HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

We use 3PAR as our main production environment. Therefore, we use it for everything from VMware to our NAS solutions. It is used for complex business needs, because we also store all of our databases on the 3PAR as well.

We have a lot of systems at the airport where I work. So, we have a lot of Oracle databases, which run a lot of core functionality. This includes the financial systems. We have a large maintenance program, and we have to track all of our maintenance needs. This is all done through an Oracle database. All of these databases are on the 3PAR. 

We have about 500 users. All of their user data is stored on the 3PAR for groups and user data. Then, most of our environment is in VMware. Thus, we have a reasonable sized VMware environment of about 700 servers, and that all runs off of the 3PAR.

It has improved our functions because we have a very small IT team. We have to do a lot of things. The more solutions that we can bring onboard which are easy to use and do not require too much maintenance, this is good for us. We just do not have enough bandwidth to cover everything.

Therefore, we are always looking for good solutions which do their job well and are easy to use. 

3PAR is fairly easy to use. We have used a few different arrays in the past, and they were a lot more complicated. This one was fast to bring up and start using right away. It is easy to keep running and does not require too much effort. It has been very reliable, which is key.

Foremost, we look for a reliable solution foremost, and 3PAR has been very reliable.

I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly. That would be a great feature.

The controllers are going to age out, then eventually they will need new controllers. If we could upgrade those controllers live without interruption, that would be great.

The stability has been great. We have had zero issues.

The scalability is good because it is easy to add in new disks. We just add them on the fly, and they are available for use. We do not have to go in, then configure then. We just put the disks in, then they are available, so it is easy.

I needed to invest in a new solution because the previous solution was getting old.

We wanted to go to market to find a better solution. We wanted something that had a little more intelligence. However, because we are a semi-public company, we had to go to market. We could not just pick 3PAR.

The 3PAR actually had to prove itself. It had to be scored and graded across a panel of people in order to win the bid. Not only that, it had to have a good price.

It was not complex.

We had a third-party vendor help set it up. We had two weeks to set it up, and we had it done within one week. We had a whole week to sit back and enjoy it.

I have seen ROI, because it has performed extremely well so far. The amount of data that we have flowing through it has worked out very well.

The return on investment for me is that all of my customers are happy. That is a really good return on investment: less complaining.

We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, Dell, and 3PAR. We went with 3PAR because of price and the functionality had everything that we wanted it to do. Also, the presentation that the HPE team put together went really well.

Give the product a good, hard look, because HPE does a very good job. They are a market leader. They are not a small player in the space. You can be very comfortable when dealing with a company like HPE.

It is doing everything that we want it to do. We are not that big, so we did not have a lot of crazy requirements. Therefore, it is doing everything we want it to do. The other big factor is that it is easy to use.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Easy of use
• Ability to have two arrays back each other up. In case one of them has a problem, the other one can take over.

The ease of management is its most valuable feature. It is so much easier to manage storage on a 3PAR array than anything that we have had before. 

I really love the thin provisioning part of it. It has saved us tremendously by being able to provide storage to our Windows guys. They think that they have a terabyte and are happy about it, but they do not use anywhere near that, so it does not chew up space on the array, which is nice. 

Being able to snapshot things for backup purposes has been key. We do that on our databases four times a day. 

We are an all-flash environment, which is really good. One thing that I would like to see is the ability to take storage on 3PAR array and copy it up to the cloud, any type of cloud I want, e.g., Azure, AWS, etc. HPE has StoreOnce CloudBank integration, but I would like to see a little bit more integration from a cloud perspective. In this way, I would have some more flexibility to do more with data, how to store it, and where I have it.

Stability has been awesome. We have a couple of 8440s that have been in production now for about a year and a half with no hiccups; nothing. Its performance has been steady, very good, and it stays up. 

That is why we had P9500s and Symmetrix in the day, because they just stayed up, and they just always worked. 3PAR has been every bit as reliable and available as those systems.

We are in a mid-size company, and the 8000 series has been good. We are not utilizing all of it, so we have the ability to expand. We have a project right now that we are looking at expanding, so from that standpoint it is good. 

You can get way into the 20000 series and just cut into petabytes of data out there. I like that it moves from entry level to as high as you need to go.

Support has been very good. Upgrade-wise, we have had HPE guys call us up, and say, "You need to apply this firmware. We need to get you to this level." Then, we get it scheduled.

They are on time and work with us when we need to get anything done. They get things done, so we do not have to do them, which is awesome. 

I have gone the gamut of old EMC arrays, Clarion arrays, and XP arrays, and 3PAR is just so simple. 

Initial setup was straightforward. It is not a hard array to set up and install. Even though we had purchased installation, this was back when we had the previous 3PAR for a performance tool. I got it and set it up.

I installed 3PAR on the server, and it was not hard to do. 

HPE called us up and said, "Here are the things that you can do with this." I replied, "I already went through all of that." They said, "Okay."

They are very good, and I like the product.

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

Our use case for 3PAR is for all our block storage. Our biggest consumption for 3PAR is for our hypervisors, VMware and Hyper-V. We're almost 90 percent virtualized and 3PAR fits the need for hypervisor environments very well.

We got our first 3PAR in 2008 or 2009 and we're up to 71 3PARs now.

It propelled our desire to virtualize more quickly, to go from physical servers to more and more virtualized servers.

The most valuable feature is its ease of use. Initially, when we had the hybrid solutions that had SSDs and Fibre Channel drives, the AO was the thing we liked the most - moving the data around where it was needed to be kept for hotspots. But now we're using the all-flash arrays and, with the deduplication and compression, it just really fits our virtualization environment very well.

In the next release, I would like to see faster upgrades, where it's really transparent to our host and our end-users. No node reboots, those types of things are the next feature set I would like to see.

They are very stable, we have very few problems with them.

Scalability is very good. We have replaced multiple 3PAR systems with just one or two 3PARs, because of how they scale in the all-flash environment.

I would rate technical support an eight or nine out of 10.

I had looked at 3PAR before HPE bought it. Then, when HPE bought it, that solidified the decision - that they had the backing of such a big organization. But the biggest factors were the features and functionality, how the hardware worked. And Adaptive Optimization was something we were really wanting.

The very first 3PAR we got was an eight-node V800, so we were very involved because it was a very big five-rack system, a very large system. It was one of the largest in the southeast. The initial 3PAR was not very straightforward, we had to have help. But since then, we've been able to do some of our own installations without much trouble.

HPE has been a long-standing partner with us in terms of block storage, so it's been a continuous investment. 

Definitely check it out, especially in your hypervisor environments. That is where the compression has really been a huge benefit for us, allowed us to regain some data center floor space because we're now able to put more of the environment in a smaller number of 3PARs. 

It's almost a 10 out of 10 but the reason it's not is that some of the upgrade processes have been a little challenging, not always technically, sometimes services-oriented. But other than that, the product itself, the ease of use and the value it's provided for us make it a valuable asset for us.

Our primary use for 3PAR is virtualization, SQL Server data, and backup logs. We also use it for our Citrix VDI environment.

We have been using 3PAR for two years. It has been performing as expected. We are actually getting ready to invest a big chunk of money to expand our 3PAR.

It has improved multiple things. Integration with current HPE products that we have, e.g., backups with integration within Veeam and restores of a huge file server using Veeam. Across the board, it has helped with more than just serving data, but also with recovery.

• Ease of use
• Ease of training for my new staff and junior level staff.
• The support that we receive from HPE.

I would like more integration with OneView. I would also like to be able to deploy and manage 3PAR within OneView Global Dashboard so we do not have to use the interface for 3PAR. Overall, I would like more integration, which I think is coming.

It meets and exceeds all my expectations. It is easy to scale. It is fairly inexpensive to scale. It easily does whatever I need it to do.

When we have a failed drive or any failure, we receive emails and do not have to open cases. 

They make the replacement of any parts easy along with the analysis of any issues with the servers, 3PARs, and any upgrades which need to be happening, in addition to any detrimental performance issues.

We previously had Dell Compellent. We switched because we were using HPE Compute and HPE Blades, and it seemed like we might as well go all in on HPE. Also, we were not getting what we thought we wanted for performance out of Compellent.

It was the easiest SAN that I have ever set up.

I do not know if I can put a number on it. When we buy products, we do not put ROI on it. It is more performance, and does it meet our business needs? 

This product has been exceeding anything else that we have had in the environment firsthand.

Give 3PAR a good consideration. Budget wise, 3PAR is a lot of money compared to other solutions, but what is in the 3PAR integration that customers are getting now from the Nimble and InfoSight acquisitions, it is worthwhile.

This system has been (by far) the easiest to use, manage, and expand.

The solution is mostly used for storage.

The user interface is very good. It's impressive. I find it very easy to understand. 

It offers good scalability.

The stability is very reliable. 

There is the possibility of using it in a hybrid way.

It's a very popular product for enterprise storage. It's good for medium to enterprise-level companies. 

It's easy to set up the product.

Technical support has been helpful.

This solution is now at end-of-life.

We have found the solution to be expensive. 

I've been using with the solution for the last six years. 

The solution is very stable and extremely reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is scalable and easily expands. 

We have various customers on the solution. They might have thousands of users overall, however, we have four to five clients using the product in general. 

We have been satisfied with the level of technical support we get. They are helpful and responsive. 

We also use Primera and PowerStore.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. We also use Primera and PowerStore and the setup is pretty much the same for all of those. 

How long it takes will be determined by the capacity and the formats. It can take anywhere from six or seven hours up to 24.

We might need two to three staff members to handle deployment and maintenance It depends on the SLA and the organizational structure. 

There is a one-time cost once you purchase the solution. There is no perpetual licensing. 

It is an expensive product. 

I'm an end-user and handle storage only. 

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the product as it is at end-of-life. However, I would rate it ten out of ten. 

We provide DoD services for military healthcare. The storage is used for healthcare delivery.

It allows us to cohost as needed. We are able to put more systems on one data storage system and it is still able to deliver the availability and speed that we need it to deliver.

All-flash also positions us for growth. We can look to simplify things while still maintaining the reliability and speed that we need to deliver quality healthcare.

In addition, it has increased our performance and it has improved our throughput. The latter improvement means that we're able to ensure that the users can get to their data as quickly as they need it, and that it responds to any queries that they have. It's able to meet their daily needs.

• The reliability - the solution's availability is really good
• The amount of storage that you can have on a system
• The speed

We've started to see an issue with the older models that we have. We've had issues where facilities would have unscheduled power outages or scheduled power outages and the 3PARs weren't able to come up successfully. We actually had an incident recently where it wiped data that we didn't anticipate would be wiped.

We will be having sidebar conversations with them later today, here at HPE Discover 2019, to talk about some of the possibilities that we're looking at.

Going forward, we're looking for bigger capacity and drives, which I know they're looking at. We want them to ensure the speed and reliability because keeping those systems up and running, 24/7, is important to us.

The stability and scalability of the solution are great. They're among the reasons that we selected this product.

Technical support has always been great. We have to be available 24/7, 365, and for what we've needed, they've always provided really great support.

We've had a long-standing working relationship with HPE. They're a trusted solution, so we've continued working with them.

We deployed it ourselves, although we had HPE come in and give us some guidance and then they were available by phone. We worked together but it was pretty easy to do. The HPE consultants have been great. Whenever we've needed assistance, they've been available and able to provide us with the assistance that we need.

The fact that it's able to provide the speed and the reliability that we need means fewer outages for the hospital. That means less back-filling the data so it's worth the money that they're spending.

We have looked at other vendors but a lot of them couldn't handle the capacity or the speed or the reliability that we needed.

It's a great product. Their support is great. We even have the ability to have loaner products provided to us as an option. We can have the products come inside and test and use them before we make our final decision. That helps with the analysis and recommendation process, so it's been a great partnership with HPE.

We haven't really had any significant issues. So other than that it's able to provide what we need and that the customer service is great, we haven't learned any big lessons from using it.

We don't use too much deduplication, but from what we've seen so far, it seems to execute what we need it to execute.

Once we get this issue that we've had recently resolved then I would say it's a ten out of ten. We haven't had any real issues with it.