HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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 are using 3PAR for production workloads, processing insurance policies and claims, file shares, and storage.

It has been performing well so far. We have had a few hiccups on the configuration side, but we have been working with HPE on them. For the most part, the product has been pretty seamless.

It had our organization start to think like an actual organization. A lot of stuff came out where the management of our workloads has improved dramatically.

We have gotten out of the mindset of physical is better; virtualization has taken hold and is starting to take off. We are going through the process of consolidation to 100% virtual. It has been incremental growth over a short period of time.

I live in Houston, so disaster recovery (DR) is very important, and the site-to-site replication is huge. I love that feature. We have our backups set up to replicate between two sites, then we also have our storage set up to replicate between two sites. The next piece would probably be to stack on a synergy appliance and be able to get our compute layer replicated between the two sites as well, which would round out that whole DR scenario.

What appeals to me is having mobile functionality. There is a vendor portal for 3PAR for whatever you want to purchase. I would like to see something from an administrator's standpoint, as opposed to having to go to a web browser, where you get a ping on your phone which says, "Your license is coming up for renewal," or, "You have a drive that is bad," in conjunction with stuff, such as InfoSight.

This is something which provides value back to me, because then I am not having to constantly babysit my vendors and say, "When do I have renewals coming due?" It is tough to get vendors who engage with you on that level. They go back and say, "Just a heads up, but these are what are coming due." Maybe they can backfill that with a mobile app.

My admins like having this functionality and direct integration, where it is like, "I need to do this, this, and this." If they could do it all from their phone that would be better. Though, sometimes it is tough, because of tiny phones, and all there is to use is a web browser. It can be hard to read on a smaller screen. If it is a mobile app, maybe it could be finessed into something where basic tasks could be done.

After we got past all the hiccups with the conditional configuration, the stability has been rock solid. I like the simplicity of it. We do not have to fidget with it a whole lot once we have it set up correctly. It has been stable and performs well, so I have no complaints whatsoever.

Scalability is incredible. We have a single server cabinet today, but we can grow it to as many cabinets as we need.

We go through a third party. We did not use HPE tech support unless we need to escalate an issue.

Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have.

I was not involved in the initial setup. When I came onboard, the product was already in the environment. 

We have already seen ROI. We have had it in the environment for about three months. It has been absolutely tremendous. Workloads have improved in performance. We do not have a lot of the same struggles that we used to.

It is stable. It does what its supposed to. You can feed it compute and storage as you need to. Whereas with our standard DL380 and ML350 servers, once you get to a certain point, that is as big as you can get. With this product, you can throw another shelf of storage or blade at it and grow it as much as you need to. 

As our workloads have increased, we have been able to finesse those into a good size to where they are valuable for us.

We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution.

Our organization looked at NetApp and Pure Storage. Pure Storage was just too expensive. NetApp was good, but they did not have anybody familiar with the NetApp configuration.

Our biggest requirement was ease of use. HPE seemed to have all the pieces that we needed, and it easy enough to get somebody trained up on how to manage it.

Understand your needs first. If you do not have a need for a highly technical solution, or you have workloads which are not high-performing. 3PAR is a perfect fit.

Understand your environment. Know what you are getting into. Research the different tools which are out there. Make sure that it is a good fit. It is nice to have the high performance stuff, but if you do not have high performance workloads, keep it simple and 3PAR is simple for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:  Our biggest requirement was ease of use. Scalability was another. We can scale it up pretty much as big as we need to. Those were the two biggest criteria.

The primary use case for 3PAR would be security video recording, and the security video is used for multiple purposes. In the healthcare environment, it will be used for real-time locating, patient wandering, infant abduction, asset tracking, and staff duress.

Taking it to the next level of healthcare, in pharmaceuticals one has to keep track of the production and movement of products and retain those records for a period of two years, as per federal regulations. So now, we need multiple levels of storage: immediate storage, short-term, and long-term, with the data being kept for up to two years.

In these scenarios, 3PAR is an ideal solution, and we've had a lot of success because of its capabilities and the different types of storage. You can mix SSDs with running drives and slower drives for longer-term storage, minimizing your cost but maximizing your storage. And you can also evolve storage as needed. You can increase the amount of storage by adding in drives on the fly, as the need arises. 3PAR provides a very ideal solution for some of my customers.

It gives organizations a single point of storage and single point of backup. I would call it a "single repository" of all your data with a good archiving system. Those are the biggest benefits I see.

There are lots of valuable features, so it's difficult to isolate a few. Number one, being able to provision drives on demand, as opposed to populating a whole stack of drives and not using them. In the latter scenario, you are locking your money in, you don't get a return on investment. On the fly, you can build up your storage as needed, so that's a very good feature. 

The second one is the mixture of drives. You can have SSD drives, fast disk drives, and slower drives, redundancy between drives, and hot-swappable drives on the SSDs, the faster hard drives, and the slower drives. This is a huge advantage as opposed to some other systems out there.

And of course, there are plugins and compatibility with the standard HPE hardware and it gives you a single panel to view the performance of your devices. From a single panel, I can see the performance of my service, my network, and my storage.

I would like to see them lower costs.

It would also help if they integrate current technologies, newer technologies, and more efficient technologies, as time progresses. For example, integrate the fourth level of NAND devices. I believe at the moment we have third-level NAND load-leveling in place. I know these devices are around the corner. In the not too distant future, they should add these types of drives in there. That will give us much faster access. Hopefully, in time, we will replace the spinning hard drives with SSDs only, and the different types of SSDs.

Hot-swappable drives and built-in redundancy gives stability to the solution.

Being able to add drives on the fly gives the solution scalability.

Most of my projects are large P3 (public-private partnership) projects, where we do design, build, and maintenance of a facility for up to 20 to 25 years. We then return it to the client with another 10 years of service. So, upfront, I have to decide what solutions to put in there that will give me the minimal refresh over a longer period of time. I have to weigh the pros and cons of how much I spend upfront and what my maintenance cost will be over time. That's where the 3PAR solution is a good solution for me. It gives me fewer refreshes over a period of time and yet, at the end of the contract, I can still return it to the client with another 10 years of service.

My clients rely on me for evaluating vendors. One of the things I do is take the data sheets from multiple suppliers, compare them, see what is the best fit for the client and then, of course, use my own judgment and experience with my other clients on the given product. Fortunately, 3PAR has been a good product, so, I have no hesitation in recommending it and moving forward with it.

My involvement is primarily in the initial design of the system. I'm not involved with the actual setup. I will engage vendors recommended by HPE, or HPE-authorized vendors, to do the setup for me.

Go out, do your research first on the different products that are out there and make the judgment for yourself. The information is out there.

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.

The ease-of-use, reliability, and the value I get for the capacity are the most valuable features. All of the deduplication and compression features allow me to buy much less storage to fulfill my business needs. I don't have very many support issues with it.

The benefit to the company is less down time. I can put my time towards other things, such as finding ways to increase performance or doing more proactive tasks.

Support has gone down a little bit in the past few years. It's hard to get the right person initially and sometimes you have to wait for a call back. It was better when it was 3PAR.

Stability is great and it's getting better every year. I have less and less issues as HPE works on the software.

Our newer array is much more scalable than I had in the past. I don't anticipate ever reaching a limit on it.

Overall, technical support is great, other than some problems getting connected with the right person. But once you get to the right technical resources, they are very easy to work with and quickly resolve our issues.

Initially, we were using another HPE DBA product and we were hitting its limits. So this was a great fit for us. We bought it just before HPE acquired it and the solution has been great ever since. This solution replaced a product that wasn't scaling well for us. Now we have a nice, scalable solution.

When we are looking for a vendor, we want somebody who can be a true partner with us and not just somebody trying to sell us something.

I was not involved in the setup of the original 3PARs we have, but I was involved in five subsequent installations. They were straightforward compared to other storage products that I've used, such EMC.

I'm sure they probably looked at EMC, but I wasn't there for the initial sale. For now, we are staying with HPE.

Don’t have any second thoughts and just go with it. It's really a great product and should fulfill most business needs. It is easy to use.

The most valuable features of the HP 3PAR solution for us I would have to say would be around thin provisioning and being able to provision big and then see what the utilization is like. And ultimately, the biggest thing, if you could draw a line from all of these features here down to one common thing, it's really the ability to change your mind. Now, as a service provider, you have to be able to change your mind, because your customers will, and if your customers change their mind and you can't, then you're kind of backed into a corner. So, you know, with the HP 3PAR and all of the dynamic-ness of that, you're able to change your mind at pretty much every layer of the technology stack.

So a key example of how the HP 3PAR has benefited our organization would certainly be from a reputation point of view. HP 3PAR is globally well known as a very high end, if not the best storage offering. But in particular, again, drawing back to that performance requirement it also has a reputation around performance and it does deliver on promise. We make big promises to our clients around performance, we have to be able to back that up with a technology that will actually support that initiative.

In the future releases of 3PAR, in terms of the overall roadmap, now I have been to the CDN booth and obviously can't say too much about that. But, HP's roadmap tends to align very well with our expected roadmap, for lack of a better term. And in terms of where we're wanting to see the technology go in order to accommodate the needs of our clients HP has a roadmap that aligns very well with that. So I would say I don't have any particular requirements that I don't think HP already have on their roadmap without saying what they are.

The stability of 3PAR is unquestionable. From day one, we had had not to bag the LeftHand product set, because it has a place in the market, but we had had some issues with that when we really pushed it probably too far. So when we moved to 3PAR as soon as that became apparent, and never looked back. You know, there's been no issues with 3PAR throughout the way through, and I say, the ability to change your mind and change your rate levels, change the way you're deploying the storage, that means that you don't have to break it just to make it what you want it to be.

So the scalability of 3PAR, bearing in mind we operate cloud platforms in New Zealand is far beyond what we need because our market is fairly small, and so being able to scale to multiple petabytes on a single SAN is great to know that it can do that, but it's not something we've had to worry about in terms of an overall capacity limit.

We engage quite heavily with HPTS, as we call technical support, and when it comes to implementing new technologies or birthing a new 3PAR, then we don't do that alone. We work closely with HP to make sure that it's all done according to best practice.

So before we went down the road of looking at the HP 3PAR, we were using another HP product, LeftHand, which was doing the job fine, but as we started to scale and started to see the demands of the client base that we were attracting, we knew we needed to make a change.

So prior to the HP 3PAR, we were using LeftHand products. That was really local disc in the servers themselves, which doesn't scale particularly well, certainly not back when we started, there was not a concept of a virtual SAN.

The initial setup of the 3PAR environments, I would say is very straightforward, when it comes to a new technology. Not so much now, because we have five 3PARs in play. But when our first 3PAR arrived, we spent a month trying to break it, and we do that with any new technology that we're not comfortable with and not yet confident in terms of our own use of the product. And so getting that implemented and trying to break it for a month, you know, we couldn't break it, and so that was good. But that's kind of our model.

Other than HP, we've been talking to, I wouldn't say working with, but we've been talking to both Cisco and Dell, more so with Dell over the years. But we've really failed to engage to the level that we have with HP. HP have always been incredibly engaging, incredibly communicative, with regards to not only the product sets that are available, where they're going. And the entire ecosystem around these product sets is really what adds to the ultimate value. Anybody can buy a hard drive and stick it in a machine, but, you know, being able to support that long term, understand where that technology needs to go, and then get it there.

So most recently, we have implemented the all flash or the entire flash-based 3PAR 7450, and the roadmap towards making that decision was really around performance. We've always kept a couple of keywords close to our heart with relation to our branding, and performance is one of those, quality being the other. And so the all flash environment has enabled us to deliver on promise with regards to performance.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

I've seen a lot of data storage systems. It's the only storage system you can watch over the application time and it keeps measuring it. We have some thresholds on our end on it, a very good graphical user interface and reporting. 

There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has limited flexibility in building replication solutions. There are limitations to the number of IOPS the system can do. It's not bad as it is doing its job. However, for the application, if you need a toolbox, you can build everything concerning periodic replication modes of synchronous or asynchronous three-site, four-site, with supported cascading which requires you to buy an IBM product. 

It also takes a few hours to one day to upgrade the system and sometimes; it takes more time because, in some HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage, you have an eight-node system. If you do an upgrade, you do it node by node and every node might take more than an hour.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past seven years.

Last year after summer, HPE had to locate replication groups getting stopped and took a lot of time to find out what's happening, and yet we still don't know what's happening over there. It feels like the message is quite clear after replicating from A to B, and it states that B is not responding very well.

There is a timeout, and it stops the replication group because there is no stability or consistency and is not good at that moment. So that might be negative, but when was the last time? I think in November of last year.

At one point, some remote copy groups stopped working, and we used a disaster recovery plan because, in production, we replicate everything from A to B and then split up into some remote copy groups, gathering together some data source and clusters. If one of those remote copy groups stops, you don't have DFP anymore and you have to restart them. And last year after starting one of those replication groups; we had some performance issues because they're trying to get in sync as soon as possible using all the resources, so we had to plan very well outside the business hours.

We have proactive datacenter care; I call it a storage advocate, and we can send every question to them and we get quick answers. They also help to find out if new releases are available and other services. For now, they have more insights on that. They have better sources sometimes, and I have better sources than them sometimes, but they do a great job and they also assisted us concerning the compression issue we had at the beginning.

It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available. 

We have done total cost of ownership calculations over the past five years, and we also ask for some cost prices for the sixth and seventh year so that we can get some insights into what happens after those five years. We have some systems that are five years old and we keep them because it's flash data storage. It's still almost a three terabyte solid-state drive, and the support cost is not that high. We'll have a look after that. I see other things happening on the Hitachi boxes with all those license defeats. This is also positive for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, everything is on the license. When we bought the systems, it was the case and then I've been reading something about it. You can buy the rest of the licenses. If you buy a system, that will not be replicated to another system, then you get a license without replication software.

The job of direct channel support to HPE 3PAR StoreServ is not an end of life or end of support but HPE Primera has now replaced it and I hope they get all the functionality in there like the HPE 3PAR. I remember it seems like HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera have support for volume plugins and that will be a big game if they can implement volumes on their system because that kind of release is much better than the datastore level.

It is our main storage solution for our entire VMware environment.

Everything run on the solution is core: MEDITECH, all the EMRs, and back-ends support services.

We use a combination of flash and spinning disk. For some of our less critical functions, since we run everything on the 3PAR, there is no reason to spend the extra money on flash to run the stuff that is not super mission-critical.

It allows us to grow. We added almost 110TB last year alone. Not a lot of product let you throw that in, resulting in the performance that we have been seeing.

It has definitely reduced our time to deployment. We can call up, and say, "I need 110TB," and they configure it so my IOPS stay consistent across 3PAR, Then, I don't actually have to worry about the IOPS. HPE takes care of that for me. I need the space, and they take care of the rest. They install it, and I just provision it, which is nice.

If you can handle the IOPS, throughput is a natural byproduct. Usually, IOPS is where you are capped. HPE has done a great job in making sure that our IOP-intensive EMRs stay up and running. We have really good performance on them.

We run approximately half a billion IOPS every six months. This 3PAR seems to handle it just fine.

Expandability and performance are its most valuable features.

We do not use Memory-Driven Flash in the old 3PAR. Perhaps we will use it in the new 3PAR. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading.

We aren't using HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity yet. We are looking into it. The old 3PAR didn't support it, but the new 3PAR does.

It is extremely stable. I'm able to do everything that I need to do in the middle of the day without interruption. It has been an absolute fantastic piece of hardware.

The availability is excellent. I have not had any problems with 3PAR.

It runs. I don't have a problem with it. If it needs an update, I can do it in the middle of the day with nobody being the wiser. It is phenomenal in that respect. As a hospital, I get two hours every quarter to reboot things, so it is imperative that nothing goes down.

The scalability is phenomenal.

The technical support is excellent. They do everything.

My old 3PAR is end of life, so it is time to switch.

I haven't done the initial setup yet, and I haven't gone through the initial setup on the new one.

We used HPE technical services for the deployment. They sent another company, Unisys, who was great. They did it all. I didn't have to lift a finger, which makes me happy

I would like it to be cheaper.

We are an HPE shop. Everything that we have is HPE, so we just stuck with them. We have never been upset with HPE. They have been phenomenal, in my opinion.

Check out HPE. They are well worth it.

It pretty much checks all the boxes that I have concerns about moving forward. This version will do dedupe better. We will start to use some of the data classifications where it tiers the storage for us. Of all the bubbles that I care about, it checks them all.

We don't use dedupe on our old 3PAR. We're hoping to use it on the new one.

We don't use InfoSight at the moment. It's something we're looking into, though.

I'm very happy with it. It has performed as I expected.