HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

3PAR has CPG (common provisioning groups) which allowed us to create multiple RAIDs on the same disks, move LUNS between CPGs and between RAID arrays. No other storage had this capability.

It gave me flexibility in moving things around, for example, I could move the production LUN and test LUNs from RAID 5 to RAID 6 in order to have more redundancy disk failures.

I used it for six months, but am now at a company that is not using it.

It's very stable, and very fast. Creating virtual disks took literally one minute for a 100GB VM disk.

No issues encountered.

HP was very helpful all the way through.

10/10.

We used a NetApp N6040n, and we switched in order to have more flexibility on our storage array as CPG moved LUNs between different RAID arrays.

It's very straightforward to configure. You need to connect the service processor to the storage array and then finish the configuration settings.

HP technicians did the initial deployment and I did the initial configuration. Even without any training I was able to the update firmware to v3.1.3, perform the software configuration, configure the ILO and service processor.

We also looked at EMC but 3PAR was the cheaper solution, and it was more flexible.

It integrates very well with Windows 2012 as well as VMware.

Although the technology is packed with features, it's still very simple and intuitive to use at both hardware and software levels.

We are now using thin provisioned disks from 3PAR attached to hosts. Using this feature, along with chunklet RAID technology, we are able to reduce the overall physical storage by about 40%. This was a significant change, as we are now able to run more resources and VMs. Also, we are using adaptive optimization, which automatically analyses CPG (disk groups) and makes automatic decisions to move high I/O regions of CPG to faster disks. This makes the provisioned disks attached to hosts work smoothly under any load.

From my point of view, the part of this product that needs improvement is the reporting. I would like it to have richer graphic charts, more info, and more reports.

We have been using 3PAR for more than a year now. We are using two 7200 devices. The first has 48 disks, and the second is equipped with eight flash SSD Disks and 56 SAS Disks. We are using the flash disks in combination with adaptive optimization technology to cache high I/O regions from disks to SSD. We have no dedicated flash storage, but the solution we are using is working great. Additionally, we own ab old HP EVA storage.

We had no deployment issues at all. and everything was done smoothly and without any issues.

Since we deployed 3PAR, there hasn't been any downtime, or other issue with stability. The main production 3PAR uptime is over 360 days to date and without any degradation in performance or any other issues.

The scalability is superb. New disks can added without any downtime at any point, and any provisioned disk can be expanded on-line.

Customer service is good enough in our region.

Technical support is great! HP 3PAR has a service processor that is connected to HP support directly, so HP is monitoring the status of our 3PAR storage. When any kind of issue or a warning is picked up by HP, we are get e-mails from them with recommendations on how to solve it. HP support also predicts failure of disks, and sends e-mail about disk changes before a disk failure occurs. This is a great level of support, and having this means we have no downtime or performance degradation at all!

As I mentioned earlier, we were using an HP EVA storage device, and it was not giving the right speed or IOPS we needed. We started to look at different solutions, starting with NetAPP and EMC, to HP and IBM. As the price and technologies of HP offered was better than the others, we decided to buy HP. And now, we are very happy with this solution and it is a great product!

The initial setup went easily as HP gave us training before we started the setup and use of 3PAR. This was a great experience, as we were working hand in hand with HP technicians on the initial setup, first run, etc. We gained a lot of experience and knowledge from them which enables us to go further with this product.

We set up everything hand in hand. The HP team worked really perfectly, giving attention to every single detail. Also they were answering the questions we had at when we set it up.

ROI is high, as the money spent on each GB of storage is slightly lower than any concurrent solution. We also got virtualization done on this product, so we have saved a lot of energy and costs on physical servers.

The original cost for two storage devices, was around US$200,000. Both devices have been in production for a year now, and we have not changed a part of it starting from the physical disks. It just works! As for other costs, it consumes about 1KW of energy.

As I mentioned above, we had five or six vendor companies for storage. This was NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP, etc. We chose HP as the technology it has, had no real competitors at that time. Also the price was great!

For sure you should ask HP to present you the product and I think you'll love how simple and robust it is. It's a great product for mid-range, big companies, and banks. It's redundancy and expandability are great, and it is packed with a lot of features and technologies.

For the P10400, we didn’t license many of the features that would have made this product really shine. We bought it for its advertised scalability, active-active controller design, and uptime (non-disruptive upgrades, port virtualization, etc.). We have not upgraded its capacity, controller count, or connection count since we’ve bought it so the scalability piece really didn’t make much difference for us. The uptime piece, however, has been 100% since initial start-up which is great. Although we cannot service the unit ourselves, cage level availability and the support team that takes care of the InForm OS updates and failed hardware have made it a great array for simply servicing I/O with nothing fancy added in.

The 7400 array is where things really start to shine for us on products and features. We initially bought this array as a production replacement of a set of EVA’s for file services and VMWare. As such it was important to us to have a reliable array that would balance itself, and was easier to upgrade than the P10400. It needed to support new OS’s fairly quickly and also have non-disruptive upgrades. We put that to the test when we added our test environment to the array. In that upgrade, only six months after initial purchase, it was very important that we could keep our test I/O from disrupting the production environment, so priority optimization became an important feature. We added two controllers, and doubled the size of the array to accommodate our test environment, and did so without downtime. The priority optimization is a real-time QoS component of the array that can be changed without disruption and takes effect in seconds. The six fibre ports per controller allow me to segregate I/O streams from VMWare and Windows to keep from having queue length and buffer issues or to simply balance out I/O load.

3PAR, in general, has helped us speed up deployments and better track our I/O consumption. We are able to speed up deployments because we are no longer having to install a vendor specific DSM/MPIO on top of the Microsoft OS or Linux ones as we did with the EVA line. System reporter allows us a more in depth look at our I/O utilization patterns in an easy to gather and archive way.

Licensing is still a pain point. It has gotten better, as any spindle count based licensing is capped at a certain number of spindles depending on the model of the array, but it is still expensive as you must buy every feature. Many of the arrays available from competitors come with just one or two licenses to buy which cover the entire array no matter the spindle count. The arrays are also not very user serviceable, which is something I miss about the EVA. A field tech must come out to replace a drive which is something I could do myself with the EVA.

I've used the P10400 for three years, and I would rate it 7/10. Alongside this, I've been using the 7400 for one and half years, and say it's 8/10.

Also, we are not currently using 3PAR flash storage but are planning an implementation. We are currently looking into flash to speed up our MS SQL for the logs and TempDB LUN’s. We are also looking into it as a possible future deployment for an as yet not deployed VDI implementation.

We didn’t encounter any issues with deployment. The pre-deployment guides were comprehensive and prepared us well for actual deployment of the product.

We have only expanded the 7400, doubling its size in disk and controller count, and did it without any issues.

None yet.

High. We have “proactive” support, so many times they are calling me about issues before or right as I see the alerts. Our account support manager reviews our environment twice a year to discuss any issues we have had and any recommendations from HP on how the systems are performing.

High. Updates to the InForm OS and firmware have gone off without incident. When something was wrong with the HBA ports resetting, they brought in additional resources from other areas to resolve it. The issue turned out to be a problem with the fibre channel switches fill word instead of the array.

We were using HP EVA and direct attached storage. Our EVA’s were getting old and needed to be replaced within a year or two. The push to replace them sooner came after our main production array crashed due to LUN ownership issues between the controllers. A lot of I/O was coming into the non-owning controller and so it would switch ownership. Since ownership was set to fail-over/fail-back it would just keep hoping back and forth. It was a problem with VMWare losing its MPIO configuration but that caused major issues with the array. True Active-Active controller design really became an important criteria after this incident.

Both. The v400 was a complex setup where the 7400 was much more straightforward. The v400 had many requirements for how cables were run, specific hole sizes and cuts in the raised floor tiles, and the installation guide that the HP Field Technicians used was either out of date or incorrect in several places causing installation to take longer than it should have. In contrast, the 7400 had none of the requirements, as it was mounted in a more traditional style rack and the installation process was more mature. The service processor could now be deployed as a VMWare appliance and set up by the customer ahead of time.

We used a vendor team with in-house support where needed. The vendor team was much more knowledgeable on the 7400 installation than the v400. We had bought the v400 not long after HP acquired 3PAR so there were some issues there. However, the local installation team had a “quick” line into 3PAR support for installation so we weren’t waiting around for support to answer questions.

It was never calculated for these arrays outside of cost to buy new against the cost of continuing support of the existing arrays. It has been several years since we upgraded the class of array and type of support.

The original setup was about $700,000 for the v400 and $350,000 for the 7400. The day to day cost is negligible in terms of support as they are really stable arrays.

We evaluated the Hitachi VSP and Netapp FAS 6800.

Do your homework and follow the deployment guides, it will save time and headaches. If you do not license at least Direct Optimization the array cannot re-level the data so the array will eventually not preform to peak efficiency as you add and remove data.

The thin technology and adaptive optimization features make the SAN appear bigger and faster than what it replaced, all the while using a third of the rack space. We also use Flash SSD disks for adaptive optimization, and this speeds up the performance up to 10 times what it was.

We are using a lot less power and space with this SAN compared to our previous solution. This SAN only takes a third less power and capacity, yet it provides almost twice the performance.

The only area I would say that could use improvement is communication on what upgrades should be applied. We have been told that the re-seller cannot perform, nor recommend, upgrades.

We have been using the product for about two years.

Installation was quite easy, and we were using the SAN very quickly.

None! We had a failed disk and have had replacements before we even knew! Rebuild times are fast!

We added a shelf online with no issues and the SAN was online during the upgrade.

Great, they are able to be reached quickly and without any issues.

Support know the product very well and will escalate any issue quickly within their tiers and without being asked.

We used an EMC solution before. The price, performance and features swayed us to HP 3PAR.

Setup was reasonably easy. We used a CD and a VM template to “birth” the unit. It was all wizard driven and intuitive.

We used a vendor team who were knowledgeable of the product.

Great! The product has exceeded our expectations.

The product seemed to be too cheap when compared to replacing our existing SAN. Therefore, we were hesitant at the features and performance offered. I believe we spent around C$80k for the system. Maintenance and proactive support was included, so day to day costs are really only power.

We compared EMC and IBM, but both cost more and lacked key space and performance features.

Compare all vendors carefully as there are a lot of features that appear to be similar but in actuality are very different.

• Virtual volume sets
• Hosts sets
• Remote copy
• Snapshots
• Storage tiering
• We currently use SSD for a few databases

Our storage management has been simplified and the performance has improved.

We have a need for a LUNS larger than 16TB but this unit does not support it.

I've used it for two years.

We had HP installers help with the setup and deployment.

We haven't had an issue yet.

Not so far.

Customer service is excellent.

It's excellent.

An EMR upgrade forced us to do a hardware refresh and HP was chosen for several reasons including cost, performance, and ease of use.

It was straightforward as HP did most of the setup.

We a had a team from HP help with the installation and they were great.

We also looked at EMC storage.

I would highly recommend working with HP directly during the installation process. We had the system up and running with production data one week after the equipment arrived.

The ability for data to be auto-tiered and the flash capabilities.

The ability for the PAR array to thin provision, effectively means that we can buy only what we need for the first year, and then plan and manage the data for future growth. What this means, is better value for money and long term cost savings.

Scalability, in the sense that it would be awesome if the product had the capability to not only scale spindles, but also processing power.

I've been using it for three years.

No major issues were encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered, but to reiterate, it would be nice to scale processing power as well.

It varies, sometimes they are a 9/10, and some days they can be 4/10.

It varies, sometimes they are a 9/10, and some days they can be 2/10.

We previously used an older HP model and switches, and we upgraded as it was a storage refresh.

It was straightforward – it was stood up pretty easily and management is simple enough.

We had team from HP implement is for us and they were easily 9/10.

We also looked at EMC and IBM array’s in the same class, but 3PAR was a better value for money with what they were able to offer.

This is a good, stable product, and management is pretty straightforward. For the price, it is a no brainer.

The performance is a good feature.

We have consolidated our storage solution from six EVA's of various ages into a single 3PAR array.

The support needs to be improved.

I've used it for three years.

The only issue I run into with HP storage is that they are not really focused on parallel file systems. It's not that their hardware is incapable, it's that HP's knowledge and support in this space is extremely limited and they are not interested in developing it.

No issues encountered.

The array was fully built out when purchased. The only scalability available is to stripe the file system across a second array, which is a very viable option.

The pre-sales team is 8.5/10, however, post sales team is a 3/10.

The parts replacement is good, however, as for serious technical issues, getting to someone who actually knows enough to help is usually a challenge. This is especially for areas that HP are not interested in developing.

We migrated pieces from various storage technologies - EVA, Nexsan, and an old EMC Clarion. They were all EOL and 3PAR appeared to have the performance to consolidate all the workloads at the right price.

Any time you're setting up a parallel file system, the setup is going to be complex. I'd say it was no more complex than any other. However, HP's limited experience with parallel file systems on their hardware (especially at the time we purchased the 10800 three years ago) was limited so a lot of performance tuning had to be done prior to releasing the system into production.

We did it mainly in-house, but HP brought in a partner for the rack, stack and cabling. I then did the implementation with limited guidance from HP engineers.

I don't know the financials, but we were able to quadruple the production output by shifting the work to the 3PAR array.

I don't have an idea of actual numbers, but I do remember at a high-level meeting, stating that a three year lease, including hardware support, would cost us about as much as we were then paying for support for the six EVAs that we owned.

• DDN
• EMC
• Isilon

3PAR is the best storage product HP has ever sold. It's not cheap, but it's definitely one of the better block-level storage products out there.