HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It is our primary storage. The entire company runs off 3PAR. Right now, we are in a VMware environment. All of our virtual machines are stored on 3PAR, along with all of our EMR applications, practice management solutions, and email. All of our virtual machines are running off of 3PAR. Our file server is on there too.

The product has heavily improved the way our organizations functions. Before we got the 3PAR, we were running an HPE Generation 6 server as our storage server. It was slow, and we were getting low on space, so we weren't able to expand capacity that easily. Since we went to 3PAR, it has fiber connections connecting all the cabinets together. Therefore, data access has been tremendously better, especially when we have to constantly recall, all day long everyday, patients charts or when we are doing scheduling. We see over 2000 patients on a daily basis, so we have to have speed and reliability. By implementing 3PAR over the old, regular file storage server that we had before, it has drastically improved our patient care.

Reliability is its most valuable feature. We have multiple cabinets with multiple failure points, so if there is one failure then we don't have worry about it. It is easy to replace a part of the cabinet when we are up and running. We can replicate back over, then we are good to go. Our uptime has to be there, so we can continue seeing patients. That is the biggest part of the reliability that I am looking for.

I would like an easier user interface and setup to help with deployment. There were many areas of the setup where I was like, “Why don't we do it this way?” Therefore, some of the things in the user interface could have been more refined, so you don't have to click in 5000 different places to accomplish one goal. Less clicks means more efficiency.  

I feel like there is a big training gap. Obviously, the HPE engineers know all about the product and can come in and do the setup with ease. However, once they hand off the product to the in-house IT group, there might be a learning gap there. E.g,, I have to call them now every time I have a problem. 

I feel like they should've spent more time with us. They were only onsite for two days, and I feel like there should be more outside training to explain how to use the product.

It has been pretty stable. We have only had one major issue. It was because of a redundancy that we had set up. HPE sent us a new part, then we swapped it in and were back up and running.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with the solution's availability.

So far, we have not had to scale up. However, that day may be coming, and we actually provisioned our 3PAR to be scalable in the future. So, I think the scalability is pretty good considering HPE helped us design and implement it in a way where we can scale up when needed.

So far, the technical support has been good. We had one major failure and the technical support team sent us a part within four hours. Then, we had the new part, and it was everything was back up and running. We were able to talk to a 3PAR specialist to walk us through how to get everything reconfigured. So, there was virtually no down time.

The previous solution that we had was about 10 years old. It was an HPE Generation 6 server. We had some management changes, and it was time for a refresh which we hadn't done in many years.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There were a lot of different things that had to happen which was the reason why they had to send out the HPE engineers to help us. 

My philosophy is if you have to send out an engineer to do it, then it is probably more complicated for the end user.

Softchoice helped us procure the equipment, and HPE sent out 3PAR specialists to help us configure and deploy the product. Our experience with Softchoice was great.

It was pretty easy to deploy the product to begin with because HPE helped us do it. They sent product specialists in. So, deployment of this particular product was definitely easy-breezy.

We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice.

3PAR has increased our performance.

The product has definitely improved throughput. We are able to more efficiently see patients because all of our medical records and practice management software seems to run faster. Uploading images and charts is a lot faster. Recalling information in the exam rooms is faster. The overall throughput of data, going back and forth, is so we can more efficiently see patients, and it also helps increase our patient flow. We can see patients a lot faster, getting them in and out a lot more quickly.

Spend your time doing the research on the product and learn the system.

So far, it has been pretty reliable. It has been a set it and forget it type product, which has been great, except for when there are some minor issues. However, the issues that we have had were resolved fairly quickly.

We are flash and standard disk combo, or hybrid. Having flash though does not mean that we have faster performance. What it does helps us with is being able to see more patients, because we're not having to wait as long for applications to load or waiting for the data to get sent to where it needs to be.

Biggest lesson learnt: Why didn't we do it a long time ago?

We use about 40 percent of our workload in 3PAR. We have 3PAR 7400, V-Class series. We use dynamic tiering, so we have a mixed workload, SSD Fibre Channel and Nearline storage.

In terms of performance, it has been a little bit up and down, but overall there isn't much to complain about. It's because we have the Nearline storage, so that doesn't perform well. That is the reason we have SSD and Fibre Channel tiering. We use Adaptive Optimization and that helps us to improve certain applications using those high-performance tiers.

The next step for us is refreshing, likely with another 3PAR. Migrating the workload from one 3PAR, to another 3PAR is pretty easy using Peer Motion.

In terms of multiple business needs, we have multiple applications running and I don't have complaints. I think 3PAR runs multiple applications well. They're easy to manage.

Overall it performs well.

I would like to see more cloud-based integrations and more file storage capabilities. They do have that now, but we haven't started using it.

We haven't had any major issues on 3PAR. We have pretty much had 100 percent uptime; we haven't had any outage. We run a lot of production workload on it with no issues.

Regarding scalability, we are maxed out right now on all our 3PARs, so we can not add more storage. So we just order a new one and it's fine.

Support is good, overall. 

We had HPE EVA storage. We switched because all of it was legacy storage. We migrated from legacy storage to the new 3PAR. The main reason we went with HPE was the migration from the old legacy to the new 3PAR was very seamless. They have Peer Motion integration so the data migration was easy. If we had gone with another vendor we would have had to do an offline migration.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, HPE is our business partner so we use their products.

The initial setup was not that complex. We work with HPE to take care of all the implementations. It took less than one day.

Our ROI has been pretty good. I can't share how much we invested, but it has been almost five years and we migrated something like 40 or 50 HPE EVAs to two 3PARs. We consolidated it quite a bit.

We did consider other vendors. That's the reason we did a proof of concept and 3PAR was the winner. The other vendors on our short-list were EMC and NetApp.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because the product just works; we haven't had a lot of problems. I'm satisfied with the product.

3PAR is a proven, more reliable and stable SAN solution. Go with it.

It hosts our virtualization platform. It works really well.

We do not have to take the whole system down now to do upgrades.

It is very easy to use. That is its best feature.

What I would like to see the SSMC management interface and the regular, Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interface. I would have to use both, because one of them has features, the other one does not, and vice versa.

It is very stable.

Scalability is improving. We have some 7400s, 8200s, and 8400s. So, we can scale pretty well.

With the support that our organization has, I can talk to someone right away if I have an issue. It has been very good.

We were using HPE EVA. We had a lot of issues with it to begin with. Anytime you wanted to do an upgrade, you had to take systems offline. That just would not work for us.

We switched when our warranties were up.

It was a bit complex in the wiring of the cages. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward.

We also evaluated Dell. We chose 3PAR because of price and functionality.

There are some things out there now, such as HPE SimpliVity that do more things, and maybe we would like to go in that direction. Right now, we are doing a PoC with HPE SimpliVity. It seems to be working well, especially the backup solution that it has with it, where you can do snapshots. We really like that since 3PAR does not have this.

I am not on the latest release yet. We are still trying to get there. The people that I work with at HPE have recommended where we should be in our version. We are not to the 3.3 version yet. I am looking forward to upgrading, because you can do them yourself. You do not have to have HPE do them. Also, it will integrate with InfoSight, which I am looking forward to.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: In our case, price is usually the biggest factor, because we are a university and have no money. Price is always big when we make a decision.

It is for shared storage for virtual machines running VMware.

It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far. 

The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected. 

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is stable. I didn't have any issues.

It is scalable. You can add storage quite easily.

We have only 10 users. It is a small system.

I never contacted HPE support because I have a selling partner,  but we didn't have many issues. So, we rarely needed any support.

Its initial setup was done by our partner, who has previous experience. So, it was relatively easy. 

It is reasonable. As compared to other solutions, it doesn't seem to be much different.

I tried to look, but it was more about the products that our IT partner had available than me choosing. They had previous experience with HPE and 3PAR, and they recommended it to us, and we followed their advice.

I can't compare it with other brands because we only have this system. 

I would advise having some reference implementation that you can test and see if it's good for your needs. In my case, I would have liked to have the opportunity to test it first to see if it's good for our use case, but I couldn't.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Performance is the only thing that I would like them to improve.

VMware and SQL.

In terms of performance, we had an issue with the earlier version, the 7400, an iSCSI issue. They replaced it with one from the 8000 series and it has been doing pretty well so far.

It lets us mix a lot of drive spaces, as well as performance drives, between Fibre Channel, long-term storage, and SSD drives. It performs pretty well as far as moving the data around and not letting a lot of it go to waste.

• Redundancy
• Performance (I/O and stability)
• The tiering

Nothing really comes to mind. We talked to somebody earlier today, here at HPE Discover 2018, about their Docker integration for it, so that's something we'll probably check out next for both the 3PAR and Nimble.

We haven't any issues with scalability. We have added a lot of different shelves to it, we have close to about 400 terabytes. It has done pretty well in that regard.

Technical support is pretty good. We've used it mainly for firmware upgrades and those type of things. We also used them initially for troubleshooting issues on the previous version. They have been helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We did have HPE onsite to help with that. It didn't take too long, maybe two to three days.

I believe it is paying off at this point, but I don't have any numbers for ROI.

We looked at Dell, Tegile, and Pure Storage. We went with HPE in the end because we already have HPE equipment, we're mostly HPE server and software, so we went with that. We're trying out the new Nimble now in our new data center.

When I evaluate vendors the important criteria are 

• redundancy
• scalability
• performance
• metrics for reporting.

My advice would be, make sure you know your workloads going into it and how you will best be able to utilize a solution, especially when deciding what disk structure to get and how to lay it out.

Overall, I would rate 3PAR at eight out of 10. The biggest issues we had were performance issues with the older version, but this one has been doing okay.

From a management standpoint of the arrays, they work really well. They handle a lot of data and, overall, it lowers the complexity of our storage infrastructure. We've been able to consolidate down to a single platform which meets all of our demands, anywhere from our advanced meter systems to our customer information system.

When we started using 3PAR what we liked was the simplicity of the product. We needed a higher performance storage and, in our support model, we needed to keep the simplicity of the storage architecture, keep it as clean and as manageable as we could.

We have seen one area, where we have highly virtualized Solaris instances, where we're getting into the queue depth, so we probably need to do some work in the queue-depth area in the arrays. I'm not sure if its specific to Solaris, because we haven't encountered it on other platforms but, then again, on some of our largest Solaris frames, we are running several hundred virtual containers and we see the queue-depth issue there.

It has been stable. It has been very reliable. I have no problems around it.

As we transform and we're starting to move data, much more data, we're looking at the scalability. I don't have any indicators that it will not scale, but there is a lot of analysis we have to do. We're doing modeling of that data right now to see what decisions we will make in 2019. I am assuming we will maintain at least some 3PAR, but we may have to compliment it with something else, based on the demands we have around our data.

From my experience, tech support has been good. I'm not directly interacting with support due to my role but the feedback I've received has been good.

This is a question better answered by the guys who actually support it, but it's my understanding that the upgrade process is pretty seamless. They scheduled it over a weekend, they rolled the upgrade through, and it works pretty well. Occasionally, there are glitches they need to work through but, from what I have observed, they're minor.

The process doesn't drag on. It's just planning, scheduling it, change tickets go in, and then they run it. It's a process that pretty much takes under a day. And then, after implementing, it's a matter of watching it to make sure everything is smooth after the upgrade finishes.

• Scaleable from two to eight controller nodes for High Availability
• Persistent fabric array ports
• Performance tuning
• Dynamic and adaptive optimizations
• Highly granular storage
• One gigabyte miniature disk concept called "chunklets"
• Striping of data across all disks available - wide striping
• Highly intelligent Gen3 and Gen 4 ASICs which acts as the brain of the 3PAR storage systems. This is not a regular CPU
• Very quick redistribution of data if there's a disk failure
• All the disk drives in the system are used for data, since parity and spares are at the chunklet level.

I cannot share the information on how it improved our storage estates, but in general, it has very good SAN performance compared to EMC Clariion, IBM XIV, IBM Storwize V7000 and its other competitors.

They have released a unified version of HP 3PAR, with a separate NAS server unit in the enclosure/rack. I would like to see a proper unified system (same controller serving both SAN and NAS solutions) such as NetApp offers.

We've been using it for three years. We currently have a 7400 (mix of disk drives), and a 7450 (full flash array, only SSD disks),

The performance is optimal, if we have planned everything properly well in advance.

These are mid-range storage solutions that can be scaled up to 700TB of space depending on the type of disks we use. It does have enterprise solutions that can scale up to eight controller nodes with 1.8PB of usable capacity. However, we have a 7400 and a 7450 with lot of provisioning done to ESX systems with thousands of VMs.

HP customer support, especially for 3PAR is excellent.

They have highly skilled technical support team. I would rate them 8/10.

We chose 3PAR because it has the best price compared to its competitors, and delivers the performance expected.

The initial setup/installation was done by the vendor. We needed to provide them with the necessary hardware and network information, (DNS, NIS etc). Their experience was very good, I have no complaints.

Pricing and licensing depend on the customer/partner deals and negotiations/agreements.

It has met our performance and stability expectations. 3PAR is one of the best in the market and it is evident that its sales have raised to 10x since it was acquired by HP. All cloud solutions from HP and many other companies use HP 3PAR storage on their backend for their cloud solutions.

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.