HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

I want to build a MetroCluester in VMware.

The speed is very good.

This solution only provides active-passive replication, as opposed to active-active. Competing products also provide active-active replication.

Adding support for Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) would be an improvement.

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

3PAR is a stable product.

This solution is easy to scale. It is done online.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE Nimble.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple.

The installation and configuration are quick. You can complete them in one or two hours, which is fast.

The deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We are always using the latest version because I upgrade every year.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use three power arrays. The first array is for video storage and video surveillance. The second array is for production of our virtual machines. Pretty much everything is run on one of these three systems.

It provides us some disaster recovery capabilities. The all-flash storage gives us the performance that we need.

The remote copy group failover is very useful and has helped us.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. The most useful part of it is being able to see the growth curve.

• The uptime
• Its reliability, that day in day out, it will continue to be running.

The solution's availability is very good.

I would like to have single click upgrades because the process is cumbersome right now. The upgrade process is very tedious. It takes a lot of time and effort, in addition to coordination with HPE. We are looking for something which is more user-friendly and easy to deploy. Fixing the upgrade process is very critical.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The scalability is alright. When we try to scale it, we do upgrades.

The all-flash positions our organization for growth. If somebody comes to us who needs an application with performance, we have that already formulated.

The technical support is good. We work with a local vendor.

Our previous solution was between five to six years old, so we were looking for something newer, like all-flash.

The initial setup was complex, but we had the partner there to help.

We used a partner for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

The solution has increased our performance.

The solution helped our organization reduce our time to deployment.

I would recommend looking at Nimble instead. It is a similar option and something that we are looking at now, though 3PAR has been a pretty solid product.

The solution’s deduplication functionality is alright.

It's for storage, provisioning to our R&D teams. The developers provision the storage and test their products. The storage is critical for our development.

Right now we are looking at automation. Based on my conversation with 3PAR, they are using Ansible to automate the provisioning, so that simplifies the day-to-day operations.

• VVols are important for us
• Thin Provisioning
• Deduplication

We would like to see automation. We are primarily looking at provisioning and deprovisioning the storage, based on the customer requirements.

The stability is good, we really like the stability and uptime.

We have multiple storage arrays, we have yet to expand the existing storage.

We use technical support for firmware updates and any other application issues. The technical support is good. 

The decision to find a solution is based on internal requirements. We need storage capacity. Currently, we have, let's say, two petabytes. When we needed more storage then we'll think about expanding the existing storage or buying a brand new system.

The important criterion for us when looking at vendors is performance. We recently evaluated all-flash-based arrays and the hybrid model, and how they handle I/O throughput. Those are the key areas.

We went with 3PAR because it is easy to use and we are very familiar with firmware which is easy to manage. Creating the internal groups and other areas is very easy for us.

The initial setup was straightforward; configured the management interface and it was ready to use. After the physical deployment - you need to connect the power and network - it should not take more than one day, even less than one day.

We are using the same area for multiple product groups and multiple setups. It's a shared environment, so we see a lot of benefits with that model.

We looked at NetApp, Hitachi.

I would recommend 3PAR or Nimble. Nimble is all-flash arrays, if you have the budget. Otherwise, we favor 3PAR, the 8000 and 10000 series.

I rate 3PAR at nine out of 10 because of the provisioning, the interface; and now there is InfoSight. We are planning to integrate all our arrays. I see that as valuable.

Normal file storage, SQL databases, Cache databases, and replications to our DR instance. The business needs it covers for us are not highly complex, only a little.

Performance is good. We've had some issues with doing virtual volume updates using Snapshots. We've had some issues with the dedupe garbage collection process as well. Supposedly those have been addressed with the latest OS update that we've yet to apply.

It has not changed the way we function a whole lot. We were on the P9500 Array before and it had similar capabilities, just different ways of doing it. Still, it has worked well for us.

We're using the Remote Copy functionality a lot, just for DR. That is one of the main features that we're highly dependent on and like to use.

Stability has been an issue going back to the dedupe issue.

I haven't had to do a whole lot of scalability with it. We're on a lease model, so we spec'ed it out for what we needed and haven't really had to scale it up at all, for the most part.

We had issues with HPE support, trying to work through that whole dedup issue; it was long and drawn out.

I'm not highly satisfied with support at this point, unfortunately. I am satisfied with our local reps. They have dug in their heels with us and have tried to help, to get a faster time to resolution, but it's the people we were dealing with through the phone and emails who really were not finding the resolution in a timely manner.

The switch was based on that fact that we're on a lease-refresh cycle. That is what really drives this kind of change, for our business.

Our main criteria in selecting a vendor include stability, that is a big one. What really drove us towards 3PAR was having just one vendor; having HPE as both our server and our storage versus HPE for server alone.

The initial setup was straight-forward. We came from the P9500, so it was more or less a rip and replace. It was involved with the project to replace our Blade infrastructure as well, but from start to finish, it probably took six months from design to implementation.

I see the value in investing in 3PAR. I think HPE, overall, is a good partner for us and we're happy. It's just the support that is the only issue that we've had with them. But overall, I'd say we're happy with HPE as a company.

We also evaluated Pure Storage but we wanted to stick with one vendor.

I would definitely recommend evaluating it. Depending on what you need for your business, it could be a good fit.

It has been rather stable, other than the couple of hiccups that we've had. Once we've gotten through those, it has been rock solid for us.

I am from Dubai. We are one of the major system integrators in Egypt. We have customers using some other EMC Storages, and they have some performance issues. When we introduced the 3PAR Storage, mainly for the virtualization, they were very happy, because it is very useful for the performance and utilization points. The customers have been very happy since we introduce them to 3PAR Storage.

I am a system integrator, so we sell a lot of 3PAR Storage to our customers. Our business has increased compared to previous days. 

• For virtualization, the failure rate is much less compared to traditional storage where you need more hard drives.
• When it come to 3PAR, it uses chunklets, so it is easier for the customers.

As a management tool, it would help us to have more customer reports. Even though, we use it for other things, if can improve more things in the supporting, like the reporting tool, it would make it easier for the customers.

The stability is really good. Even though there is some downtime, the support is really fast. 

It is a very scalable solution. 

Our customers, they are smaller customers. Very few customers will go to the maximum, but for us, this is fine.

The support is really fast. There is very good support for 3PAR Storage.

It was really helpful. Because when I was a customer, having a downtime in the night, we called them (the support team), they immediately reacted. It was product tech support, and within two or three hours, the problem was solved. 

It was business critical. It was a multinational company. All the data was down. But within a few hours, we sorted it out. The customer really appreciated HPE, as well as the partner.

It is very straightforward. It is very simple.

I have sold at least 10 to 15 storages. But I have only had one incident, out of these 10 to 15 where HPE could not install fast enough. Not bad for failure rates.

We highly recommend HPE 3PAR, plus the latest other storage solution from Nimble, too. We highly recommend 3PAR to all our customers. We are replacing lot of other vendors (EMC, even Dell). We are replacing a lot of storage solutions with HPE 3PAR.  

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I am a partner. Even though, we are partners with HPE, we are also partners with EMC Oracle, but we prefer HPE. With HPE, the support, reliability, and credibility are much higher than with any other products.

The primary case is the utilization of VMware, and it is performing well.

We have much better performance than we managed earlier and are now saving lots of space. We feel as we spread things out that we have become more efficient in our performance.

Its consolidation.

We are waiting for compression.

It is performing great; no downtime.

We do not have a need for it yet, but it should be no problem.

Technical support has been very good when I have used them before. I felt like I was reaching the right person. They call me to check up when they have seen that we have some problem and tell us what we should do to fix it.

We used Nimble previously, before it was an HPE product.

We had a big issue with the performance. Last year, we spoke with HPE's people, and they recommended this solution and we are now certified.

The initial setup was straightforward.

HPE helped us with the initial setup.

Speak with HPE and describe your whole scenario before buying it, so you do not buy and hope.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability. That I feel I can talk to the vendor and they understand what I want.

If you design it right and implement it right, it's headache free. Just keep it there and it does what it's suppose to do. Gives us peace of mind.

1. Reliability
2. The support channel

Nothing comes to mind. Most of these products usually come with more features than you need.

Whatever failures you have, there is no single point of failure. So, any failure, you get an alert, you have time, you plan the fix, the replacement, and so on. So your operations are intact.

In terms of scalability, I think it will meet our company's needs for the near future, but, later on, no. I don't think it will. It's not because it's not scalable, it's just that technology changes so much. Three or four years, you get something new.

The support channel, you open a ticket, they follow up, the replacement part comes to your doorstep in a maximum of three working days. And the price we paid for that, upfront, is very minimal. So, when you buy an HPE product, if you pay, say 10 or 15 percent more, you get the Care Pack for a total of five years. Other vendors, they charge much more for the same deliverables.

When looking to work with a vendor I would look for manageability features. Monitoring, central monitoring, alerts, mass deployment, functionality. If you have one server, two servers fine, but if you have 100, these pay back easily.

It's the performance that we need. Before, we had another system and we noticed that the performance wasn't enough, so now we have two types of 3PAR systems, the 20850 all-flash and also the 8450 all-flash. We can really see that the performance is much, much better and the latencies are much lower. That's what we needed. 

The performance.

The new interface, the OneView, is a nice interface. 

The command line is very extensive, a lot of tools so in comparison to other vendors. It's one of the great things about 3PAR, that you can really drill down on performance, get statistics, really know how your system is internally performing. You don't need to wonder what is happening, you can really see it inside.

For performance it's all okay, but we are also hoping for the compression feature, hoping that we can have not only good performance but also more gain in our capacity; we are still waiting for it to be deployed.

We have had a painful migration to transform from the old way of doing dedupe, in version 2, to the new way of doing dedupe; and also getting rid of the old CPGs with the old way of storing the data. So it's a bit painful, cost a lot of manpower to do it.

One big thing that we really need - it's a simple thing - is longer names for our volumes. Now they're only 28 characters and we try to have the same name convention as our VMware guys, the datastore names. We want the same name, but if we want to create a SnapShot, and we want to add something - an underscore or something like that and maybe another number - then we have issues. It's only 28 characters and we then hit our limit. Twenty-eight is too low nowadays. I will ask our Technical Account Manager to do an enhancement on that. It should be 64, or at least more than 32 characters. 

It sounds simple but, somehow, I think it's a deeper integration issue and it's not so easy to change. But I need to ask for it because now we are trying to use SnapShots for copying production data to servers and we need those extras, a space, character spaces, to create a longer name.

We haven't had any downtime. There have been some small issues sometimes with an upgrade, a link went down but we didn't investigate further. Or sometimes we send it to support but it takes too long. But no downtime, not like we hear from other customers. Sometimes they really have a node that reboots; or our colleagues in Hungary, they had some issues, but we haven't had any downtime or the like with our 3PAR systems. We're happy about that.

Setup was very easy. I think even for the 8450 - we had also prepared ourselves -but in one day we had installed everything and it was up and running. So it's easy to set up.

I rate it about seven out of 10. It's not bad but it's also not the best. We had some issues, now they are resolved, but one issue existed for a year. We needed to migrate everything, and all the extra work needed to be done by our VMware colleagues, and they would not be so happy if we ask again to transform something.

Also some things were promised, like turning on/turning off dedupe and compression on the fly. But now it will create another one, compress, and then migrate it via the VMware tools. So we are really depending on vMotions. We wanted to remove the load from our VMware colleagues so that we could say, we will do the transformation to compress, you don't need to worry.