HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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 this solution internally for our test environments.

This solution handles everything to do with our business. If it’s down then we can’t deliver to our customers. We can do more, faster, whether it's spinning up more virtual machines or handling large amounts of data.

The All-Flash has positioned us for growth because we can do more. Going past traditional hard drives has really been fantastic for us. Our performance has increased by anywhere from fifty to one hundred percent. Moreover, our deployment time has been reduced by about fifty percent.

For us, the increase in throughput translates to an increase in productivity.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its security.

The deduplication functionality is fantastic.

We had a minor error when we were configuring this system, which initially detracted from its overall stability.

We had some minor issues at first, although it was mostly due to configuration. Since those were ironed out it's been very smooth.

The scalability of this solution is excellent.

Technical support for this solution has been great.

Prior to implementing this solution we were using one by Dell. We were not meeting our commitments to customers because it was not meeting our performance requirements.

We had a lot of legacy hardware in our environment, and the step into the future by implementing this solution has been fantastic.

The initial setup was a little complex. It was our first time setting it up but now as we're doing another iteration it is much smoother.

We used a consultant to assist with our deployment and it was a good experience.

We get about twenty percent more productivity out of our people because we use this solution.

We do not have any licensing fees.

We only considered solutions by HPE because we have a partnership between our companies and they are our number one pick.

This product has met our expectations. Once we got past the minor configuration issues, it's been smooth sailing, so I'm very happy with it. It is important to understand the terminology upfront because it helps prepare to do the actual implementation.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

All Flash Only

• Designed as only flash with the xx50 designation. This array was never intended for spinning disk or hybrid use.
• We have never seen a disk or other hardware failure in over two years.
• Average latency is less than one millisecond.
• 3PAR ASIC is the heart of the processing power built into 3PAR arrays and it is built specifically for its role.

Common Provisioning Groups (CPGs)

• CPGs allow for versatile, yet powerful configuration and use of disks that help us to define both disk performance and availability.
• There is no need to pre-carve space. It auto-grows and distributes as it is defined. Factor in wide striping, the fact that this is all flash, and the performance and reliability are even better than the other models of 3PAR.

Data Reduction Services

• The 3PAR and the ASIC really help the CPG to leverage an increase in performance as well as data efficiency.
• Dedupe is applied to all items inside a CPG. There is no need to manually configure per volume.
• Features are all inline and there is no post-processing window. The ASIC really shines on faster write speeds with the Zero Detect Algorithm. All zeros are ignored, resulting in much faster writes, not just space savings for blank data.
• Thin provisioning
• Thin clones

Native Veeam Support: Provides ease of use for backing up and restoring with the additional integration with Veeam.

VMWare 6.x Vol Support

VMWare Fibre Channel: Reference platform for v6.

Scale up, or out: It does both on demand unlike other arrays that leave you stuck with a single alternative. 3PAR Active Mesh Architecture is quite robust.

We were quite hesitant on the array size when it was pitched as our replacement of an aged SAN.

We were guaranteed we would get much more space than the physical capacity. (Make sure you get it in writing.)

In reality, their safe numbers were extremely safe.

We were expecting 2:1 as a rule of thumb, but in reality, we ended up sitting at greater than 8:1 across the entire array with all compaction/reduction features factored in.

I would really love to see HPE add some cloud analytics. So many other Tier 1 SAN vendors have enhanced cloud analytics and flashy visuals. While HPE has the StoreFront and it is better than nothing whatsoever, other competition offered “shiny” reporting and analytics engines.

I have used the product for over two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Its performance and capacity have been even better than expected.

The code updates have been exceptionally smooth compared to our previous SAN vendor. This includes no outage windows and really short upgrade durations.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. This device can scale both up and out. It is exceptionally versatile.

I recommend that you always procure the higher support offering with an enterprise product. It will pay for itself.

We went with Proactive Care Advanced, before HPE was offering Datacenter care.

The Advanced Care provides proactive interoperability reports from a dedicated technical account manager. They provide further recommendations on your current configuration if it is not compliant with HPE best practices.

Our previous solution was retired due to capacity and performance issues.

HPE really addressed our issues with their recommendation of the 3PAR 7450 for our specific needs.

It’s actually less expensive per Gigabyte than a conventional array when looking at the true cost of ownership. Not to mention the performance is six times greater than the competitor’s device.

The entire setup, from rack and stack, to configuring the array, was shockingly expeditious.

It took longer to rezone my fibre switches than it did to get the Common Provisioning Group (CPG) configured and begin storage with vMotion VMs.

Remember, you are charged per disk with a 3PAR array for licensing. Make note of this when considering future capacity. A smaller number of higher capacity SSDs can be less expensive than multiple smaller capacity disks.

We evaluated EMC, Nimble, IBM, NetApp, and Pure Storage.

• Make sure that you are trained on the nuances of 3PAR technology if you select this Storage Area Network.
• There are many useful features and you need to leverage them to lower the total ownership cost while easing the management of the device.

In a word, performance. It was primarily brought in to replace our EVA with something that was more capable from a performance perspective. We did not order solid state in our original configuration and we were looking for something which could grow with us, that could handle unpredictable VMware workloads better, and that didn't have the bottlenecks of a traditional monolithic array. Since that time, we have added solid state to accelerate the performance further.

My 3PAR array is too old to support File Persona, and I would love to be able to do that, but that's something that we would need more powerful controllers. We've got the first generation, so at some point we will get it, but we've got to wait for a refresh cycle.

3PAR stability has been there since day one. It's one of the platforms that has just been a joy to work with, because it changed the way that we are able to protect our entire environment. Being a telecom, we've got really good high speed links between our two data centers and we are able to do with 3PAR in a Peer Persistence configuration, and that's a feature where it clusters the two 3PAR rays together with seamless failover for LUNs from one array to another.

Now I've got disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery of a traditional replication technology. So Peer Persistence for us is kind of nirvana. It's been a great solution for us.

It started out just with VMware, then they added support for our Windows clusters. Most of the things we run on the blades are things that we can do this with. So if we have a blade fail, the great thing about a blade is the server profiles, move that to another blade, spare, in the enclosure, it comes back up in the same server running again, and if we have a storage failure, it automatically switches over in the backend, and our users never know.

We've got plenty of room to grow. We're about three or four years into our 3PARs and we've still got more than at least about 50% of our drive shelves open, so we have a lot more room to grow. With each generation of drive that comes out, we can install bigger and more capable drives in it, so we haven't hit any scale issues there.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

We were using HP EVA, and before that we were HP HSG. So when I first started we had two small HSG arrays that were primarily behind DMS and maybe a couple of other systems, but we had a very small amount of data on a san. VMware changed all of that. So we had all of this data running on EVA and we were staring to hit some limits, and the EVA didn't have good telemetry to let us know where the edge of the cliff actually was, so we were teetering right on the edge and about to fall off when we got the 3PARs in. So that kind of saved our bacon.

When we were evaluating potential replacements for our HP EVA storage array, we looked at Tintri and Tegile. We ended up doing evaluations for both of them.

Our company purchased Tegile for another project. Internally, my security officer didn't like the NFS of Tegile. That was kind of a no-go for internal use. Otherwise it has really great features for virtualization. That was really appealing to me as a VMWare administrator. We talked with them after a VMUG meeting and brought it in, did a proof of concept on it. It didn't perform as expected in our environment and we found out after the fact why. We would have needed a second active controller and a second disk shelf to get the full IOPS we were expecting out of it. That kind of killed our evaluation. It had good features, it had good reporting, which was one of our big criteria moving from the EVA. We wanted something that was going to let us know how it was performing. That was really strong, in Tintri. It's also been three and a half years since then, so that product has changed a lot also.

3PAR installation was an easy one. We had really good consulting services that came in and walked us through that process. We've done a couple of field upgrades and those have gone smoothly also, so 9/10.

From a storage perspective we've looked at some other vendors, but once the 3PAR 7000 series was announced with its capabilities, it made the most sense, being mostly an HPE shop.

I really love that platform. It's rocked for us. It's, like I said before, it's near nirvana for our environment, because we are trying to do something where we want to avoid disasters and have seamless fail-over, and I don't know of another solution that can accomplish that in our environment.

Right now we’re actually undergoing an expansion of the 3PAR and we’re using flash gearing with AO which is kind of maximizing that flash storage with a spindle in combination. I think that’s gotta be the best productivity feature. The other one would have to be that thin provisioning features, those are great. I think we ended up with a four to one ratio on thin provisioning and the looping.

It’s very simple. You log in and it’s got a myriad of graphs and things that I can quickly put into a presentation for my upper management when I’m trying to justify why we’ve gone with a 3PAR, why we’ve made that kind of investment. Also, it’s really easy for me to bring in my lower technical resources into this 3PAR environment because I have to, I don’t have a choice, and kind of make sure that they don’t, we can manage security so that they can, they have enough rights to do their jobs without being able to cause a catastrophe. And again, that’s peace of mind is high on my priority list.

The biggest benefit is the flash the IOPS cannot be beat. I’m in a very ever evolving environment and I have now the confidence that I have the appropriate resources at hand that if a bigger problem or a new development project comes around, I can react to it quickly. And with a 3PAR, I’m able to move machines back and forth between a QA, a production environment, the QA environment being in my legacy storage seamlessly. I don’t even need a systems engineer for that, I can have my help desk resources do it. So that’s a real benefit for a shop with five people.

I don’t know, I think as we scale I’d like to implement replication features. We haven’t been able to test those out yet ‘cause we only have one unit but no, all-in-all I’m pretty happy with the UI.

We’ve had that unit for just under a year right now. I’m pretty sure I bought the first All-Flash starter kit in the US and it’s been a huge source of success for us. We’ve used it to stabilize our business intelligence infrastructure and extreme line some of the processes in our ERP.

Stability is one of my favorite features. Like I said, our BI infrastructure on Wednesdays at the beginning of that fiscal week is getting hammered. You get tired after a while of answering the phone and saying, we’re sorry, we know it’s Wednesday but you know, once we put that particular SSAS uh, implementation into the 3PAR storage we haven’t been down since. The only time we’ve been down in the last 180 days was for maintenance and it was a planned maintenance. That’s a very good thing, that’s peace of mind for any infrastructure manager out there.

We weren’t able to do it last year just for budgetary reasons but we recently doubled our footprint with the 3PAR and we probably have plans to purchase at least another shelf. It’s just an easy platform to grow and the 7200 is the smallest model, so for a small shop like me it’s gonna take about half a rack. It’s pretty good.

It’s great and yeah we have a great support agreement with HP and we leverage them, not just for support but for their technical expertise. Like I mentioned before I have a very lean team and none of us really have that industrial strength, big company experience. We know the basics of how to tune storage area network but it’s really handy to be able to call in an HP engineer and have that conversation without having to incur big professional services engagement.

We still have it. We have a Legacy Dell Compellent Array, it does great for file storage. It just really wasn’t meeting the mark for our infrastructure and once we put this 3PAR on our SAAS implementation things really stabilized, and performance really didn’t become an issue anymore. We have a somewhat weird fiscal week in that on Wednesdays it’s the beginning of the fiscal week. All of the finance department needs to get their data, all of our stores and our retail customers out in the field come in and they’re really mining through the sales, the labors, the costs, try to figure out how did they do the week before. So on this day it’s like a perfect storm for our implementation in that everybody’s getting a big bulk of data at the same time. Using the 3PAR flash array we were able to stabilize that environment so that I really can get their data on demand.

I think it’s a common theme for people in my position. I have an older array, it’s the generational investment coming up and we looked at a number of different models, different competitors but you know a big name like HP and a product like 3PAR and at the right price it was just all-all the stars aligned. We are an HP shop but I would have to say that it’s simplicity. In a couple of days we had this array running. We were able to test it out on multiple production level systems and kind of decide where is the best bang for the buck in utilizing that flash storage.

We were looking at Nimble Storage which was pretty close. I think the big differentiator there was the features set is pretty similar but I really like the approach of HP and I like the big name brand because the rest of my infrastructure is HP as well. We’re primarily an HP shop so given that I have such a lean team I only have myself, a system administrator, a network administrator, I can’t afford to have a lot of complexity in the way that my storage arrays are configured.

In terms of a rating from 1-10, I’d say a nine and I’m not gonna give you a ten until I have at least two units mirrored over my data centers. I think that’s gonna get me a ten, but bottom line is simplicity. With a lot of the competing arrays you really need to have a team that-that’s really eager and motivated to go and configure this array and try some of the obscure features. I just don’t have time for that. I need this thing up, I need it running, and I need it now, and with 3PAR we’ve been able to achieve that objective and keep our cost per terabyte in line.

My one recommendation is we started pretty small, we only bought the all-flash starter kit which is 8 SSD drives and no additional shelves, no spindles. That is a great unit however most of the features that really leverage the power of the 3PAR require kind of that blended approach of the spindle drives and the SSD’s. So buy the flash starter kit and buy some spindles as well.

We use it as a primary storage device for user data and applications. It covers complex business needs in our organization. We have a lot of secure data on there. A lot of our financial applications run on our 3PAR.

It has been excellent. We've got a 7440c at my office and then we have two 8000 series at the other sites. We're using Adaptable Optimization, we've got the different tiers of disks. We find that the performance is excellent, really excellent.

Previously, we had lots of different storage vendors. We moved to a standardized platform using 3PAR and then we were able to have a consistent set of documentation through all of our sites, and we're able to replicate data between the sites really easily.

The biggest benefit is the fact that it's pretty much bulletproof; we never have any issues with them.

Reliability, the fact that it works really, really well. It is a really solid platform.

I know that the reporting functionality is changing. It's going to be much better and that's something that we're looking forward to. 

I would like to see more flexibility with the cloud. I've actually just been in a presentation about it, here at HPE Discover 2018, so those features are coming.

It's still an older architecture, you've got a lot of physical spinning disks. I would imagine more the memory-based computing is coming.

It is massively scalable. It's very easy to add more capacity, it's very easy to add more modules if required. It's the same with the licensing model. I think the licensing model changed last year, or two years ago, and now it's much more flexible.

Technical support is good. It's still separate from the normal HP Enterprise support team. It's really responsive, incredibly knowledgeable. Their engineers are wonderful, really good. We have had really positive results with the 3PAR support guys.

About eight years ago, we had a bunch of different storage platforms, and we actually went through a proof of concept and selected 3PAR. Our company was expanding. We realized that our data footprint was going to grow massively in the next few years. We're a game developer so our data growth is completely mirrored by the hardware that we make our games on. At the time, we knew that there were new versions of PlayStation, Xbox 4K coming out for TV, so all of our assets just blew up, about 20 times the size.

We realized we needed to invest in an enterprise-grade solution. We looked at three or four different companies. Then, we rolled out the F400 series.

The factors we considered were the normal things: Obviously, cost per terabyte or gigabyte, performance, IOPS; scalability was a massive factor as well. We knew that we were going to grow and we needed to be able to just add shelves of disks or add SSD, add SaaS or add Nearline.

The setup is one of the drawbacks of 3PAR system, it's a fairly complicated piece of hardware. You need to get the engineers in to do it. So it wasn't something that we could do on our own. The Professional Services that we engaged with were wonderful, and it was a couple of days as opposed to a week or two weeks.

ROI, that's a difficult one. It's expensive. When we compare that to the cost of the product that we make, and the return that we get, it's a small piece of the overall project cost. So we don't really complain about how much we initially had to pay for it. The value is that it works, and we don't have any downtime. The return on investment is pretty good.

We looked at NetApp, we looked at EMC, we looked at 3PAR, and 3PAR was the best fit for us totally.

• Get a proof-of-concept
• Draw a list of testing criteria
• Have a testing matrix
• Be clear in your objectives

3PAR is a great solution but it has a big physical footprint for the amount of data. There are other solutions out there. If you don't necessarily require the performance and the redundancy, there are other things to consider. But, it's a really solid storage appliance.

I would give the 3PAR an eight out of 10. Because we don't have any issues with it, it's hard to complain about it. But obviously giving it a 10 out of 10 would mean that there is no work to be done. I give it a strong eight.

1. Replication between sites
2. Migration
3. Dynamic Provisioning
4. Tearing
5. Manageability
6. Easy user interface

A real example is that before 3PAR, the nightly batch job would start at 7:30 PM and run until the next day in the afternoon, until around 2:00 PM.

Now with the 3PAR storage platform, the night batch job starts at the same time (7.30 PM) and finishes at 4.00 AM (instead of 2:00 PM the next day).

Firmware stability could be improved. Apart from that I can't think of anything else.

We have been using this solution for more than a year.

3PAR 10400 (Production) and 7400 (DR - location)

No issues with the deployment and we had very good support from the vendor. It's very easy to get it going.

A part of the firmware for the controller had a bug that caused some issues while doing the Dynamic tiering, however once we upgraded it was fixed.

No, there is plenty of room to grow.

On a scale from 1-10 I will give them a 9.

We had a quick turnaround time with one issue, and even a dedicated engineer working with us even though the issue was on the network side for the replication. Overall, we have very good support.

We had a XP24K and a EVA 6000 and we were experiencing challenges in replication and doing tiering. That was one of the main reasons we chose to switch.

It is very straight forward. Any person with basic storage knowledge can do the installation, with no specific training required.

We implemented through a vendor for the production site, PKA Technologies, and using what we learned, we have implemented the DR site in-house.

They are very helpful, and even after the implementation they have provided support for troubleshooting on the network issue.

According to the performance and scalability of the product, a rough calculation is that in three years we will be able to get an ROI.

Original cost was about $2 million. Day to day, it's just the cost of the power to run the hardware.

We evaluated Hitachi HUS VM, and EMC alongside 3PAR.

We are using the SSD but not flash. Even without that part, we are very satisfied with the performance.

It is reasonable and good product.

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.