached the limits of our 3PAR 7200s in Europe. Thankfully for us, we've got 7400s, which gives you a lot more scalability in terms of storage. From a memory and processing prospective, they're perfect. So we have no issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good for the 3PARs you get. We've bought a 5-year support plan and we get to speak to the 3PAR technical support team in Houston, Tx. They're quite responsive. The 3PAR support plan, as well, is a reactive support plan, so we've got people from Houston who are looking at our systems and they inform us whenever a disk is filled. They send disks to be swapped out. They can be swapped out by our team or they can be swapped out by an HP person that turns up and does the job for you.

We're a large company of many, many small companies and we've realized through global projects that have an autonomous approach to IT departments, for example, where it doesn't work. That's exactly the same when it comes to the architecture behind your IT environment. We had to look at centralizing all of our systems, all of our platforms, so that we could offer a meaningful level of service to business. Without centralization, we couldn't guarantee the service of any of our platforms around the key business applications that the business expected us to deploy. That's how we knew to centralize all of our systems and platforms and host them on converged systems.

Initial setup was very complex. These systems are very complex, but if you buy a converged system from HPE, the converged system is part of the package and HPE provides you with the technical expertise to come out and build the converged systems for you. They're built and tested at the manufacturing plant. You can go and visit the manufacturing plant and see them if you want. Some people can. Then they're sent to your site and HPE sends experts to build the 3PARs on site and assist you with the build.

We have a global HPE agreement and it depends on the sort of size of projects and whether or not we issue and RFP when we got to other suppliers. If we do issue an RFP, then we're not tied internally to working with HPE. We can work with whoever we think's best for the requirement. But because we have such a good close working relationship with HPE and because they attend industry events, I'm always key to recommend to some of our peers and our colleagues around the world that they should be looking at this or that particular product.

3PAR's good from a medium-sized to large-sized enterprises. We're probably a large-sized enterprise company, but we have also small companies around the world where we wouldn't recommend the 3PAR for those sort of situations. We'd recommend applying a platform converged systems solution.

• Scaleable from two to eight controller nodes for High Availability
• Persistent fabric array ports
• Performance tuning
• Dynamic and adaptive optimizations
• Highly granular storage
• One gigabyte miniature disk concept called "chunklets"
• Striping of data across all disks available - wide striping
• Highly intelligent Gen3 and Gen 4 ASICs which acts as the brain of the 3PAR storage systems. This is not a regular CPU
• Very quick redistribution of data if there's a disk failure
• All the disk drives in the system are used for data, since parity and spares are at the chunklet level.

I cannot share the information on how it improved our storage estates, but in general, it has very good SAN performance compared to EMC Clariion, IBM XIV, IBM Storwize V7000 and its other competitors.

They have released a unified version of HP 3PAR, with a separate NAS server unit in the enclosure/rack. I would like to see a proper unified system (same controller serving both SAN and NAS solutions) such as NetApp offers.

We've been using it for three years. We currently have a 7400 (mix of disk drives), and a 7450 (full flash array, only SSD disks),

The performance is optimal, if we have planned everything properly well in advance.

These are mid-range storage solutions that can be scaled up to 700TB of space depending on the type of disks we use. It does have enterprise solutions that can scale up to eight controller nodes with 1.8PB of usable capacity. However, we have a 7400 and a 7450 with lot of provisioning done to ESX systems with thousands of VMs.

HP customer support, especially for 3PAR is excellent.

They have highly skilled technical support team. I would rate them 8/10.

We chose 3PAR because it has the best price compared to its competitors, and delivers the performance expected.

The initial setup/installation was done by the vendor. We needed to provide them with the necessary hardware and network information, (DNS, NIS etc). Their experience was very good, I have no complaints.

Pricing and licensing depend on the customer/partner deals and negotiations/agreements.

It has met our performance and stability expectations. 3PAR is one of the best in the market and it is evident that its sales have raised to 10x since it was acquired by HP. All cloud solutions from HP and many other companies use HP 3PAR storage on their backend for their cloud solutions.

We have 70 virtual machines, which include various services such as Active Directory, mail server, phone server, file server, security, firewall, and antivirus.

The only advantage is taking snapshots quickly.

It has a very robust product. While we may not need many features in our environment, the Snapshot capability and seamless integration with Veeam were important to us. However, Veeam now supports a wider range of products, including VMware. HPE offered us a good discount, which made the StoreServ a viable option.

We have experience with several systems, including the HPE x1200 and x1600 models and IBM’s PS3500. We were also considering products from Dell. Some companies that acquired 3PAR storage offered additional choices. Although we didn’t initially require Flash speed, it’s a valuable option. Flash reliability was a concern at the time, but now, the cost of larger hard drives is much lower than Flash. We were looking for hybrid solutions but might now consider going all Flash.

It is expensive. It is an older system, and since then, many new technologies have emerged. Initially, it had a steep learning curve, and understanding its workings was challenging. We had to open multiple support tickets and escalate issues through various levels of support—level one, level two, and level three. Even then, some problems remained unresolved. 

One specific area of difficulty was understanding the RAID configurations and the concept of chunks, which were unique to 3PAR. HP has moved away from this approach in its newer systems. In general, we might prefer simpler, more straightforward systems over the specialized complexity of 3PAR.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ since 2020. We are using V7200 of the solution.

It is scalable. We can buy a lot with money. We have ten terabytes of data. DeepL has about forty-six terabytes.

Technical support is great. It includes experts from various global locations, such as China, India, California, and the UK. Despite this extensive support network, there are instances where issues like data reinitialization might still occur. Local technical personnel are experienced and provide excellent service, ensuring effective assistance.

Positive

We evaluated solutions from IBM, HPE, and Dell. During our evaluation, we encountered the HPE 3PAR StoreServ, which initially appeared quite expensive. However, after negotiating with HPE, we received a significant discount—almost fifty percent. We decided to proceed with the 3PAR StoreServ and have been satisfied with its performance. However, the support renewal costs have been high, and as we approach the end of support, we need to consider a third-party support partner until we can upgrade to new storage.

The migration from IBM to HPE 3PAR StoreServ was a bit challenging. Although we had a partner from HPE, they were also new to 3PAR, which led to some difficulties during the migration. We encountered issues such as hardware compatibility, which required us to obtain a special card for the servers and a switch for 3PAR. Additionally, we had to work with Veeam to ensure compatibility, which involved using a beta version of their software.

The system was marketed to us as offering very fast snapshots, which was appealing at the time because we needed extensive backup solutions. It also promised smooth transitions between Nearline and Fast Class storage tiers. However, our work environment changed rapidly, and many planned features did not align with our new needs. Space was a significant issue; we frequently needed more storage than anticipated. While the solution was good, its effectiveness depends on the specific requirements and context of the deployment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Whenever new cars are manufactured and tested in the field, that data is picked up via laptop and stored in the solution's storage arrays.

The most valuable feature of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is its online upgrades.

The solution’s customer support could be improved.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ since 2021.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a stable solution.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten for stability.

The customer support team doesn't know the answers to the problems, and they cause delays. All the tickets, including a high ticket, always go to their L1 support before going to L2 and L3, which is not expected. I have to call a very senior SME eventually, and then they would really start working on the issue, which causes delays most of the time.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an expensive solution.

I would recommend HPE 3PAR StoreServ to other users because it has good stability and performance.

Overall, I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for all the storage needs for the hospital I work at.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has improved our organization from its ease of use and high availability.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is easy to use, fully featured, and has a great graphical user interface.

The configuration and flexibility should improve.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for approximately seven years.

I have found the stability to be very high.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is scalable but it has limits.

We have approximately 5,000 users using this solution across all departments. The solution is being extensively used in our organization.

The vendor support is very helpful.

The configuration is difficult but we had help from HPE 3PAR StoreServ. The whole process of the implementation took approximately one week.

We used vendor support to help us with the implementation of HPE 3PAR StoreServ. The representative was excellent.

We have one administrator that does the maintenance and upgrades of the solution.

The licensing cost for HPE 3PAR StoreServ is expensive.

We have evaluated the IBM FlashSystem solution and we are switching everything over from HPE 3PAR StoreServ.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution would be to find a good reseller who has expertise in HPE 3PAR StoreServ.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten.