HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We target 3PAR because of the availability aspects that it brings with a synchronous replication. I work with a lot of medical and larger business organizations which are looking for the ability to run stretch clustering between data centers. If they lose a full data center, they can use this to flap over live without application downtime. This is probably the biggest thing that comes into play from an availability aspect. Then, there is also inherently a lot of the performance which comes with it. E.g., if I have a lot of high demand applications, it is one of those where the system, the all-flash array, the 8450, and even the 9450 that recently came out, can keep the latency and response time down.

A lot of it has to do with its ability to stretch between data centers. It has helped a lot for times when our customers do DR testing. Instead of having to spin down and spin up, I can do it live and seamless. Therefore, I do not have to schedule downtime with an organization. Especially maintenance on arrays, if I need to do some maintenance, it could potentially slow down somethings or even take things offline. 

With 3PAR, I can transparently sort of flap over to that other data center and do all the maintenance I need to do (even if it means forklift upgrading things). I can do this without having to take applications down. For a place like a hospital, which is open 24/7/365, it can't suffer downtime. That is why this product is one of those nice game changers. 

It allows me to do so much and worry about taking care of the clients, instead of how do I keep things up.

Its biggest feature is the ability to do a lot of stretch clustering. When I look at a couple of the other arrays, sometimes I have to put extra layers on top where I can do this natively. It works with Hyper-V, VMware, and physical servers. I can keep that storage up transparently when it flops over and also to the kind of the way that it integrates with other stuff in the portfolio, like a Nimble and StoreOnce, to offload like snapshots. Therefore, I am not eating up a lot of what we call Tier 1 data for retention, when I am trying to keep data for archival purposes. I can offload it to less expensive storage. 

It all works in concert using Recovery Manager Central (RMC). HPE coordinates it all, so it is more of a solution instead of products trying to do things together.

Some people are talking about getting NVMe drives in with faster flash. However, I think that is on the roadmap. I was at Aspire this year, and they were talking about the next chassis and they are ready for it. It is just a matter of getting them in. 

Feature-wise, with the InfoSight additions, there is a lot of the stuff missing in the intelligent interface. As they grow and push, a lot of it will not tie into Hyper-V. I have a lot of clients with Hyper V, so having that put into InfoSight because I have a lot of clients who run half-and-half or a lot on Hyper-V, especially a lot of schools with public domains. There has been a shift more to Hyper V because the features are really good now, and getting those analytics would really help.

With OneView, there are some challenges. When I set up the Peer Persistence, it is very hard to manage zoning from OneView for arrays. We have eight 3PARs out there right now, and we do all our zoning outside of OneView, which is the opposite of what they say to do. 

Stability is nice. A lot of other systems have two to four controllers. From a performance perspective that gets into availability, it can suffer parts failures. The nice part about 3PAR is it starts getting into the six to eight node controllers, if I want to scale up. It is built-in there, and what helps with that is they from almost a managed services, or service provider background, before HPE even acquired them. They have a great structure, where if I have different business units, I need to get granular access. I can create separate domains for clients, but then manage it a little bit differently. The flexibility and ability to adjust to business needs is where its robustness is. Sometimes that adds some complications to the setup and the configuration, but sometimes that is needed based on what the business is trying to do with it.

If I need to step up performance-wise, I can add additional controllers. As far as different systems, if I need to go between the 8000, 9000 or the 20000, I can get into the multi-petabyte and still maintain massive performance, if needed. Therefore, I can start low, even with small businesses. I can look at a two-node 8200, but then if I need to go big, I can get into the eight-node 20000. 

It is a nice family of products. It adjusts for even the smallest client and largest business clients.

Usually if it gets to the point where we can't solve it, we will getting on the horn with technical support. Recently, we did have an under the hood issue which came up, and we know where to go or who to contact. Normal support has been good, but if I have to, we can get with their team that is developing the code. 

HPE even hooked me up. There is one guy who is writing their Remote Copy Software, and there is an inherent little bug we found. We have a pretty complex solution, and unfortunately, somebody always has to be the person to find the bug. The nice part is how they responded to it. Their team all came together, and everybody has been real responsive, even to this day. The VP and their product manager are emailing me, and I receive email updates, even as recent as yesterday. They are staying involved and care about the client.

Reactive is normal support, you do not go there. What will happen, and this is what we are excited about, InfoSight from the Nimble acquisition has a lot more of that predictive information because that is where I am pushing my clients to shift. They should be at the right OS level, so we can get those heuristics in there, because a lot of that information is will help. If something is going wrong, then we can identify it ahead of time, because it is easier to prevent than it is to repair. 

One of the reason why I think HPE bought Nimble is not so much for the Nimble Storage, but for the InfoSight part of it. A lot of the intelligence and data center will help resolve those last little issues regarding, "Why did we have downtime?" We should have seen this coming.

There have been a couple bumps with some of the support stuff, but HPE needs to sort that stuff out and that is where I hope Nimble will help because they are well-known for their support. For example, there were a few goofy things with support where we were trying to do OS upgrades and HPE MyRoom failed. However, they would not get on WebEx because they are only allowed to get on HPE MyRoom. Therefore, we had to reschedule an upgrade three times because of it. It was one of those where it was no one person's fault. It was just a policy and procedure issues. So, I am looking forward to getting some of these things cleaned up.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of 10.

It is the availability aspect. Over the last few years, I have done a lot of shifts where people come off of Dell, Hitachi arrays, or even some other products within the HPE line, and they need either the performance or the availability. The availability that they want to put in is a lot of time a type of Peer Persistence setup. We are selling at least two 3PARS where they have multiple data centers, so if an array goes down in the same data center, the customer can lose a whole array and still stay up because they have peer persistence set up. That has probably been the single biggest selling feature: availability. Nobody wants to be the person in the news that is down or costing their shareholders money. Thus, availability has been a real big push, and 3PAR does availability really well.

If you have never set up a 3PAR, it can be daunting. There are a lot nerd knobs. There are a lot of things that we can turn on and adjust. It is easy to get lost in 3PAR. This is where our organization gives a lot of our time, in the setup. 

A lot of times people play with buttons just because they are there. That is where you can get in a little trouble with 3PAR. This is because there is plenty of stuff to do. That is where we try to get ahead of the game, and help them with planning and architecture, e.g., here is what we will do and here is what we will set up and do, because you can get yourself into trouble playing with everything.

We have a pretty good routine down now where the last two arrays that I did were all-flash 8450s, including racking time, and it took less than probably a handful of hours before we were up and running. We did about eight shelves. It is not overly complicated. It is more the OS and configuration which take more time. Usually, most installs never go beyond a day. The rest of it is just fine tuning and adjusting to the environment, depending on the size of the array.

Even as we have upgraded the product, one client that I work with a lot has eight 3PARs. They had two of the old 10000 arrays, all three tiers of disks, and they traversed about three to three and a half racks each. Therefore, we had almost six and a half to seven racks of storage. When we went to the 8450s, we went to all-flash and were able to go down to a 16U a piece, so that is 32U total. That is almost a six rack reduction. 

They are out in New Hampshire, in a very green state and very green conscious. I spent an extra 30 days getting the proper numbers from the state of New Hampshire about power consumption, even the air conditioning, such as calculating BTUs an hour. The benefit was already showing that they would save over five years over $400,000 from power cooling. That does not even get into buying less racks.

They were going to more of a fixed pod structure, like a service provider. This was six racks that I do not have to put PDUs into. It is less hardware to maintain. It is less likely to fail because there are less moving parts. Obviously, there are the SSDs, which was a big part of a green initiative (less waste and power being used). 

I do not sell 3PAR all the time because it may not fit in with everything a client is trying to do. It is more about finding the right product for the solution. 

The big ones who comes up is obviously Dell technologies, VMAX and PowerMax, when I am looking for availability and performance. Another one that comes up a lot is Unity when we are looking at Nimble. Unity is a big player too right now. 

Also, what usually comes up quite a bit, is just Nimble. That is another one of those things where if I do not want all the nerd knobs, just a simple, great easy product that performs well, and if I want to be less focused on watching the data center moving forward, Nimble is a nice thing. The only thing that is missing right now is that synchronous for availability. They do not do synchronous replication, everything is asynchronous. Therefore, they are missing that availability, but it is on the roadmap for them. If peer persistence is not needed, Nimble is usually a great fit.

They chose HPE 3PAR because of the scale and the adjustability of it. If I need to get bigger, I can get pretty large with the product and still maintain good performance. There are not many vendors that go beyond the four nodes and maintain performance. Having the ability to scale from four to eight nodes allows that additional performance, because I can put 100 SSDs behind two controllers, but I will only be able to see about 20 disks worth of performance because I will outrun the controller. Therefore, getting that in the throughput  helps, but also in its ability to do Peer Persistence, which is the availability aspect where I can lose a whole 3PAR and it is seamless to the host. These are the biggest things: the availability and the speed of it.

They do great things. The system is great. It is just a matter of cleaning up some of the support stuff, then the enhancements that are not there yet. Hopefully, they are coming in with InfoSight. That is where it could be better.

Never have blinders; everybody has their favorite product, but do not turn away from keeping your vision open about a solution. Keep that in mind when you are looking at a product. 

Most important criteria for clients when they evaluate a vendor: A lot of that gets into supportability. What do they have for a track record? How easy is support to work with? How efficient are they? When things go wrong, I do not want be scrambling. How easy is it to get to support and get them on the line (an efficient use of support). 

As far as feature-rich, how does it work with everything from an availability aspect?

Everybody talks about backup, and lot of times, they are talking about it after storage. They should be talking about it together, because storage is part of backing it up. The business should be asking: Am I backing it up fast enough? Are my RPOs and RTOs inline with what the business SLAs are? 

When we start talking backups and the availability aspect to a lot of businesses, they do not seem to be defining their SLAs. They often do not have any. That is where we find that we are having more of a discussion which helps drive a lot of what we need to do. 

You do not want buy stuff, then say, "What can we do with it?" You should be defining what you want to do with it, then purchasing. That is a lot of how we are changing the purchasing process. 

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.

I use 3PAR as the standard storage. The main production is VMware, and it is connected to 3PAR across fabric switch. The fabric switch between them is MDS Switch and Notebook 8. We also have a Hyper-V environment, which is connected to the same storage. The main service is the exchange service. I have a public cloud and a private cloud. I use 3PAR as a private cloud.

In our organization, the storage is not detected from the first day, so I don't have the workload. The workload is run in my environment, and 3PAR is the best solution. If I have a workload from Thursday, I don't make the adaptive optimization on this because 3PAR is collecting all the storage and doing all tiering of the storage. If I have another disk from a new line, 3PAR makes it as tiering and adaptive. When a VM has more rights about the storage, it will make such VM of a higher tier. It can make it a C-tier. If the VM has a need for more IOPs, they need to use the scale command every time. This VM will move to another tier, and after the weekend, I will schedule adaptive optimization to check if this VM needs this tier or not. This way I can make all the storage tiered. If the workload is big and needs more IOPs, it moves the VMs from one tier to another tier. This is the main advantage. 

3PAR is different from other storage solutions because it uses a chunklet when we initiate the storage. Every disk is submitted as a 1 GB chunklet. This chunklet can be RAID 1, 4, 5, or 6. This fabulous feature is very useful for me because I can distribute the RAID for any volume. 

The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning. Other vendors take this volume as thick provisioning because of which the capacity is reached quickly. It doesn't happen in 3PAR because it detects zeros. It only writes the data, and it doesn't write zeros. There are two processors in 3PAR: the ASIC processor and the main processor. The ASIC processor detects zero writing and doesn't write it, which is a big feature in 3PAR.

File Persona can be better. I don't use File Persona because it has many problems with my environment. The antivirus that it has is not compatible with File Persona, and that's a big issue with File Persona.

3PAR is not as good as Dell when making a file in the storage. 3PAR for a block is very good, but when comparing row capacity, I get 14% capacity with 3PAR, but with Dell, I get 60% capacity.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is very stable because the controller is active-active. It is more secure if you make the best design and make two fabric switches around that.

3PAR is easy to scale up and scale out. It can serve a production workload without any problem. To scale up, you can have another inclusion in 3PAR. To scale out, you can add another controller. You can also have more IOPs in your production. 

We have 5,000 users of this solution. The main workload is in 3PAR now. I will also implement 3PAR on another site.

Their live technical support is available 24 hours a day. When I open a ticket with them, the support calls me within 30 minutes and schedules a meeting to show the issue.

I have PowerMax from Dell. I also have Dorado from Huawei in my environment, which is all-flash.

It is straightforward. I power on 3PAR and take care of the cabling. 3PAR is managed by two components: a services processor and a server component. The server can be a virtual appliance or a physical appliance. 

For upgrading, I take different configurations from the services processor. I update a package on the servers, which makes it easy to upgrade in production. For initial configuration, I do an upgrade offline, and it is easy.

It is lower in price as compared to other vendors, such as Dell. As compared to Huawei, all storage solutions are expensive, including this one.

If you are a new company and you need more capacity, availability, and scalability, you can choose 3PAR. Otherwise, you can choose another storage. When you put 3PAR, you must tell the customers about the usable capacity from the first day, not the row capacity.

I would recommend taking the official course from HP for 3PAR before performing any tasks. This is because 3PAR is not easy to manage in your IT environment. You must know everything about storage and how everything is written in the storage.

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

It's the main storage system, both for the primary site as well as the DR site.

We have complex business needs. Our business has multiple databases - both Oracle and SQL - an Exchange environment, Active Directory environment, websites, web servers, SharePoint. We have a variety of use cases - including development VMs for custom web apps - all being stored on 3PAR at the primary site. The DR site gets Veeam backups of the primary site, so we have the backup recovery on our other 3PAR.

Performance-wise it has been fantastic. 

So far, we have yet to have a disk fail on either system, other than one I forced to fail when we first got the system in. So the reliability of the 3PAR system has been outstanding. We've had maybe one controller go bad, but not enough to bring the whole system down. It was just random, maybe a degraded state, until HPE Support came and fixed it, and they have been fantastic.

In terms of features I'd like to see, I have been hearing a lot about InfoSight with the 3PAR, here at HPE Discover 2018. I'd be curious to see some of the additions that will bring to the system. We're fairly up to date, so we should easily be able to utilize some of it, once it's available. I know that came from the Nimble platform, so they are still integrating it in.

With the uptime and reliability, it's been rock solid so far.

We just added an SSD tier to it, so we're even leveraging that. We literally have three tiers of storage, SSD, fast class storage, and a slower storage state.

We haven't had needed to do much, other than add the SSD tier, at this point. Normally, we try to guess at our storage needs for about a five-year turnaround time, and then from there we usually buy another storage system to replace at that point. I don't know if we'll go to that model, with the 3PAR. It has been so rock solid that I might look into just extending support on it. So it may save us money on storage systems in the long run.

HPE support has been great.

We used to have a Dell EqualLogic storage system prior to this one. On the phone, with support, they managed to tell us to do something that caused the whole system to come down. That was one of the determining factors to go completely away from anything Dell had their hands in and go with something else.

In our research, as much as I tried to look on the web to find anything negative about 3PAR, I couldn't find it. I found negatives about every other storage system we could find, but not on the 3PAR.

Among the most important criteria for us when evaluating a vendor is support. Support is always a concern. We don't have that many IT staff, so we do rely on vendor support and we usually keep the maintenance up on all of all our main equipment. So having a decent support relationship with vendors is critical.

Setup was pretty straightforward. We attended a week-long training with HPE onsite. Other than that, we've been able to manage it ourselves, for the most part. If there are any issues, we just call them in to support and work over the phone with them.

I believe they did most of the install in one day. They came out for two days or three days, but the majority of it was done - the initial racking - in one day; maybe some finalizations on the second day. It didn't take long.

We definitely see ROI. The price point for the 3PAR was actually cheaper than the other storage systems we were looking at. From just the initial cost perspective, it was already cheaper. From what I can tell working with the other storage systems we've worked with - we've had EMC, we've had EqualLogic on the Dell side, and we have even had older Dell storage over the years - there is no comparison between our 3PAR system and the rest of them.

When we were initially looking we priced out some IBM storage, obviously Compellent, some Dell stuff, EqualLogic. Realistically, we didn't want to go back with EqualLogic, mainly due to support.

With the Dells, they were telling us we could upgrade it, firmware and everything else on it, and we said, "No, we're going to hold off until we get another storage system in place and then we'll try that." When we migrated to the 3PAR, we went ahead and did a full upgrade on the Dell EqualLogic. It lost blocks, it lost about 12 drives, and I was thankful that we didn't actually need that data. We left the data on it while we did the upgrade just to see, following Dell support recommendations, what it would have done. Had we listened to them, we would have had, probably, multiple hours trying to figure out what data was actually misplaced, lost; and it had no way of telling us where it lost blocks. 

So from that perspective, we were nervous about doing a 3PAR upgrade which we did recently. We made sure all our backups were off of it prior to doing it. It had no problems during the upgrade, except that one card wouldn't upgrade, and they had to replace it. But there was no issue affecting any data, which is the primary purpose of having a storage system.

You couldn't go wrong with the 3PAR system.

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.

The solution is mostly used for storage.

The user interface is very good. It's impressive. I find it very easy to understand. 

It offers good scalability.

The stability is very reliable. 

There is the possibility of using it in a hybrid way.

It's a very popular product for enterprise storage. It's good for medium to enterprise-level companies. 

It's easy to set up the product.

Technical support has been helpful.

This solution is now at end-of-life.

We have found the solution to be expensive. 

I've been using with the solution for the last six years. 

The solution is very stable and extremely reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is scalable and easily expands. 

We have various customers on the solution. They might have thousands of users overall, however, we have four to five clients using the product in general. 

We have been satisfied with the level of technical support we get. They are helpful and responsive. 

We also use Primera and PowerStore.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. We also use Primera and PowerStore and the setup is pretty much the same for all of those. 

How long it takes will be determined by the capacity and the formats. It can take anywhere from six or seven hours up to 24.

We might need two to three staff members to handle deployment and maintenance It depends on the SLA and the organizational structure. 

There is a one-time cost once you purchase the solution. There is no perpetual licensing. 

It is an expensive product. 

I'm an end-user and handle storage only. 

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the product as it is at end-of-life. However, I would rate it ten out of ten. 

We use 3PAR as our main production environment. Therefore, we use it for everything from VMware to our NAS solutions. It is used for complex business needs, because we also store all of our databases on the 3PAR as well.

We have a lot of systems at the airport where I work. So, we have a lot of Oracle databases, which run a lot of core functionality. This includes the financial systems. We have a large maintenance program, and we have to track all of our maintenance needs. This is all done through an Oracle database. All of these databases are on the 3PAR. 

We have about 500 users. All of their user data is stored on the 3PAR for groups and user data. Then, most of our environment is in VMware. Thus, we have a reasonable sized VMware environment of about 700 servers, and that all runs off of the 3PAR.

It has improved our functions because we have a very small IT team. We have to do a lot of things. The more solutions that we can bring onboard which are easy to use and do not require too much maintenance, this is good for us. We just do not have enough bandwidth to cover everything.

Therefore, we are always looking for good solutions which do their job well and are easy to use. 

3PAR is fairly easy to use. We have used a few different arrays in the past, and they were a lot more complicated. This one was fast to bring up and start using right away. It is easy to keep running and does not require too much effort. It has been very reliable, which is key.

Foremost, we look for a reliable solution foremost, and 3PAR has been very reliable.

I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly. That would be a great feature.

The controllers are going to age out, then eventually they will need new controllers. If we could upgrade those controllers live without interruption, that would be great.

The stability has been great. We have had zero issues.

The scalability is good because it is easy to add in new disks. We just add them on the fly, and they are available for use. We do not have to go in, then configure then. We just put the disks in, then they are available, so it is easy.

I needed to invest in a new solution because the previous solution was getting old.

We wanted to go to market to find a better solution. We wanted something that had a little more intelligence. However, because we are a semi-public company, we had to go to market. We could not just pick 3PAR.

The 3PAR actually had to prove itself. It had to be scored and graded across a panel of people in order to win the bid. Not only that, it had to have a good price.

It was not complex.

We had a third-party vendor help set it up. We had two weeks to set it up, and we had it done within one week. We had a whole week to sit back and enjoy it.

I have seen ROI, because it has performed extremely well so far. The amount of data that we have flowing through it has worked out very well.

The return on investment for me is that all of my customers are happy. That is a really good return on investment: less complaining.

We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, Dell, and 3PAR. We went with 3PAR because of price and the functionality had everything that we wanted it to do. Also, the presentation that the HPE team put together went really well.

Give the product a good, hard look, because HPE does a very good job. They are a market leader. They are not a small player in the space. You can be very comfortable when dealing with a company like HPE.

It is doing everything that we want it to do. We are not that big, so we did not have a lot of crazy requirements. Therefore, it is doing everything we want it to do. The other big factor is that it is easy to use.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Easy of use
• Ability to have two arrays back each other up. In case one of them has a problem, the other one can take over.

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.