HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

It is for our IT. It is our kitchen sink; we use it for everything.

Our applications are now at least two to four times faster. It was a night and day change.

People walk up to us going, "This is just good. Thank you." It is nice for storage people to receive thanks instead of people saying, "Your stuff is slow."

Comparatively to everything else, the value proposition, the TCO, and the price make a big difference from all the other players who are in the same realm.

Better dedupe. It is hard for all the older generation arrays to put up dedupe because they tend to do the other stuff so much better. They have to keep the stability before any other new feature. They have to get it right all the time, not just the first time.

It is stable as heck. That is 3PAR's main name.

We upgraded scalability-wise, and it just hummed along. It was easy.

I have used support a lot. Even in the beginning, it was easy to call somebody, and people say, "Other vendors when they talk to the support guys, they actually collaborate." 

This was 3PAR five or six years ago until now. When we have an issue, they will call VMware for us instead of us needing to go back and forth.

We previously used EMC VMAX.

When I was at Level 3 Communications eight years ago, we were one of the first customers of 3PAR before HPE bought them. We did a PoC, and it literally made the others in the race look bad. It was that good.

It was so easy. When you make a volume, it takes seconds instead of minutes, if not tens of minutes. It took me less than an hour to set up the array.

I was the one who did all the PoCs. I set up everything and tried to automate everything I could.

Performance is at least two times, if not three times, what we had previously. Even now, it is still two to three times in performance what everything else is by price comparison.

The value is not just in price, there is the time that the administrators administer the array: It is two times, if not four times the difference. Something that they would take task-wise an hour, it will take (at the most) 15 minutes with a 3PAR. It goes the same way with the Nimble.

Back then, it was HPE versus EMC.

Just try it out. Do a PoC side-by-side. It wins.

Most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• The technical aspects of the price
• The return on investment
• The support. 

You are not making a decision based on just one or two things. If you are, you are not doing a good service for your company or your stakeholders

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.

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.

It's quite fast, easy to manage, and easy to extend. Adding new shelves or new platforms is easy.

In our case, 3PARs were easier to implement into our existing environment. Also, we had problem with storage space so it was the easiest way to expand.

I'm happy for the moment. But I would like to see them implement the new types of RAM; the NVRAM that is being used in the server environment. This would make storage quite a bit faster. It's not slow, but it could always be faster. Maybe this can also be available partially in a storage environment.

For example, if you have a DSQL server or something similar. Most companies have the lock database on the local server. In our case, we have everything on the 3PAR and it would make sense to have faster storage. We would like to see some innovation. There's room for improvement.

We have been using 3PARs for a year.

We have never had any stability problems.

Scalability is always a matter of price of course, but you can put in new disks with no problem at all.

We used technical support to do updates. They're good and very fast. They were very helpful.

We used EMC before but it was quite old, about 7 years, and it was time to change. There wasn't a good solution from them at that time. The ability to scale to size was important to us when choosing a vendor, as well as the speed. We want our solution to be future-proof to an extent.

I was partially involved in the initial setup. It was complex because of our environment. We have 10 or 15 different systems in the background so it wasn't easy. We thought it would be easy, but in the end it was quite complex.

There isn’t only one solution on the market. We already had the EMC systems. We were not limited to flash providers, so we also looked at Nimble and Hitachi and others.

At the end of the day, 3PAR was the most valuable. It was the most valuable solution. It was quite fast and it wasn't too expensive. Additionally, we could have an active-active scenario. That was for us the most important thing.

I would say go for it. You should at least give it a chance.

Easy management is huge as is the scalability and the performance.

We're using deduplication a lot so getting a return on our investment there is a great. We're getting a lot of performance through that, so we're running probably a 1000 VMs on a 7440 that has done pretty well for us.

It would be nice to see reporting around percent of utilization on the performance side. It tells you what you're doing in the reporting but I would like to know what my array's capable of, versus what I'm using.

It's very stable.

I don't know if you can really fix this but to upgrade from 2 nodes to 4 can be a hassle because you have to re-balance everything. So you have to either do a lot of work or duplicate what you've got which can be expensive. I don't know if there's a good way to fix that though, other than start with 4 nodes.

I think we're getting towards the upper end of what we have and with what HPE would consider our array is capable of and what percentage of that would be helpful, so we don't have to try and guess. Because you know you ask how many IOPS an SSD can get and they'll say, "Yeah, 2000 to 3000," something like that. Who knows what you're actually going to be able to get out of it. Based on your IO size and things like that, being able to see a clear picture would be cool.

With 3PAR WE haven't had to use technical support.

We came from using Hitachi, so provisioning and that sort of thing is way easier with a small team. It's a lot easier to use, the SSMC and management tools for 3PAR than it was for any of the Hitachi tools that we used.

I'd like to be able to license different tiers of disks for different features. We have arrays that we could use for different purposes really. And so if I'm using near line drives for camera backup, I don't want to have to license them for things like dynamic optimization that I'm not using them for. If they're in the machine, now you have to license everything. So I'd like to see that. It might make things more expensive but I do like the model that Pure uses where it's just everything's included.

Get 4 nodes at the start. I would say that's important. Plan more long term rather than what you need now. Get the licensing and nodes you need upfront, makes it easier to expand later.

Reliability. It’s a good, solid product with ease-of-management.

Before switching over from HP’s old storage, we just needed to upgrade our aging infrastructure, which was pretty easy.

3PAR has everything that I’m interested in. I come from a storage background, and everything that I want to see is there. I don’t really have anything pressing to suggest, but nothing is perfect.

Stability is rock solid.

If my company doubled in size, I could scale it well.

Everything has been very positive with no issues. Working at a nuclear power plant, it’s mostly on our end when issues come up. Otherwise, HP’s been perfect.

It was mostly just aging storage. We used HP AVA before, and so we just switched over to a new product.

It was purchased prior to me being there, so I’m not sure what else was considered.

We always look for ease of use, and 3PAR is very easy to use.

From my experience with other storage platforms, if you want something where underlying hardware is designed with a goal and you rely on pre-existing hardware around which you build your product, you’re setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. It seems to me that something like 3PAR, where it’s designed around a specific product, just makes life so much more easier. You’re essentially setting yourself up for success with a product like 3PAR.