HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it as our main data storage for everything from SQL Server, storage, databases, to all our virtual machines - servers and desktops  - to file storage for everything: for the city's mapping. We use it for just about everything we do.

The performance is amazing. It's been probably one of the best products we've bought in years.

We upgraded to 3PAR from an HPE EVA about seven or eight years ago and power consumption went down.

• Ease of use / very user-friendly 
• Ease of adding on
• Inexpensive

In the next release, I would like them to make it a little easier to find where everything is in the new console. It now has the OneView look and sometimes I don't think the OneView look is enough. It's too different from the original console that was a separate system. I haven't totally learned it. I knew where everything was, and now I think to myself, "Why do I have to go there? It doesn't logically make sense."

It's very scalable.

Technical support is not as good as I would like. Our biggest problem is usually the language barrier. I don't want to say anything derogatory, but sometimes we have a hard time understanding what they want us to do. And sometimes the required upgrades have been a little bit involved: "You have to do this before you do this," and I want them to explain to me why. It's more work than it should be.

When we knew we were at end-of-life. I have a product lifecycle that I keep track of, how long I want to keep things. We knew that our HPE EVA was running long enough that we really needed to replace it. I was looking, I got some ideas from our vendor - from HPE - on what solutions there were to replace it. We were able to cut our power consumption by 80 percent. We're very happy with 3PAR.

In selecting a vendor what was important to us were ease of use, that it was easy to transfer the current data without a lot of trouble, and it was. It was really easy. It was moved and it was done.

It took me a day to totally get everything in my mind regarding what we need to do and to teach my staff how to use it.

The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny.

We looked at a few others, but I'm probably one of those people who just prefer to have one vendor for almost everything. I'm pretty much an HPE shop.

My advice is, look beyond the sales pitch. Talk to customers, and find out how they're really using it and how easy it is to use. Because, sometimes the sales pitches, in my opinion, it doesn't really get how people are using it day to day.

I can't imagine not having 3PAR. We're very happy with it. I just bought more storage and actually bought another 3PAR which is being installed next week. We're continually adding on to it, and I would consider that one of the bests things we could do because you can never have enough space to put everything. I work for a local government. We now even now have body-worn camera videos, and we somehow have to store them temporarily before they put out to cloud storage. We need good, reliable data because we never want to get caught not having something we need.

We use 3PAR as the primary storage in our environment for all our Tier 1 applications.

We have been using it since 2015. It has performed well. You guys have gotten a lot better with the 8000 and 20000 series.

We design a lot of our DR and business continuity strategy around 3PAR Peer Persistence and other copy services.

The most valuable features are their tight integration with VMware, their multi-node architecture, and their copy services, such as Peer Persistence. We are a big MetroCluster user.

I would like to see the following:

• NVMe support, not only on the disk side, but also in the NVMe over Fibre Channel.
• More advanced copy features.
• A few user improvements on their SSMC product.
• Mesh-Active, which I hear is coming.

One improvement that they could do right now is with the way they do their metric clustering. With Peer Persistence, they use a Lua. It would be really nice to have a volume that is truly Active-Active in both of our data centers.  

It has been quite a stable product, which is why we continue to invest in it.

It definitely scales.

We use HPE technical support. We have gotten every question answered, so they have been helpful.

We were look for a refresh. At the time, IBM was not keeping up with their VMware integration, especially with VVols. It was quite obvious that HPE was a leader in it, and this steered us into looking at them. Then, we found out that the product could do everything we needed it to do.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

For the price that we were able to acquire it, we have seen it give us the performance and stability that we require to run our enterprise. They have also added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI.

NetApp, Pure Storage, and IBM. We chose HPE because they checked all the boxes.

Nine out of 10 times, the system does exactly what we need it to do.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Knowing that the product works. We like to choose bigger companies. We do not like to invest in startups because you never know if they will be acquired. 

We have a good existing relationship with HPE, which was a lot of what steered us toward using them in the storage space.

The number one feature is speed. We're serving almost 3.2 million people, we're running an eligibility system, we are on about 80 terabytes of data that need to be churned and processed.

In addition, the standard Oracle features like the compression. 

Right now, all of our development to pre-production, everything is in one single rack, which is easier for us to do. Production is on another rack, another full rack. That's what we use it for.

Pretty much whatever we need from the database side, it is there. 

There are specific things from the application side; I don't have a list, they do have a list of what you can see from the database side. 

Most of the developers are used to Microsoft .NET and SQL server. They are cutting out Oracle, so there is a shift within the developer's mind. "How am I going to, starting from the modelling, use it?"

Key items, like there's a 90-degree column in SQL that automatically fills in. It used to have triggers, but 12c is coming. There are some good features coming that I'm looking for. I was part of the session for what is new in 12c. I'm really excited about that. 

We're doing real-time analytics, so another thing is whether noSQL may be the best fit or not. We need to evaluate, not done yet. We are thinking, we have Exadata, we have Endeca, so we want to use the product.

Three and a half years, almost four years.

Absolutely stable. After we moved to Exadata the stability has been good. First, we used to go through Microsoft patching every month. With Exadata and Linux, we do only the firmware once in a quarter. It was really only required that we do it because we were behind two firewalls, so we didn't have to apply all the patches.

Absolutely scalable. We have our own five enterprise applications. They're all public-facing systems. Again, going back to the performance. On a given day, anywhere between 5000 to 8000 internal people use them. We do have a public-facing system. People apply for benefits, and it's entirely public, so they can use it. 

Compared to before, if you look at the performance, some of the applications are 30 to 40 percent improved. Some of the batches are almost 70% better. If you look at the back-end side, your export logical backups, and your disaster recovery, all those things, there is a tremendous increase.

Support is pretty good. There are certain areas specific to the enterprise application, we may not be getting all the support. But for Oracle products in general, pretty good.

Previously, we were on Sun Solaris, then we moved to a Windows platform, and it was really bad. The processing took too long. Start the load on Tuesday, Wednesday sometime around noon it would finish. Sometimes it would crash. Right now it is within four and a half hours. Starts at 6:00, 9:00 it's done. That is one big advantage we see.

We brought Oracle in to set it up. We didn't go through the entire setup process because Oracle was part of it. Oracle itself did it, so it was pretty easy for us. One good thing was that we didn't have to worry about the patching, OS levels, and other stuff. It was pretty easy for us.

When it comes to choosing a vendor, the primary criterion is support. When you have an issue, you need to immediately have a solution; it's a 24/7 application. For example, suppose we are going through patching, and something we don't anticipate comes up, I suddenly find an issue. I never saw that in my lower environments, and now production is impacted, so we create a severity-one ticket. How soon will it be resolved? can I trust it? That's number one. 

There may be some custom solutions we may be looking for that are not part of the product. Depending on what type of solution it is, we may need additional support. 

Also training. I think Oracle is growing fast. From '91 when I was with Oracle 6, I know how much it grew outside the databases. So training is one of the biggest issues that we are having. We moved from a Windows platform to a Linux platform, and also how to manage the entire thing. Enterprise Manager completely changed. So it is necessary to do some self-learning, but also vendor-provided training at a low-cost would help. Those are the things we are looking for. 

On top of that, there are certain things that would be of benefit. There is a new release coming in. If they can provide us with the documents, really help our DBA's to be on the cutting edge, rather than they themselves having to explore.

I didn't give it 10 out of 10 because there are still be a few issues that we are working on, but from a performance point of view, ease of use, scalability and reliability everybody is happy with the product.

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.

We are a telecom company. We are using the tool mainly for processing applications.

The virtualization environment is good. The compression features are good. The tool provides data-tiering features. It is a middle-level storage solution. It is good enough. We do not face any problems with it. The performance and reliability are okay.

If we have two different types of disks, only one data-tiering is possible. The product must accept any type of disk. The solution must be vertically and horizontally expandable. It is not possible currently.

I have been using the solution for the last ten years.

The solution is stable.

Scalability is possible with only the existing drives. The product does not accept the latest drives like the NVMe drives. We have 15 users.

The support is good.

Positive

The solution is easy to deploy. The deployment takes a reasonable amount of time. We need one architect to deploy the tool. It is easy for one person to maintain the tool.

The tool’s price is higher compared to other products. The solution is 20% more expensive than other storage.

We use Dell and HPE. I prefer Hitachi for scalability reasons. Hitachi accepts drives like HDD, NVMe, and SSD. Hitachi is the best tool.

We are partners. After we give the inputs to evaluate and ask the commercial to the presales team, they take a lot of time to respond. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The tool is fast and easy to use. You can also configure it easily. The product also has good performance tuning. 

The tool needs improvement in the utilization report at the granular level. 

I have been working with the solution for one year. 

The product is stable. 

The tool is scalable. 

The customer support team is good. They give timely responses and if need be they also share screens and provide support.

The initial setup was very easy.

I would recommend this tool to other users, consumers, or customers.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

This solution provides flash storage for our servers. Our environment contains Linux operating systems, VMware, and some web servers.

The availability of the server has given us increased stability in our environment.

The mission-critical apps and processes that we use are our Oracle database, VMware, and some web services.

The All-flash positions us for growth because of its better performance, which means that our applications are faster.

This solution has improved throughput. It has helped when we deploy non-production servers.

This solution has great availability that works for us.

This solution should be easier to use.

The stability of this solution is good.

We have not yet tried to scale this solution.

I think that technical support is good. We have only had one report.

We implemented this solution when it was time to renew the servers. Prior to this, we used HP EVA, but it had reached end-of-life.

Although I don't recall the details of the initial setup, I think that it was a little complex. The people that normally work with storage had to ask for help.

We used a consultant to assist with our deployment.

The vendors that we evaluated were HPE and IBM.

The All-flash has better performance, which means that our applications are faster. Our performance has increased by twenty to thirty percent.

The biggest lesson that I learned from this solution is to try something before you reject it.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to test all of the functions that the vendor tells you about. It is important to see how it works in order to see whether it suits your business.

This is a good solution, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.