HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

This solution hosts our core banking system. Mostly everyone in the bank uses it — about 1,000 users.

The features which are most valuable are the availability of the system and the management.

We do see room for improvement, especially in regard to expanding the defined storage areas.

The alerting system could also be improved. If there are issues with the system, it's supposed to send emails and SMS alerts — this could be improved.

I have been using this product since 2017 — about five years.

It's very stable. It has never broken down.

It's scalable. Only now it has reached end-of-life.

The technical support is very good.

We were working with an HPE storage called HPE EVA. We switched over to HPE 3PAR StoreServ because EVA's technology was end-of-life.

The initial setup was complex because we didn't have experience with it. 

We had a consultant set it up for us. It took about a month.

This solution is expensive. We pay every year for support. It's a lump sum because we pay for data center support services, and everything is included in one. 

Currently, we're looking at HPE Primera and Nimble Storage. 

It's a very good system, especially the All-Flash system. That's quite good. The only downside is the price — otherwise, the product is perfect. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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.

We use it for all kinds of needs, such as infrastructure needs, and application services. We are using the latest version of this solution.

Their support is the most valuable. The support that we are getting from HP Turkey is very good. 

This product is better than some of the other products in terms of reliability. It is very reliable.

We are using a built-in solution in 3PAR. We are using All-Flash Storage, and there are some difficulties with it. HPE has now developed a new tool system to support All-Flash, and that's why we are changing our investment.

They must increase its performance. I want unlimited support, which is very important for performance. I am not interested in spinning disks. HPE is developing new storage systems called Primera, but they must be developed more.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

3PAR systems are stable. We don't have any problem, but in the past, we had a problem with the 3PAR disk. I don't remember the disk vendor, but it was about the disk. That's why we changed all disk parts, which was a bit of hard work for us. We didn't have any other problem other than the disk problem a few years ago.

It is easily scalable. It is easy to scale, but if you plan to increase it substantially, it can be a bit difficult.

I'm a service provider. We provide support for Unix servers for many companies and customers. Some companies have more than 1,000 3PAR users.

The support that we are getting from HP Turkey is very good.

We are using IBM Flash Storage. In Turkey, IBM has more support and more products for the flash systems, which is an advantage. Performance of the storage is also better. 

We are also using FUSE Storage, which is also All-Flash Storage. Their performance is also better than HPE 3PAR. HPE 3PAR doesn't support any images.

The initial setup was simple.

Our storage team deploys the HPE 3PAR system. Sometimes, we also need some support from the local HPE support team. Its maintenance is done by a vendor.

It is a bit more expensive. IBM is cheaper than HPE in Turkey.

The most important things are availability, scalability, reliability, stability, and performance. We are service providers, and the customers want availability. You must focus on these things before buying storage. I advise going for All-Flash Storage to all people because spinning disks take too much space and electricity and provide less performance. That's why NVMe is better.

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

We use it only for storage.

Its stability is the most valuable. It has soft alerts. When an alert is raised, we get a call from HP saying that there is this type of alert, and they need to do a remote session to check things. Similarly, for firmware updates, they get in touch to say that a firmware upgrade is required on your storage. They schedule a time and take control remotely to upgrade the firmware. In all such cases, there is no downtime. Everything is done when a full-fledged operation is going on.

Its user interface is also quite good. We are quite accustomed to this user interface. We can easily take a look at the current usage or the amount of storage. It is quite easily understandable, and I can present those things to my seniors or other people who are not that tech-savvy, and they can easily understand what we are trying to tell them. We can easily show them that we are using around 87% of the storage, so we need to plan for another tree and things like that.

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree.

I have been using this solution for four years. 

It is very reliable. In these four years, we have not had any big failure or faced any issue.

Scalability is not an issue. If someone has 3PAR and within one or two years, they find that they need to add more storage, it would not be an issue. It will scale perfectly fine. 

We have already consumed around 87% of the storage. We may have to add another tree. We had a discussion with HPE, and it was quite good. The only reason for not going forward with it was that the amount of money that we will be spending in just upgrading the storage has a life of only two and a half years now. We are now evaluating whether we should invest this much money for two and a half years, or we should invest more and buy a completely new storage. We can then use this storage for other backups and all those less important steps.

From the application side, we have 50 users. There are also a lot of other users who are connecting to the applications and the storage because their data resides on the storage. For its maintenance, we don't require any engineers.

We haven't raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR, but they always call us if there is any soft alert or any firmware upgrade. The only thing that we have to do is to schedule a remote session during which they will perform the update activities.

Before HPE 3PAR, we were using Dell EMC. We have used three storages from EMC. The first one was very reliable. It was 300 series that we were using in 2003 or 2004. After that, we replaced it with the 400 series EMC storage, but it was not that reliable. Every three to four months, one of the disks would fail invariably, and we had to raise a ticket. After some time, they will review the ticket. They didn't ask any questions, and they would just replace it and take the faulty one. After that, we moved from the Dell EMC storage to HPE 3PAR, which has been very reliable. We haven't faced any issues in all these years.

The initial setup is really smooth. 

Its price is a bit high for adding another tree, but when we purchased it, it was okay with us. We had compared it with EMC and other solutions, and it was okay at that point in time. 

Our storage has a lifespan of seven to eight years. When you purchase it, you need to keep a headroom of around 40% to 50%. After three to four years, you generally plan for an upgrade. The price is not so bad today for two years or so, and within a year, I might find that I have to upgrade or increase the storage. This usually happens when there is a radical change or a new application has come that is consuming a lot of data, but generally, there is a plan for the amount of data that we generate and the storage upgrade. 

3PAR is very much reliable. In these four years, I've not raised a single ticket with HPE regarding 3PAR. 

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten. It has good support, good UI, and good reliability.

We are using it for Oracle Databases. We're are also using it for VMware and NetBackup. It's one of the storage solutions for NetBackup.

The primary system comes with not too much software and is pretty simple and straightforward. You're not really using too much. The solution doesn't make things that are too complicated.

The replicating software is very good and the duplication part of it is very efficient.

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution offers good stability.

It has a good ability to scale.

The replicating software is pretty complicated. I probably would have put it on a sequence.

I've been using the solution for about a year now. It hasn't been too long.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

In general, the solution can scale. That shouldn't be a problem.

The technical support on offer is very nice. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We're very satisfied with their level of service so far.

We were using Synergy. The company wanted to go to an all-flash drive. At the time, HPE was one of the biggest manufacturers of all-flash drive. Therefore, it made sense to switch.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy to go back and look at it. It wasn't too complex at all.

The solution is moderately priced. It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive option.

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

Anyone interested in any solution should probably research the software that comes with their own system a little bit better. If you do that, there's a chance that you might not buy some of the things that we bought and that were defaulted on setup. That was not good. Knowing what works together well will help in the long run. Don't be afraid if a third-party asks you questions. They're probably just trying to get to the bottom of how your setup looks.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten overall.

We use this product for our server storage. Our systems are primarily used for ERP.

The most valuable feature is the proactive technical support. If there is a problem then the HPE facility will detect it and immediately contact me.

It achieves very high performance.

The price is a little bit high.

We have been using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past five months.

In terms of stability, our experience has only been good. We have not had any problems in five months.

I think that its scalability is good. You can have up to eight storage units and you can vary the storage rate. For example, we need quick database storage so we rate that high, compared to some other applications of lower importance.

Prior to this, we used the HPE3PAR StorServ 7200 series. With that version, sometimes the hard drive was broken. It's not about storage, but rather, it is about how the hard drive operates.

The deployment took about two weeks to complete.

One of the HPE partners deployed this solution for us.

We paid for five years of support when we purchased the product.

We evaluated a solution based on NetApp and ultimately, we decided to implement HPE.

There is a storage replication feature that I think is nice, although we don't use it right now.

For us, this product is a very good, full-flash storage. The suitability of this product depends on the organization. It comes down to a combination of the performance and the price.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Primarily, we use it for SAP storage. At this moment, we are running an ERP system on it. 

SAP is our mission-critical app.

All-flash is positioning our company for growth. We need to improve our systems with better hardware and systems. That will happen in the next three to six months.

It is easy to use and understand. It is also very stable.

I would like the documentation easy to find. There is a lot of documentation, but sometimes it is hard to find. You have to do a lot of searching to find it.

Before you could go on the HPE website, and download every driver that you wanted. Now, you need to have a service contract, or something else, to be able to get the drivers. Sometimes, you just need a simple driver, because your machine needs to restart and reinstall. If the machine is not under warranty anymore, it's hard to get the driver. That is a setback when compared to other solutions.

We are in the Caribbean, but we are Sint Maarten. Sint Maarten is French and Dutch. We are on the Dutch side. We speak Dutch and English, but because we are in the Caribbean, the way the system is set up with HPE in Latin America, a lot of times when we contact support, we get a Spanish-speaking people instead of an English-speaking people. I find that is a problem. When we are dealing with support to send somebody over, for example, we make sure to always put the emphasis on, "Make sure you send somebody who is English-speaking to us."

The product is really stable. The main thing is the solution is easy to use, and my administrators don't spend a lot of time on maintaining or troubleshooting issues because of it.

We never have a problem. The system runs. One of the main things is that we are in the Caribbean. The amount of power outages that we have compared to the US is more than 60 percent higher. The 3PAR can handle that. A lot of systems, when power goes out and it come back, they just don't work. We never had that. The 3PAR was one thing that always used to backup. I had problem with other servers, but not with the 3PAR.

It is very scalable and simple. The moment that you understand the product, it is straightforward to use. That is one of the most important things when it comes to our administrators. They don't like complex things.

Because we are in the Caribbean, sometimes our waiting time for a problem is a bit longer than when you are in United States.

For the solution that we were looking at an ERP system, and what we need to do with it, 3PAR was one of the best. On top of that, the company used to use another product called, LeftHand. After LeftHand, we moved over to 3PAR. When I saw the performance from LeftHand compared to 3PAR, it was a very good improvement and the way to go.

Speed is what we are all looking for right now. Before, people could wait for data, but now, the moment they wait five minutes, and are not typing, that's the minute they say the system is down. In the past, we used to have a different way of storing data. Since we moved over to the 3PAR, where we have two different sizes, the replication and accessibility are much faster.

The initial setup is straightforward. The moment that you are ordering a product, you pay for your support. When they come, there is communication going on between you and them. They check what is available for you. They send a person over, and that's it. After that, once the engineer has left, you have a working product.

We used HPE support, who are special for implementation and installation. When we order a product, we have good support from them. They come and install it for us. Then, we pay for the support after that. We use external support too.

I can't complain about the support. Usually, they send somebody over because we are in the Caribbean. When we install a new product, they have to send a person over, and they are with us a week sorting the system. The fact that we're doing it together is always a very nice experience, because it is hands-on. I find it really good. I'd give them a 10 out of 10 for that. For the last, I will say six to 10 years, we have had three different engineers from HPE, and they were all awesome.

We used to get somebody from Houston, but now, they switched us to somebody from Barbados.

We have seen ROI. We have less of maintenance. Our administration has been cut down by a lot. The people who used to administrate other databases are not buy improving the system. 

3PAR has increased our performance by at least 40 percent.

The solution has reduced our time to deployment by at least 60 percent, because there is less maintenance and time to spend on the storage.

Our licensing cost are $32,000 annually.

We are a fully HPE shop since 2000. Since then, we never really went over to a different vendor. We were approached by Dell EMC back then. They wanted to change up our whole server room and data center with their product. However, we are happy with HPE.

I don't really know the other products out there, but I love this product.

We are not running SSDs drive yet. When we move to SSDs, I think it will be much faster.

We are not yet using the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity offering.

Biggest lesson learnt: if you have a good product, you have less maintenance.

We're currently running two 3PAR 7200 storage units in high availability. We have three workload tiers. We have Nearline, FAST class, and SSD. Our primary ERP system is an Oracle JD Edwards running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 that is all on SSD. Then, we have other workloads for our barcode. Our engineering solutions are running on FAST class, and then most of our traditional file and print, storage, and workloads are running on Nearline SATA. Also, have two 4200 LeftHand SANs in the environment. I put very low priority VMs on those two LeftHand SANs. They are minor application servers. They don't need a whole lot of performance. However, the LeftHand SANs are now seven years old. The 3PAR SANs are now five years old, and I have to replace everything in 2020, and I'm looking at HPE SimpliVity, Nimble, and potentially 3PAR as the storage architecture for that environment.

Our JD Edwards, which is our ERP system, that is critical. Also, our barcode scanning, because we do a lot of barcode scanning out in the shipping and manufacturing warehouse. Our accounting system is part of the JD Edwards too. All of that is on the SSD. We're currently evaluating whether we upgrade to JD Edwards 9.2 or if we deploy Microsoft Finance and Operations. If we go with Microsoft Finance and Operations, that'll be totally in the cloud, and I'll be able to carve a third of my storage requirements out because it will no longer be necessary to run an on-premise ERP solution.

My directive when I was hired in 2016 as a direct IT manager versus an outsourced IT manager, as I was when I started in 2014, is anything and everything I can take to the cloud goes to the cloud. If I do that, it reduces the need for all SSD on-premise, and that's actually what I'm trying to get to, because I'd rather utilize Microsoft Cloud, Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. I want to utilize that cloud for my performance, whereas on-premise traditional file, print, and storage doesn't really need SSD.

In the deployment of virtual servers, I can have a new VM up and running in 15 minutes, run the patches, then done. I routinely fire up base images that I have for my servers: Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016. I routinely fire those base images up and do all the updates, then prep them again for cloning. With 3PAR, we definitely have the performance to do that. Those images I do keep on SSD just to have that performance to deploy a new VM.

It has improved our throughput. We went from a 1G backbone on our LeftHand SAN, and also the IBM SAN was not redundant, but we put in a 10G backbone with 10G fiber which truly increased our performance. 

The high availability is awesome. 

The reliability: In five years, I have had one drive that has failed, which is not so much 3PAR as much as it is HPE. I have depended on HPE servers since it was Compaq servers. 

One of the things I like about the Microsoft operating systems are Microsoft's built-in backups. It's not elegant nor real pretty, but it just works for a single server or single VM. What I would really like to see from HPE is backup built-in, not snapshots nor replaying snapshots, but true block or file level backups integrated into an HPE platform program.

Today, I'm using StorageCraft, where I can have a VM recovered in 15 to 20 minutes. I run a continuous restore point on three of my primary domain controllers. I run a continuous restore point against my primary Microsoft SQL server. So, I always have that continuous, but it's taking up so much storage space that I keep running out and having to add. I need something better, as I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe having Arcserve Backup or Seagate Backup Exec more integrated into the hardware solution.

in the last five years, we've only had one drive failure. We have run out of space on our Nearline storage, because our Nearline storage was set up for the Remote Copy groups. I'm actually going to be working with an HPE storage architect next week to redistribute the ARC copy groups. Most of that is low tier that I'm not worried about for high availability, but for our SSD storage and FAST class storage, the high availability is there. I have a six node cluster that we are splitting to two sites on one campus. If I have any failure, everything fails over in a heartbeat, then nobody will hardly notice.

In the past, I've been comfortable running HPE servers for more than 10 years. However, I no longer find that to be cost-effective, especially as a customer, because running something that long obviously induces too much risk. Now, I'm on a three to five-year replacement cycle, and the current environment was installed five years ago. I have to get it replaced next year.

3PAR technical support has been outstanding. When I ran into some issues with my Nearline drives last year, they helped out with that. Every time that I have had to update the OS or firmware, I opened up a case with 3PAR support, and I get somebody right away. Then, we schedule time and are able to do live updates with no downtime. This is huge and critical for me.

I told the company that they needed to invest in 3PAR. They had one IBM DS 5600, a SAN that was huge, but was only eight terabytes, at the time. They were trying to go with the two LeftHand SANs to replace the IBM, but the LeftHand SANs IOPS could never succeed the IOPS from the IBM SAN. Then, the reseller that was helping them was let go and new management was brought in. That management decided to outsource IT to the company that I worked for. I was a huge HPE partner at the time.

3PAR has increased our performance over our old IBM SAN that was put in around 2009, prior to my time, which was 1G fiber and all SAS drives. The performance of the 3PAR, with its SSDs and controller nodes, was vastly superior to that older IBM. The HPE LeftHand SANs were all SAS and SATA, so the 3PAR SSD performance was just off the charts.

Anything new can be complex. There were some things in the initial deployment that I was not happy about. One of my directives was, "However, it's configured, ensure that it can never be overprovisioned." That one key thing was overlooked.

This is why I had to have a support call last year, because it actually became overprovisioned and I had to move some stuff around. We're still sort of in that with the Nearline storage, and that's why I'm having another architect work with me next week, so we can redo some things. I've had to move a lot of what was on the Nearline storage over to the LeftHand SANs. If I hadn't had those LeftHand SANs just sitting there with 20 terabytes, I would've been in serious trouble. That was my one point with the deployment team, everybody thinks, "If you do this, you do this, and do this, you'll never get overprovisioned," but I've been doing this long enough, and going back to Compaq StorageWorks, if you're not careful on how you have Remote Copy groups, your redundancy setup, thin provision, thick provision, lazy zero, and eager zero, then you will get overprovisioned at some point. You will lock up on a SAN tighter than a drum.

I was actually outsourced as the IT manager. Starting in February of 2014, I was selected to lead the management of all the company's nine locations in North America, Europe, and Canada, working with HPE at the time. After we selected to go definitely with 3PAR, HPE helped do the whole design, and I approved the design. It was actually deployed in August of 2014. Everything was deployed to my specifications.

We have seen ROI. 

For the entire six node cluster and the two 7200 units plus the Brocade Fibre switches, we financed it through HPE Financial. It was $850,000. We leased that and paid it off in October of 2018.

I have to renew support in October for the existing solution. That will cost me roughly $50,000 this year, which in the grand scheme of things, $50,000 is not that much compared to paying $850,000. However, it will be the last year that I'll be able to get direct support from HPE. Therefore, product has to be replaced in 2020.

I worked with the team from HPE. We looked at their solutions, and selected 3PAR. We also looked at Dell EMC and Nutanix. At the time, when evaluating Dell EMC and other SAN products against 3PAR out-of-the-box, 3PAR just was vastly superior to anything else.

Working with the HPE team back in early 2014, they proposed the design. As it turns out, the SAN that we deployed in 2014 was the largest 3PAR SAN in the state of Wisconsin.

I just have a long history of HPE. I've tried Dell EMC and IBM before. IBM sold its server products to Lenovo. I always come back to HPE, especially the ProLiant brand, just because of the reliability and consistency through all the generations. You can look at a ProLiant 1000, never having seen one before, but if you know a Gen 9 or a Gen 10 today, if you could find a Proliant 1000 that was still operating, then you would know how to go in and configure it.

It is this type of consistency that keeps me with HPE. Dell EMC is all over the place. Lenovo has reliability issues.

Look at HPE's roadmap for 3PAR, SimpliVity, and Nimble. Do your research, then pick the right one that works for you with the future that you envision.

I'm highly interested in using InfoSight going forward. One of the things that I have always tried to do is get to where I had just one dashboard for everything from managing from the desktop up to my Internet perimeter security. I want to look more at Aruba Networks and Cloud services to see how that might be able to help me integrate my WatchGuard perimeter security. I'm looking at Commvault and switching to Commvault for my backups, because eventually I just want one dashboard that shows me everything: servers, storage, switches, access points, and security perimeter points. That is the platform that can get me there.

That's one of the reasons why I'm at the conference is to check out HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity.

Biggest lesson learnt: Don't be absent during the design phase.