HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It's very similar to most of the other arrays, which are available there. 

The auto-tiering is something that we like. The provisioning is quite good. 

Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud. That's the other important aspect of using 3PAR.

The initial setup is simple.

The solution should have a smaller footprint. It's large compared to, say, something like Pure Storage, which is a lot smaller. 

3PAR is not as fast as Pure Storage. That's something that 3PAR needs to look at.

They need to look at the frequent breakdowns. It's not as lag-free as some of the other HPE Arrays, the enterprise flash arrays. That's something that HPE needs to look at.

The pricing could be lowered. 

In the future, I'd like to see it being controlled more from the cloud itself.  

The solution lacks reliability. This aspect has gone down in the last few years.

I've been working with the solution for many years now. It's been five or more at this point.

Reliability is one area that needs improvement. I cannot afford to have a 4-node storage array suddenly having 2-nodes reboot for no reason. This has never happened on Pure or even on Dell EMC Storage Arrays. However, I've seen that happen on 3PAR on multiple accounts. That's something that HPE needs to work on. They need to work on their codes and make them more reliable. It was reliable to start with, however, somewhere down in the last three or four years, they just slipped.

Technical support has always been quite good. I have no complaints there. They're pretty good, very professional. I'm satisfied with the level of service.

I've been using it for so many years that, for me, the implementation process is quite easy.

The costs can be lowered. They're a little more expensive, especially on the support side of it. Even with us being that kind of partner, and getting discounted prices, it's still a little expensive.

We use it in our company as well as our customer's companies.

We've used all different versions of 3PAR from the smaller arrays to the newest one, which we have, even their 2400, 2800 versions as well.

StoreServ is good storage, which needs to get implemented alongside other products to allow it to be utilized in the way it's supposed to be - especially in a private cloud environment. Some of the other storage arrays, which came after StoreServ didn't really fully feature. For example, Nimble. We thought Nimble would do that, however, that's not the case. Still, StoreServ is quite well-rounded as storage, which we can still work with on multiple traditional environments plus with the new environments - with cloud and DevOps running the show. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

We have used HPE 3PAR Flash Storage in the past for all our IT data. For example, we have used it for claims, office management, business intelligence, business information. It can be used for a lot of purposes.

The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year.

I have been using HPE 3PAR Flash Storage for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage was scalable in the past but in the current market, it is a four out of ten. You are not able to add more power to the solution, it is not stackable.

We have approximately 6,000 users using this solution.

The technical support is good.

I have used Nimble and Primera.

The installation is not that difficult nowadays. It takes approximately two days.

When we need to do the implementation HPE comes with us and does it together with our maintenance department and an external company.

We have three engineers that do the maintenance of the solution.

The price of the license depends. Some people expect more from the hardware. Some expect more from the licensing, and that is because you can receive several licenses nowadays, such as the terabyte license. You buy the storage, and you pay extra for the terabyte license for the software. There is a one-time purchase for the license and you pay annually for the maintenance.

I have evaluated NetApp.

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage is old and is obsolete and we are moving to newer versions of the system.

HPE has several storage options, such as Nimble. HPE has a lot of operating systems for their storage, and they all have a different approach. They were all from different companies which HPE bought, for example, Nimble and Primera.

I would not recommend this solution anymore. I would advise others to look for new types of storage solutions.

I rate HPE 3PAR Flash Storage a four 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.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

I've seen a lot of data storage systems. It's the only storage system you can watch over the application time and it keeps measuring it. We have some thresholds on our end on it, a very good graphical user interface and reporting. 

There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has limited flexibility in building replication solutions. There are limitations to the number of IOPS the system can do. It's not bad as it is doing its job. However, for the application, if you need a toolbox, you can build everything concerning periodic replication modes of synchronous or asynchronous three-site, four-site, with supported cascading which requires you to buy an IBM product. 

It also takes a few hours to one day to upgrade the system and sometimes; it takes more time because, in some HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage, you have an eight-node system. If you do an upgrade, you do it node by node and every node might take more than an hour.

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

Last year after summer, HPE had to locate replication groups getting stopped and took a lot of time to find out what's happening, and yet we still don't know what's happening over there. It feels like the message is quite clear after replicating from A to B, and it states that B is not responding very well.

There is a timeout, and it stops the replication group because there is no stability or consistency and is not good at that moment. So that might be negative, but when was the last time? I think in November of last year.

At one point, some remote copy groups stopped working, and we used a disaster recovery plan because, in production, we replicate everything from A to B and then split up into some remote copy groups, gathering together some data source and clusters. If one of those remote copy groups stops, you don't have DFP anymore and you have to restart them. And last year after starting one of those replication groups; we had some performance issues because they're trying to get in sync as soon as possible using all the resources, so we had to plan very well outside the business hours.

We have proactive datacenter care; I call it a storage advocate, and we can send every question to them and we get quick answers. They also help to find out if new releases are available and other services. For now, they have more insights on that. They have better sources sometimes, and I have better sources than them sometimes, but they do a great job and they also assisted us concerning the compression issue we had at the beginning.

It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available. 

We have done total cost of ownership calculations over the past five years, and we also ask for some cost prices for the sixth and seventh year so that we can get some insights into what happens after those five years. We have some systems that are five years old and we keep them because it's flash data storage. It's still almost a three terabyte solid-state drive, and the support cost is not that high. We'll have a look after that. I see other things happening on the Hitachi boxes with all those license defeats. This is also positive for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, everything is on the license. When we bought the systems, it was the case and then I've been reading something about it. You can buy the rest of the licenses. If you buy a system, that will not be replicated to another system, then you get a license without replication software.

The job of direct channel support to HPE 3PAR StoreServ is not an end of life or end of support but HPE Primera has now replaced it and I hope they get all the functionality in there like the HPE 3PAR. I remember it seems like HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera have support for volume plugins and that will be a big game if they can implement volumes on their system because that kind of release is much better than the datastore level.

Generally, clients use the solution as primary storage or data storage for corporations. They also use it for data replication where they replicate to another site or even on the same site. They're typically replicating the data for a backup situation.

The solution has greatly assisted data performance as far as a VM-ware environment goes. My data performance is much faster.

One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. 

The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. 

It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment.

The solution is very easy to use.

The product is very robust and offers very good performance.

HP has several integration elements that work with other vendor storage products. I'd like to see a greater expansion on that so that a customer can do a more seamless migration from other vendor products. The migration of data to their platform could be better.

Primarily they don't have a lot. They have several EMC elements that they can migrate data from, however, there are many more controllers out there and it'd be good to see a more seamless integration so that that could occur.

I'd like to see 3PAR have some integration with Cloud services.

I've been using the solution for several years. It's been probably around seven years or so. It has definitely been a while.

The stability is pretty decent. The only thing you have to worry about is that you don't overtax the controller. In other words, you don't do that combination of deduping and compression as well as data replication and then also heavily use the controllers where your IO starts, the IO performance. With IOPS and Truepoint, it's important that users do not over-utilize the environment. Then you have performance issues. 

You have to be careful about exactly what your usage is. You really need to understand what you want to do with the controller. You need to understand what your total IOP performances will be, before you do any sizing so that you can size appropriately, otherwise, as with any storage, you could have an underutilized controller. That would then cause you frustration and business units would suffer as you would have slower performance than what you expected.

A lot of times customers get themselves in trouble due to the fact that they make a purchase or size a controller and then later on they undersized it. Sometimes the under-sizing can occur due to the fact that a company starts putting more demand on the new stores where they want to put one more device on the storage product or connect to it, and that wasn't what it was sized for at the time. If you didn't plan on the growth of the utilization of the controllers the product doesn't look like it's performing properly, however, indeed it is. It's just, not big enough to handle the new user profile that you have put on it.

Microsoft Exchange, VMware, SQL, and Oracle - those are the types of software or devices that are applications that were used within our environment. We have several different departments or groups that get access to that storage.

There were some older 3PARs that we wanted to replace and there were some Clariion EMC products that we wanted to replace. The reason why was due to the fact that the 3PARs, were four years old and we needed a technology revamp, so to speak. 

The other reason we switched was that EMC was just too slow. It was getting overwhelmed and we had to go to a stronger or newer technology controller. Therefore we decided to go with the 3PAR as it was a lot easier to use. We also liked the virtualization of the product and we appreciated the ease of being able to make changes without having an overall effect in the environment.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too complex. If you have any SAN experiences pretty easy, as you have to understand some of the terminologies so that you can pre-prep the architectural design that you're looking for. Overall, however, it's pretty easy from a GUI perspective. You can do everything from a GUI. You don't need to play at the CLI level. Of course, if you'd like to do that, you can do that as well.

I typically handle implementations for my clients.

I'm a consultant and an HPE partner and I have my hands on several different things in terms of products I use.

Normally I work with all the versions as far as software versions. I've worked with all the different hardware, 3PAR versions as well, and I do a lot of installations.

The big thing and with 3PAR and with any other storage - and this goes for any kind of storage as you're sizing - is to make sure that you are getting the right size environment for what you currently have and what you expect for future growth. Otherwise, you may run into performance issues.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. We've been quite happy with the solution so far. It's robust and offers very good performance.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an enterprise storage that is mainly deployed in enterprise scenarios like banking and insurance.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

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

Around 20 customers use the solution extensively in their companies.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten for scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward if it is a single server. If there are multiple servers, the initial setup becomes complex.

A single server takes an hour to be deployed.

The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features.

One admin is enough to maintain the solution if it is single storage. A complex environment with a heavy workload will need more people to maintain the solution.

I would recommend HPE 3PAR StoreServ to users based on their use cases.

Overall, I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten.

We are using the solution for capacity storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We are planning to change the storage soon. The tool is old. We are looking for enterprise-grade storage with NVMe capabilities, low latency, and higher responses.

We have been using the solution since 2018.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. The product is not for users. It is used by an application. We are using 70% of the total capacity of the tool. We are looking to change the solution.

The support team has good capabilities. The team has people with good experience.

Positive

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. The deployment took three to four months.

We have an on-site team. One or two people are required for implementation and deployment.

We choose the solution because HPE is a long-term partner. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution provides streamlined deployment compared to other products. It has a smooth interface and configuration. Also, it is easier to do pre-requested checks as well.

They should add AI-enabled dashboards to the solution.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

It's a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have around 500 customers using it.

The solution's initial setup process is easy. If there are no hardware issues during initial configuration checks, the process takes two and a half hours to complete. It requires two executives for maintenance.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I advise others to test the feasibility of the solution's compatibility checks feature when moving from source to target. Apart from that, it is easy to use. I rate it as a nine.