HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use this product for our server storage. Our systems are primarily used for ERP.

The most valuable feature is the proactive technical support. If there is a problem then the HPE facility will detect it and immediately contact me.

It achieves very high performance.

The price is a little bit high.

We have been using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past five months.

In terms of stability, our experience has only been good. We have not had any problems in five months.

I think that its scalability is good. You can have up to eight storage units and you can vary the storage rate. For example, we need quick database storage so we rate that high, compared to some other applications of lower importance.

Prior to this, we used the HPE3PAR StorServ 7200 series. With that version, sometimes the hard drive was broken. It's not about storage, but rather, it is about how the hard drive operates.

The deployment took about two weeks to complete.

One of the HPE partners deployed this solution for us.

We paid for five years of support when we purchased the product.

We evaluated a solution based on NetApp and ultimately, we decided to implement HPE.

There is a storage replication feature that I think is nice, although we don't use it right now.

For us, this product is a very good, full-flash storage. The suitability of this product depends on the organization. It comes down to a combination of the performance and the price.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for 3PAR is our EMR application. We're in healthcare. We also use it for virtualization. The performance is excellent.

Backups were huge. We take a lot of SAN-level Snapshots and it has been phenomenal in that aspect.

When we bought it, the big sell for us was what they called "wide striping," how they striped the data and could get performance on a cheaper disk. Nowadays, the newer models that are out, which we are going to in the next couple of years, the most valuable feature is mainly being able to achieve such high IOPS in such a small chassis.

In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyperconverged. They are working that way with Greenlake and integrating their own "build your own" expansion environment within 3PAR.

I would like to see some of the InfoSight integration. In the speech today, here at HPE Discover 2018, it was pretty clear that that is where it's heading.

I think it's on track, on the whole, as far as where we're going. I'm probably two years away, maybe less, from a 3PAR purchase. LIkely, by the time I'm ready to buy, it's going to be in there.

We have had one major hardware failure in the last seven years and nothing went down because of it. It was a controller failure. It's a four-node cluster so end-users didn't even notice an impact in performance. Nobody was in a panic besides me. In the end it worked out, they just replaced it.

We're at right around 700 or 750 terabytes raw, and we're about maxed out for the version we're in, without a wholesale swap-out of our drives and drive architecture. From a scalability standpoint, we can add to it but we have to add more controllers. But we're in an older version. The newer versions have gotten better, faster, stronger. Probably the next step is going to be Greenlake and that avenue.

We went from an old XP24k, a long time ago, to an EMC VNX. The EMC storage was cheap on the front-end but expensive on the back-end for maintaining it. It was cheaper for us to jump into another 3PAR than it was to maintain support on the VNX. We quickly moved to 3PAR and we haven't looked back since.

In terms of important criteria in selecting a vendor besides price, we're primarily an HPE shop. I can count on one hand how many other pieces of hardware we have other than HPE: a Palo Alto firewall and maybe a couple of vendor-supplied Dell boxes. I always look to HPE first. If they can't do it, I call and complain to my regional sales VP and he tries his best. Sometimes he can pull one out and get something going for me, but if not then I start looking at others.

I was involved in the initial setup but we did have Professional Services come in and set it up because we didn't have any training at the time. The setup was a while ago, but it took longer to unbox it because our reseller messed up and sold us all the individual boxes for every single drive. So the implementation guy wasn't very happy: four pallets of itty bitty boxes for every single hard drive. But soup to nuts, with that problem in play, the setup took about a week. If he didn't have all that, it probably could have been done in a day.

Overall the setup is very straightforward. It's just like any other enterprise storage. If you set up one you've set them all up, as it were. They're the same idea, different architecture.

From a comparison of bang for the buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best.

We've looked at Pure Storage, we've looked at Kaminario. We've looked at EMC's new VMAX. From a price standpoint, what you get - and with us moving towards VDI and having Synergy frames and SimpliVity on the market - it doesn't really make sense to switch. Do you really want to pull away now after you have invested so much? 

It's a matter of: "They're going down the right path so just keep following it." The reason we jumped ship for VNX back when we did was that, at the time, HPE stepped away from SAN and storage. Those were their bad years of MSA versus EVA and dropping away. They didn't really have an offering that fit that mid-tier storage that we were at. We had to do something. "Once bitten, twice shy", so now we'll look at EMC, we'll look at other vendors, but I always have a feeling we're going to come back to 3PAR.

My current 3PAR, three years ago I would have rated it a 10 out of 10. Today, just because it's aged, I'd give it a solid seven. It's because the drive architecture has changed over the years. Comparing it to the new ones that are out... it comes back to "better, faster, stronger." Without me spending another six figures to swap out hundreds of terabytes of storage, I can't get the added performance. It comes down to me making a critical decision of, "Okay, how do I balance my current IOPS, deliver what I need to deliver to my customer, and still meet the budget?"

• The most valuable feature to me is its reliability. After that, it is the architecture, and the rest of the HPE sort of products, like the blades and the storage.
• You've got the best of breed from a storage perspective, and a proven solution that integrates well with the HPE c7000 or the BladeSystem infrastructure. You have a solution that has been tried and tested by HPE as an overall solution.
• It enables us to use a virtualized layer. Until we deployed our 3PAR, we had pretty much everything as physical servers. With 3PAR, we are in the process of completing the virtualization of our services.

Small companies are interested in simplicity and a very granular licensing model is something that poses a number of challenges.
From the cost perspective, (usually this licensing model is geared towards revenue generating…) it makes it expensive but also from the admin point of view it ends up being cumbersome and difficult to manage. We had a number of issues when ordering an upgrade to existing array due to this licensing model.
Using a small number of bundles or just a single licensing model (like Nimble for example) will make the product more appealing and simplify the process of organizing an upgrade.

Stability-wise, I think it's very good. Support-wise, I think it’s debatable based on some issues that we had with it.

I think the scalability is one of the factors that caused us to select 3PAR.

Technical support was average, and bad handling some incidents.

We were using direct attached storage. We moved to Sun; and then we decided to implement 3PAR.

The initial setup was complex. I would say it was flawed because we had issues.

For the storage, we looked at Talent, which is now Dell. We also looked at Nutanix and Tintri. The main reason we chose HPE was that we already had an HPE infrastructure; and it felt like it was the best solution for our needs. The product met our requirements at the time.

Reliability is very important in a vendor. We also look at the breadth of offerings because we like to keep things simple. Rather than choosing a varied mix from a multitude of vendors, we like to go with a small number. I have a small team and it's easier from a management perspective, as well as understanding and supporting the product in the best way possible.

It all depends on what you need, and how you can justify the cost. It is not a cheap solution. It depends on what you have. If it's a brand new setup, then there are other paths you can take, and it's worth researching them. If you already have HPE deployments in-house on the server side, not the storage, I think 3PAR will definitely make a very great addition to your portfolio.

Right now we’re actually undergoing an expansion of the 3PAR and we’re using flash gearing with AO which is kind of maximizing that flash storage with a spindle in combination. I think that’s gotta be the best productivity feature. The other one would have to be that thin provisioning features, those are great. I think we ended up with a four to one ratio on thin provisioning and the looping.

It’s very simple. You log in and it’s got a myriad of graphs and things that I can quickly put into a presentation for my upper management when I’m trying to justify why we’ve gone with a 3PAR, why we’ve made that kind of investment. Also, it’s really easy for me to bring in my lower technical resources into this 3PAR environment because I have to, I don’t have a choice, and kind of make sure that they don’t, we can manage security so that they can, they have enough rights to do their jobs without being able to cause a catastrophe. And again, that’s peace of mind is high on my priority list.

The biggest benefit is the flash the IOPS cannot be beat. I’m in a very ever evolving environment and I have now the confidence that I have the appropriate resources at hand that if a bigger problem or a new development project comes around, I can react to it quickly. And with a 3PAR, I’m able to move machines back and forth between a QA, a production environment, the QA environment being in my legacy storage seamlessly. I don’t even need a systems engineer for that, I can have my help desk resources do it. So that’s a real benefit for a shop with five people.

I don’t know, I think as we scale I’d like to implement replication features. We haven’t been able to test those out yet ‘cause we only have one unit but no, all-in-all I’m pretty happy with the UI.

We’ve had that unit for just under a year right now. I’m pretty sure I bought the first All-Flash starter kit in the US and it’s been a huge source of success for us. We’ve used it to stabilize our business intelligence infrastructure and extreme line some of the processes in our ERP.

Stability is one of my favorite features. Like I said, our BI infrastructure on Wednesdays at the beginning of that fiscal week is getting hammered. You get tired after a while of answering the phone and saying, we’re sorry, we know it’s Wednesday but you know, once we put that particular SSAS uh, implementation into the 3PAR storage we haven’t been down since. The only time we’ve been down in the last 180 days was for maintenance and it was a planned maintenance. That’s a very good thing, that’s peace of mind for any infrastructure manager out there.

We weren’t able to do it last year just for budgetary reasons but we recently doubled our footprint with the 3PAR and we probably have plans to purchase at least another shelf. It’s just an easy platform to grow and the 7200 is the smallest model, so for a small shop like me it’s gonna take about half a rack. It’s pretty good.

It’s great and yeah we have a great support agreement with HP and we leverage them, not just for support but for their technical expertise. Like I mentioned before I have a very lean team and none of us really have that industrial strength, big company experience. We know the basics of how to tune storage area network but it’s really handy to be able to call in an HP engineer and have that conversation without having to incur big professional services engagement.

We still have it. We have a Legacy Dell Compellent Array, it does great for file storage. It just really wasn’t meeting the mark for our infrastructure and once we put this 3PAR on our SAAS implementation things really stabilized, and performance really didn’t become an issue anymore. We have a somewhat weird fiscal week in that on Wednesdays it’s the beginning of the fiscal week. All of the finance department needs to get their data, all of our stores and our retail customers out in the field come in and they’re really mining through the sales, the labors, the costs, try to figure out how did they do the week before. So on this day it’s like a perfect storm for our implementation in that everybody’s getting a big bulk of data at the same time. Using the 3PAR flash array we were able to stabilize that environment so that I really can get their data on demand.

I think it’s a common theme for people in my position. I have an older array, it’s the generational investment coming up and we looked at a number of different models, different competitors but you know a big name like HP and a product like 3PAR and at the right price it was just all-all the stars aligned. We are an HP shop but I would have to say that it’s simplicity. In a couple of days we had this array running. We were able to test it out on multiple production level systems and kind of decide where is the best bang for the buck in utilizing that flash storage.

We were looking at Nimble Storage which was pretty close. I think the big differentiator there was the features set is pretty similar but I really like the approach of HP and I like the big name brand because the rest of my infrastructure is HP as well. We’re primarily an HP shop so given that I have such a lean team I only have myself, a system administrator, a network administrator, I can’t afford to have a lot of complexity in the way that my storage arrays are configured.

In terms of a rating from 1-10, I’d say a nine and I’m not gonna give you a ten until I have at least two units mirrored over my data centers. I think that’s gonna get me a ten, but bottom line is simplicity. With a lot of the competing arrays you really need to have a team that-that’s really eager and motivated to go and configure this array and try some of the obscure features. I just don’t have time for that. I need this thing up, I need it running, and I need it now, and with 3PAR we’ve been able to achieve that objective and keep our cost per terabyte in line.

My one recommendation is we started pretty small, we only bought the all-flash starter kit which is 8 SSD drives and no additional shelves, no spindles. That is a great unit however most of the features that really leverage the power of the 3PAR require kind of that blended approach of the spindle drives and the SSD’s. So buy the flash starter kit and buy some spindles as well.

The solution provides streamlined deployment compared to other products. It has a smooth interface and configuration. Also, it is easier to do pre-requested checks as well.

They should add AI-enabled dashboards to the solution.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

It's a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have around 500 customers using it.

The solution's initial setup process is easy. If there are no hardware issues during initial configuration checks, the process takes two and a half hours to complete. It requires two executives for maintenance.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I advise others to test the feasibility of the solution's compatibility checks feature when moving from source to target. Apart from that, it is easy to use. I rate it as a nine.

It runs all our tier one and two apps. Right now, we are replicating between two 3PARs and two different data centers. We use for our tier one and two apps, so they can do failover, synchronous replication.

We have been running 3PAR for three years. It was running well until we tried to split our two 3PARs and put them into two different data centers. Then, we had a lot of problems.

I do not think it has changed the way that we function.

When we were having problems, it actually hurt us. Before that, we did not have any problems.

The most valuable feature when we purchased it was that it was a four-node system. However, the throughput knowledge should be a lot better than what we previously had (EMC).

A lot of tasks, you have to manually set up. They need to already have them set up and working. Then, you can just go in and tweak them if you need to. There are a lot of things that we did not know that we needed to schedule and make happen, and that is what we found out six months ago.

Stability is a little lower than EMC, because of the problems that we have had. We ran EMC for the last 10 years and never had any problems with it.

We have not scaled it up yet.

We worked with technical support for six months to get the splitting 3PAR issue resolved. We met every day, until it was finally resolved, but it took six months. It was good that the issue was resolved, but we were disappointed it took so long.

3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors. 

We switched because of the cost and 3PAR's four-node system, because they said we should get more throughput from the four-node system, since EMC is a two-node system.

3PAR is more complex to set up and start than EMC. There are a lot more things that you have to do and know that you need to do. Where with EMC, stuff sits there and runs.

The initial setup only took a few weeks to get it going. However, this is when we found out there were a lot of things that we did not have set up right. We just got these fixed about six months ago.

HPE assisted us with the initial setup, but they did not tell us about all these other things which needed to be done.

For the amount of downtime that we have had, I do not know if it was a good option. We might have been better to spend the extra money and stay with EMC, therefore not experiencing any downtime.

Purchasing maintenance: You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

Evaluate if the money savings is worth it. One of the problems that we have had is HPE spec'd it out for us. They underspec'd it, so this was one of our problems with performance. It did not have the amount of drives in it that we needed.

Pay attention to what you are spec'ing out and make sure that it will meet your requirements.

It is a good product, but it is very software driven, and it has some software problems. That will be our challenge going forward. Once we go out of maintenance, how do we keep the system up-to-date software-wise, if we have problems purchasing maintenance?

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is definitely part of it and reliability has to be there. When you buy something, you do not know what you are getting until you purchase it and put it into production. We did not do any type of try and buy. It was just off the word of the vendor.

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.

3PAR is our main storage solution that we use for anything and everything, mainly Oracle right now. But we also have different db8s as well flute.com on our 3PAR. We have a number of different things on it.

It's outstanding, it works like a champ. We have been using it for about 15 years. We have a T400 sitting in the data center right that I'm trying to get up off of. We've been using 3PAR for quite a while.

We're able to move things around with more agility. I can take it off one server and slap it on another in a couple of minutes, so we're really agile when it comes to that. If we run into server issues, it's a quick jump, we're on a new server, we're off and running again. And then I have time to look at the server. That's a really nice feature. 

And the speed is outstanding, it really works wonderfully.

I really like the new RMC (Recovery Manager Cental) software that was introduced with the 3.0 or 3.1 update. It allows us to use our data protector with our 3PAR and give it a nicer front-end than the SSMC did.

I'd really it to be able to interact with older 3PAR storage, and possibly even non-HPE. I would like to be able to pull stuff off of old things and bring it up to the standard that has been set, simply, quickly, and efficiently. That would be a really nice feature. Right now it is a big pain. It seems to work but we tend to get some latency behind. It seems it could be better.

I've never had it go down unless I wanted it to, ever.

Scalability is easy. We just had HPE come out and put in a whole other shelf for us, for more storage. You can scale it out almost indefinitely. It works amazingly, I'm a huge fan.

Up until this point, technical support has been amazing. I am a little leery because I have heard they are doing more outsourcing with their support. I've run into that with other vendors that we deal with and it has never really worked out that well. We always seem to get less knowledge and then we have to go through three or four people before we get to the person that used to be the number one guy that we talked to. And he was the only guy we talked to. He knew how we use our things and at what capacity they were used, so it was easier for him to help us troubleshoot. Now I have to go through all these different hoops and jumps, and I'm not a fan of that.

I would give 3PAR an eight because, first, I don't think anything is ever a 10. It's still really good - but since 9 is really close to 10, and that's almost perfect - it's about an eight. The reliability is really there. Once it's there, it's there. You don't really have to worry about it, which is really nice because we have enough things to worry about.