HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews and Pricing

it_user294933

Storage Technologies Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 1, 2015

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We are able to replicate our LUNs from one 3PAR device to another.

What is most valuable?

The best feature is how easy it is to use.

How has it helped my organization?

We are able to replicate our Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) easily from one 3PAR device to another.

With our old SAN storage, it was either too complicated to do LUN replication or not available at all.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered, and we have deployed two F400s, two 7400s, and one 7200.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

8/10.

Technical Support:

8/10.

How was the initial setup?

For the most part straightforward. HP had an engineer available onsite for one week to help with setup and any questions that we had.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user252609

Senior Network Engineer at Colonial Savings

Jun 28, 2015

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We were looking for a solution to improve latency. We also needed a new solution because our Dell Ecologic was down often.

What is most valuable?

Easy manageability, and the speed is very quick.

How has it helped my organization?

Less downtime, unlike our previous solution.

What needs improvement?

That’s hard to say because it’s pretty good for us. The areas that we would suggest for improvement, HP is already looking at.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It’s excellent; no complaints. I’m very impressed with it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I’ve already scaled it twice and will scale it again.

How are customer service and technical support?

It’s also great. We’ve not really had a problem with it in over a year of use.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We chose HP to improve on the latency because we knew we needed something that could solve our new needs. Our last system, Dell Ecologic, was very bad and was down a lot.

How was the initial setup?

Setup was straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at EMC and HP. 3PAR is using some very high quality software, so we chose HP. Dreamworks uses HP, so we figured it would do us just fine.

What other advice do I have?

Look for something that is expandable and reliable. 3PAR is great.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user107568Works at HPE

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Jul 21, 2015

Robert - sorry to read that you were driven to replace what you had because of reliability issues. That's never a good thing . Glad to have you as an HP Storage customer. For anyone that wants to learn more, here's a link to many HP 3PAR articles on my blog: hpstorage.me

I also manage an HP Storage LinkedIn Group that you can find at hpstorage.me It's a private group for customers, partners and HP employees so please join if you fit one of these groups.

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

March 2025

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Learn what your peers think about HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.

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it_user252639

Senior Systems Engineer - Storage and Virtualization at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 25, 2015

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We value this solution for its performance and manageability.

What is most valuable?

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor for Flash Storage is partnership. Additionally, we value this solution for its performance and manageability.

How has it helped my organization?

During the migration process, we have had to troubleshoot less than in the past.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is fine. We put disks in the system a couple of weeks ago, which went off without a hitch.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven’t had any issues with scalability

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

We haven’t had any issues. We wanted white-glove treatment and that’s what we got.

Technical Support:

We haven’t had any issues. We wanted white-glove treatment and that’s what we got.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We ran on NetApp and had maintenance, performance, and troubleshooting issues.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of 3PAR was straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also looked at BMC.

What other advice do I have?

The solution is great and I haven’t had an issue.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user107568Works at HPE

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Jul 21, 2015

Thanks for taking the time to do the review. For anyone that wants to dive deeper, here's a link to many HP 3PAR articles on my blog: hpstorage.me

it_user184665

Independent IT Analyst with 51-200 employees

Jan 22, 2015

Interesting and comprehensive family of products which now includes a native file interface

HP 3PAR, 360° storage

This is the first time in a while that I won’t be attending HP Discover. It’s a pity, not only because I have the chance to get updates directly from the horse’s mouth there, but also because it is always well frequented by good bloggers and other interesting people. At the event, HP usually organizes what they call “coffee talks” and you have the chance to get briefed and also have a lot of confrontation on each single line of their business (not that I’m really interested in everything they do, but Storage, Cloud and Enterprise IT in general are all well covered). BTW, thanks to my friend Calvin Zito I got news in advance and even though I’m overseas at the moment, I want to comment on what I discovered a few days ago.

When good gets better

You’re most likely aware that I still consider HP and HDS among the best companies when it comes to some enterprise storage solutions (especially when we talk about tier 1 storage) and, this is the case of 3PAR, I really like the fact that you can buy a storage in the order of $25.000 that has the same identical characteristics and features of the biggest one. Different in size, identical in functionalities.

This is a major benefit for the end user. A small organization knows it can grow with virtually no limits on an enterprise-class platform, while the larger ones have many possibilities to serve, on a single platform, most of their needs from the primary data centers to the branch offices. This really helps if you want to keep your IT infrastructure as simple as possibile, and you care about TCO.

3Par has come out with a lot of good things in the last couple of years both from the hardware (the 7450, aka the flash memory play, is a vivid example) and the software aspects (features like peer motion or Adaptive flash cache for example). All steps that have contributed to building up a very interesting and comprehensive family of products. But something was always missing!

File (and objects!)

Looks like we finally got it! Native File interface from 3PAR (through a software license, not external appliances!!!). On paper it looks pretty good: SMB3, NFS v4/3 and, of course Active Directory, DFS, Microsoft Management Control integration, NMDP and other features you usually find on the best NAS boxes. (I said “on paper” because I’m not there to see how it really works, but on paper it looks great!).

And… there’s more. Object Access via API (which is not totally clear to me… the documentation is a little elusive). Let’s suppose this is an S3 (or Swift) interface to the same files you can access via SMB or NFS, it would be another great feature. (something I wrote about a few years ago indeed, and I’m glad other unified-storage vendors are working on it too)
A feature like this can’t compete with real object storage, just because 3PAR is a primary storage and can’t achieve the level of cost and scalability of an object storage, but this could have its (many) applications! If you need a few TBs for sync&share, a development system, a private object storage for some critical data, you name it.

7440c

On the hardware front, if I got it right, you can all of these features on a new model called 7440c. C stays for Converged and specs are very comparable to the 7450 (no new ASIC so), but it’s “hybrid”… which obviously means that you can have it with both Flash and disks. The 7440c can also scale up to 3.5PB of usable space (calculated with dedupe on, of course).

It’s not clear to me whether File/Object access is available only to this model, but I’m hoping that all the features will soon, if not already, be available on all other models of the family (like it already happens for any other software feature).

The Icing on the Cake

There is a new feature that allows a 3PAR array to move its snapshots directly to the StoreOnce VTL! This is called HP StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central. No backup software and no complexity.
Long story short: Nice and useful! You can take a consistent snapshot and you can automatically save the data directly into a StoreOnce VTL. Time saved, software backup saved and complexity saved.
The first version is compatible only with VMware but other options will be added later. I would love to see a demo (but I’m not there)

The P10400, and more in general all P10000models, absolutely needs a refresh. The the 7440c outshines the P10400 and it probably costs a fraction. I’m sure that at next HP Discover in Las Vegas we will see a Gen5 ASIC and other features that will re-establish the right positioning of the whole line-up. It’s highly likely next year’s event in Las Vegas will bring a lot of news again. (a new ASIC for sure, IMHO)

I really love the File access option. It is really interesting, especially in the SMB space where the 7200/7400 can now fight with similar functionalities (but a better backend architecture) against NetApp FAS and EMC VNX. My only concern is about CPU/ASIC usage on current (old) models and, consequently, performance. I hope that HP will show some benchmarks soon.

First published here.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: HP has been a client of Juku consulting. Last year I published a couple of white papers for HP (one about 3PAR and one about StoreVirtual VSA), they also invite me often to their events and I recently joined an advisory council with other bloggers to review some of their products. However, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku team.

it_user107568Works at HPE

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Jul 17, 2015

Hi Steven - I can't speak to performance specifics for Nimble because they haven't submitted to the SPC-1 benchmark site. What I do know is we have lots of service providers and other customers who are running mix workloads and they're quiet happy with 3PAR performance. And getting really good performance out of mixed workloads is in my mind the benchmark for performance.

Nimble's performance is dependent on getting the entire active dataset into SSD and my understanding is that 5% of an array is SSD. If you're working set is bigger than that, my understanding is performance will be impacted because the other 95% of the capacity is 7200 rpm nearline SAS drives.

The 3PAR family can scale up to 3.2 million IOPS out of a single system so performance there is not only dependent on the workload but on which system you're evaluating. Happy to answer any questions you have.

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Mesut KARACA

Responsible for information processing at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 28, 2020

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Stable with a long shelf life and good technical support

Pros and Cons

"The product lasts a very long time without having to be replaced. It's had a very long life."

"As long as they can keep the solution stable, it will be good. Stability is very important to us."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution as on-prem with local SAP HANA application servers. We have five of them.

What is most valuable?

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any malfunctions with it at all.

The product lasts a very long time without having to be replaced. It's had a very long life.

What needs improvement?

As long as they can keep the solution stable, it will be good. Stability is very important to us.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using the solution for three months at this point.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. We haven't had any issues in that respect in the time we've used it. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have more than 1,000 users on the product currently.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support has been very helpful. They are responsive and knowledgeable and we've enjoyed working with them. They tend to know if there are any issues before we can even catch anything.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was not complex or difficult. It was pretty straightforward and easy.

What other advice do I have?

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with HPE.

I'd recommend the product to others. We've only ever had a good experience with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user783906

Procurement Management at Mubadala

Dec 17, 2017

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Scalability is the main purpose, that I can scale out, keep adding more modules

How has it helped my organization?

We are trying to create a valued addition, because the project is still on, and we are looking at how it can benefit the business more. It's a new solution in place which we are looking at now.

What needs improvement?

At this stage I can't give you any feedback on that. It's too early.

For how long have I used the solution?

Still implementing.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No stability issues at this stage.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is the main purpose, that I can scale out with something, where I can keep adding more modules onto it.

How are customer service and technical support?

Tech support is good. They're knowledgeable. The people with whom I'm dealing are pretty good. We go through the usual channels, but right now we have a partner in place who is helping us out.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were running on some technologies which were going off the market, and we wanted to upgrade them. So we looked to put 3PAR in place, and we are moving into 3PAR now.

How was the initial setup?

It was not complex. It's pretty straightforward. It took approximately two and a half months, the project which we have run through it. So it's pretty good. And now that our actual deployment starts off, we'll get to know the actual time lines on it.

What other advice do I have?

When we look to work with a vendor we look at their reputation, and along with that is the way it can be scaled up. Also, the new technology innovations which can can be added to your portfolio must be excellent. That's where we started off moving into HPE.

At this stage I would rate it somewhere around eight out of 10, because there were some initial challenges in finalizing the design, etc. Now we are looking into the cloud solution as well, so we'll see how that goes.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user539658

Researcher

Nov 26, 2017

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Better performance and we're able to use fail-over and load-balancing at different locations

What is most valuable?

Switching from HDDs to SSDs, because of better performance (IOPS) and, hopefully, reliability.

How has it helped my organization?

No improvement for the organization, it's "only" storage, but due to moving from one system to two systems, we are now able to use fail-over and load-balancing functions on different locations.

What needs improvement?

OS/patch/firmware installation can only be done by a division of HPE Support, which must be coordinated.
Error reporting and alarming needs additional VMs per node (SPOCK) and cannot be integrated in HPE Remote Support, which is used for all the other HPE devices (FC Switches, Proliant Servers, etc.).

For how long have I used the solution?

Approximately nine months, and still in the migration process, so a total assessment of the whole product and it's functionality is still not possible.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

So far, no issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

So far, no issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

The level of technical support which we have used up to now has been good, but luckily there have been no major issues. I cannot rate how such issues would be solved.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

It's not a different solution, same vendor with the follow-up product, with newer technology and more space.

How was the initial setup?

The setup of the storage itself was OK and not too complex, but there are additional VMs (or appliances) needed for remote support, reporting, etc., which can only be set up by HPE or a partner technician.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The new licensing model includes every function for the same price, and in terms of price, everything is possible if HPE is interested in getting the contract.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, Tintri T850, but at the time of the PoC the solutions provided by Tintri were not scalable enough for future demands.

What other advice do I have?

Everything works as expected but, as stated above, we are still in the process of migrating our data from our old storage.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user485052

Senior Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

May 11, 2017

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We've only had a couple of problems with them.

What is most valuable?

They work reasonably well. We've only had a couple of problems with them, and HPE knows about the problems.

What needs improvement?

On certain of their features that we have to use to migrate data, it tends to go off for about 60 or 90 seconds toward the end of the work.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is pretty good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling. Application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.