HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use the 3PAR as a centralized storage system where all of our data for production, mission critical data, are consolidated on that storage.

Previously, we were using EVA from HPE. When we moved to 3PAR, we noticed a reduction in footprint, reduced by more than 30%. We use the Adaptive Optimization giving us a reduction in cost and with better performance. So, we are achieving the goal of performance with less cost.

It increases our availability and service provision. We provide service to many customers at the same time. Sharing of the resources is a good target we have achieved using 3PAR.

With the thin provisioning we have been able to satisfy a lot of the requests which before we could not. Our customers are requesting more space just to make sure they have it. So, with the thin provisioning, we gave them what they need, but we maintain some spare for the others.

We have used the Remote Copy from datacenter to datacenter, as well. It is efficient, and working as expected.

I would like to see more virtualization: storage virtualization, data virtualization would be very nice.

Also, the features that we are seeing in Simplivity, if integrated with the 3PAR, would be much better.

It is stable, above average. There were some obstacles, but support managed, in the end, to fix it. It wasn't the product itself, it was a configuration issue.

It is easy and efficient. It should meet our future needs when we need to scale.

I've used technical support, and the architecture support was efficient for us as well.

The importance of having thin provisioning was a key factor. And when we found out that 3PAR had been acquired by HPE, since we have good relations with HPE, it was a very efficient and easy decision to take. We have good support, and the functions that we are looking for come in one product.

It was straightforward, comparatively easier than EVA. We had an HPE support person helping us throughout.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, or what we appreciate most about a vendor, are

• support
• easy to reach
• trust.

If you want a cost-effective solution, go for 3PAR. We did a PoC and found it effective.

Ease of setup and connectivity to our server environment.

We use it for our VND environment. It’s made it easy to make sure we have the highest throughput capable. It has helped with our connectivity to our DL servers. It’s made functionality a lot easier, doing that.

As far as what I do with it, I don't have any additional needs from the system. It is doing exactly what we need it to do. To make it even better, it could be faster.

It is very stable. The only issue that we've had with our 3PAR system was caused by a firmware update and it caused an outage. It was actually a human issue.

It’s very scalable.

Technical support was actually really good. Once we got the right person on the call, then it was actually resolved pretty quick.

We changed to the 3PAR solution to do a direct connect to 3PAR. Before that, we had a VND environment and we were connected to a larger SAN array. We actually had HPE come on-site. They drew up the solution and the architecture that we wanted to do and they actually were able to implement it based upon what our needs were. When selecting a vendor, we look for support, which is one of the biggest things. Other elements are up-time and hardware reliability.

I was involved with initial setup. HPE came on site for the configuration and they were really good.

We have IBM solutions on the docket. We are really big. Our storage team has everything, so we actually brought in 3PAR to get it in-house.

Work with HPE and the sales team. The HPE sales team has been great to work with. They offered a great solution to us.

We find the adaptive optimization and dynamic optimization to be the most valuable features.

This has not improved my organization at all. It has had a direct effect on how we see our storage solution and how critical it really is and how availability is a priority. This product ran great for 6 months until we had our 1st drive failure. After that, it started falling apart and we have had nothing but issues ever since.

We did oversubscribe our drives in regards to IOPS capacity with no alerts of such. This caused us to lose another drive a couple months later, which brought a HUGE performance hit to our business until the drive was rebuilt. Shortly after it was replaced and rebuilt, another drive failed, which completely crippled our business until it was resolved. We were down most of a day because of this.

Since then, I have had too many tickets open to count. I still currently have a ticket open with them that they do not have a resolution. They know the issue. It is 3rd-party firmware on the HBA card in the controllers, which is going to be released in some unknown future release.

We have just received another unit as a PoC to set up Peer Motion so that we can try and update our current production array for a completely different reason, which we have been waiting several months for. We have no confidence in HPE technical support or engineering to update our current production array without any type of outage.

We have replaced FC drives, NL drives, SSD drives, HBAs in controller nodes, and SFP connectors. The onsite CE’s that came out to service the unit have been great, but I find it ridiculous that I can’t run for 1 year without an issue.

Only room for improvement would be to just abandon this product line and start with another.

We have been using this product for 1 year.

Suprisingly, we had no issues with initial deployment.

We have not had problems with scalability.

They will dedicate resources to help resolve issues. That part was impressive, although to actually get a resolution at times we had to really push.

Technical support is hard to understand at times and we always had to escalate to level 2 or 3 or engineering. I have even had escalations to Lab still with no real resolution.

Previously, we used Dell EqualLogic and switched because of some minor instability issues that we had, which, looking back now, were pretty petty. We actually pulled them from storage and powered them up to resolve stability issues with the 3PAR array.

The setup was fairly straightforward, once given the proper documentation and we had knowledgeable people onsite. Our initial HPE people that we had out to help show us best practices and usage were ridiculous. The HPE person we had out that did the physical installation, unboxing, racking, and initialization of the array was good.

We have experienced absolutely no ROI. We have lost money due to these arrays.

STAY AWAY. They will give you a book for an invoicing quote.

We evaluated several other products and we were over sold on these arrays. At the time, we looked at EMC, Dell Compellent, Nimble, and IBM. At the time, HPE sales sold us what appeared to be a superior product, but that was really not the case and was a mistake.

It's very user intuitive. It's not really that complicated as long as you have the basic knowledge on how SANs work. It's easily deployable and costs verses other brands is good. This size is also a plus.

It's more about the redundancy. Their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers, the 3PARs are just a perfect fit for the company. They're easily deployable and it's easy to provision storage to the blade server when we need to. It just works, it's a perfect fit.

There's a lot of stuff you can do with the 3PAR. Right now, we're using it for what it's mainly designed for - the provision storage. I'm still looking into all the other features like Deduplication and Flash Cache.

If we see that deduplication can fit into our infrastructure, and if it will benefit the company, then we'd definitely look into that option. It would be nice to have it as a core feature included in the product initially at no extra cost.

Everything is straightforward.

It's outstanding.

As long as you check the start-up manual, you should be able to deploy it pretty simply.

We went with the HPE product because we really didn't have the need for such a big SAN. The company isn't big enough to warrant an EMC SAN. We're a midsize business, so the 3PAR was a perfect fit for us.

We used it in a casino BI environment, along with the BladeSystem 3000. It was a very good performer, and really no problems with it. It was rock-solid. Using it in a BI environment, we got a lot of IOPS, a lot of throughput with it, and very good performance.

It's a good performer. There's a lot of options coming out with the 3PAR and I'm very interested in looking at the old Flash systems too. In fact, I'm actually thinking of converting the 3PAR StoreServe that we have over to an old Flash system.

It needs to be cheaper.

We're just getting into the 3PAR world. In fact, we're getting ready to stand it up. We just got it. It's not yet running, but I've used 3PAR in the past as well.

It's very stable.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

It's a very expensive solution.

I think it's some of the software features. They've done a good job, and there was always a good class enterprise storage area network. 3PAR's always been at the top. That was a very good purchase by HP when they purchased 3PAR a few years back. That gave them a good enterprise platform, storage platform, that they are now building onto it.

In a converged environment, 3PAR is a very good product to look at. There's a lot of good competition out there with NetApp and EMC VNX, but 3PAR is right up there with them. It has features and performance.

I would say one of the most valuable is the ability to dedup on a CPG level. That's one of the newest features that has come out most recently and has enabled us to get a ratio of about 7.1 to 1. That's one of the things where we really were going for with it. One of the main examples for that is we were able to save a lot of money on we've converted from an older F400 to a 7400 SAN.

We were able to save money by not buying more physical drives for storage and more cabinets, things like that.

Oh, that's a great question. I would consider having better integration with VMware. It's on a license basis and VMware does communicate with the SAN, but right now the capabilities are only that it shows you what the deduplication savings is or what the thin provisioning savings is. It doesn't actually show you on a volume level what you can do, how many extra VMs you can get on there for example. If we're only using 20% of the available storage, it still sees like it's full. I would like to see a better integration of that. We actually had a bunch of different solutions. I wouldn't say that we had any specific one. Well, storage is about performance for a lot of people.

We had an accident where when we turned on deduplication and we had it active for some of the virtual volumes that we had in our environment, it did actually cause a problem that HP had not heard of previously and had not yet documented that was fixed in a release 2 weeks later, and a software patch 2 weeks later. We did have an outage related to that specifically where it's not dithering us from doing it using dedup long term, but that was actually the cause of that. Other than that, reliability has been fine but that's a pretty big marker as far as having a problem.

We had to aggressively work to upgrade through the ranks of HP support in order to get to a tier that would really help us with this problem that could really understand this problem. It took us several hours to get through that. Of course we're relying on the thousands of concurrent connections we have at any given time. That was an issue. I have no complaints there, whatsoever. You can add controllers, add drives as much as you want. It's pretty much unlimited how far we can go with it. I mean HP did the setup work for us. Therefore, it was very straightforward. The only thing they really wouldn't do is the wiring which is understandable, so we had that taken care of and could not be happier with that part.

This was actually a revolution of getting us into the cloud because one of our clients demanded that we start offering a cloud-based solution. This is when we went out and started really looking for solutions that would empower a cloud level enterprise.

For us, it was about reliability. Our SaaS solution, our clients depend on and our clients' customers depend on on a daily basis, so that was number one. NetApp was a contender, but honestly we mostly looked just at HP 3PAR.

Specifically with flash, I would say don't believe the hype of other vendors that say they can save you money by deduping and that was their go to strategy. With 3PAR, they can do the exact same thing and it's a lot more scalable on an enterprise level and you'll pay about the same amount of money. Don't apply the latest technology, even though they say it's vetted and tested. Just in case, dedup was a relatively new feature.

We deployed it believing in the reliability of the 3PAR and it ended up being a problem for us. Wait until a couple of cycles have ended. Let customers that do that vet it for you and that's just typical sound practice. It's really invaluable. We heavily rely on online resources to do that research for us and the reviews are critical. We'd like to see things that other people in our same caliber are using. When we explore a new solution for example, we say, "Okay. Can you give us our position, equivalency in that customer? Can we talk to them and see how their real life experiences has been with it?" That kind of thing, online reviews very, very important.

So we actually go with a three tier solution. We have near line, we have fast class, fiber channel, and we have SSD, the flash. We began making an entrance into introducing flash. That was really as part of a 7400. So we acquired a 7400, took our F400, put it into DR, and with that 7400, we've now been able to actually grow and increase based upon the needs.

So we've been able to look at the data, look at the growth and the need for the SSD, as needed, and we moved things around. We're starting to introduce AO, but realistically, we didn't have to initially jump in and put everything into all flash. I know the sales force wanted us to, but realistically, at the end of the day, we wanted to take a more cautious approach, and it's paid off for us.

One of the biggest benefits that we just experienced was we actually went through an Oracle E-Business Suite R11 to R12 migration. Three-quarters of a terabyte database. Oracle came in, said this should take you somewhere around 24 to 36 hours. Realistically, at the end of the day, it took 10 hours, and a lot of that had to do with the 3PAR back end storage system and our ability to transform the actual virtual volumes and the IO, the rate configurations, within minutes. We had one instance where we took the entire 750 gig database, that virtual volume from fast cache to SSD in six minutes.

Actually, during our migration we had a very choreographed timed execution of needing to transform virtual volumes from one level, from one tier to the next. AO wasn't necessarily getting us there. It would need to see and predict, and these were ad hoc, one off, it's going to happen this one time workload, and never happen again. And so one of the things that's been thrown out is, hey, could you all give us some ability to actually choreograph that, to actually be able to lay it out and then trigger it fly by wire in a way, but have it pre-laid out.

We've actually had a number of drives fail over a three year period, and actually before that, we had on the MC and other systems we'd see drives fail. The drive failures, however, and the way that the predictability comes about and the disc is actually evacuated on a 3PAR, and it's done, you know, preemptively, that's been a game changer for us. Rather than watching an entire raid volume go offline or become poor performing or unstable, we don't have that. Mechanical devices are gonna fail. Ideally, they don't impact your business. That's been one of the big things for us.

Overall our ability to add storage increase the IOs, on demand and as needed, I can't ask a whole lot more based upon the choices that we made. There are of course more scalable aspects of 3PAR out there than what we have landed on, but based upon what we utilize and the choices that we made, we're still well within. Of course, the beauty of storage and a business is that anytime you build it, they find ways to fill it up. And so we've continued to stay on top of that.

With the insight that we get as far as disc usage, we are actually able to more properly calculate our capacity though with thin provisioning. So we're not just stamping out storage and saying, hey, it's wholly dedicated, we have no idea kind of what our growth is. You know, it's wasted over here and needed over here. We don't run into that. It's used through the thin provisioning capabilities across the platform. So that's another aspect of scalability that I think, you know, you don't necessarily find in other systems.

You know, realistically, we have probably seen more upgrades, former firmware updates, insertive updates, good solid response. When, Heartbleed and a couple of other issues came out with open SSL, we saw within a month timeframe that we were getting updates, being notified, okay, here's the level that you need to be running at. That's not necessarily the case with other vendors. It's been really good overall.

So originally, we were actually running on EMC CX700 and VNX 5300s. The back end was front ended actually with AIXP5P6 series systems. We were needing to realistically bring our ERP system forward. Poor performance dictated that, you know, we can no longer really continue to do business the way we were doing business on that platform, so we looked at others, including EMC, Hitachi, IBM, and actually HP 3PAR was late to the game and came knocking.

The biggest part with 3PAR is overcoming your pre-existing mindset. So coming into it originally, the whole idea of chunklets and not having dedicated storage groups or, you know, raid types, it took time to understand operationally what what you could really do with it. And so in that sense, I would say that there was some complexity. From a services standpoint, they came in, they knocked it out, they got it installed, and we integrated into the environment. We started migrating.

They've made advancements in migrations, that, you know, I've seen now. It would have made life easier for us back then, but they've listened and they've, you know, made improvements.

Realistically, we ended up choosing HP. It was the more expensive solution at the time, but given the need for the performance, we also looked at a three to five year roadmap and the ability to continue to grow and the ability to add additional storage tiers within the same frame, that played a big part in it for us.

In comparing HP 3PAR against really EMC and some of the others, the ability to kind of maximize the actual storage. So thin provisioning, the ability to use all disc realistically across the storage system from an IOPS perspective, rather than your traditional monolithic, to where you're isolating storage groups and raid groups to particular LUNs and that's all the disc they have, so your spindles are limited, you move away from that.

At the same time, our ability and our need realistically to transform the raid or the stripe size, our IO kind of dictated that at times, or our lack of knowledge of IO, and that was really, came along as a third item, is the tools that were native in the 3PAR InServ store gave us the ability to look at the IO versus Navi-analyzer and others, while the capabilities there, we were either inhibited from a performance standpoint, or we weren't getting all the data and visibility that we needed.

Don't be afraid of the price tag, number one. If you're willing to really set out a roadmap and know the investment and what you're able to give back to the business, look at what you're able to give back to the business. In our case, we had individuals during close, close would take up to 18 days. It's now down to 10 days. We had individuals that would literally kick off reporting FSGs at night and go home and then check back on them. They might fail, and they'd have to try and kick them back off. They couldn't run them ad hoc during the day. They had to only run them during certain times because the system wouldn't sustain it.

Now they can do that any time they want. So don't just look at the price tag of the infrastructure. Look at what you can actually give back to the business, see how you can actually facilitate the business's strategic direction.

I think peer reviewers are priceless. Realistically, you can get all the marketing hype, but at the end of the day, seeing how somebody has either pushed the boundaries on a product, looked at the product, and used it in ways that a development team could never- or a product team could never actually envision, and see it either live or die, you know, how it performed, those are the things that you get out of community and from peer reviews, that you're not necessarily going to get from your traditional marketing.

Finding a group of individuals that you know is important, that you know the context of their background, because with any data, especially on the Internet, you have to understand the context of where people are coming from, what their knowledge level is, how truthful they're really willing to be. And so having that trusted community is very important.

One of the things that I really liked about the 3PAR solution, going back to the architecture, is its unified architecture for their entire suite of products. Companies like NetApp and EMC, have a very broad spectrum of products, but as you go through their portfolio, the way that they're managed, the way that their team would have to interact with our product, it differs. So I was looking for a platform that would allow us to scale, because as we know, data is not becoming less and less. It's increasing. So if some day we need to increase the SAN that we have right now. I feel very comfortable that if I was to choose another product within the 3PAR suite, that my team could get it off and running off the ground very quickly

Flash as a solution for us was very obvious. Reason being, as I mentioned before, we're very data intensive. For the longest time, disc has been our bottleneck in our processing service, in our processing capabilities. With flash, we have no concerns. So it's been a very, very great and positive experience for us

We've seen a huge improvement in processing times and coming from a traditional SAN over to the HP 3PAR all flash solution, we saw about a 90 percent reduction in the processing time to some of the batch processors that we were running, which for us is very, very huge.

I would like to see a little bit more of automated reporting. As an IT director, I would like to get a better view, high level view of how the environment is performing instead of having to go and ask my guys. That would be my only future request.

Oh, it's been incredible stability. Here's an anecdote. The solution we were on before was a dual controller solution which is kind of a misnomer because the way that the system balances itself, if you have any controller that's running a bit higher than the other, say, 50, 60 percent, and one controller goes down, well, that one controller now has to take the additional load from the other controller. So what we realized at one point was, we had a controller that had to do down for maintenance, and during that maintenance window, we had some performance issues, because the one controller had to pick up the load for the other controller, and it caused our environment to run slower than we would have liked

With the 3PAR solution, it's a four controller system, a four node system. It load balances very well. It actually does it automatically for us. Something that my team had to struggle with actually, with the EMC solution. So for us, it's been great. We've been doing maintenance upgrades on the solution with little to no impact at all on the environment. So it's been very stable for us.

I would say it's very scalable. I mean, we're not at the point now where we've had to increase the size of our SAN. But from what I've seen on paper and my discussions with the HP engineers, we're very comfortable that we're in a good spot for the next three to five years, with the solution that we selected. However, we know that if we need to move to a higher tier of a solution, that we'll feel comfortable in bringing another product in because of the flexibility the seamless transition from one platform in the 3PAR lineup to another.

The feedback I've received from the team is that they've been very responsive, very attentive to the questions that they've had. Very responsive to any problems that we had initially rolling out. I mean, problems just a little bit of growing pains and try to understand. It's a little bit than where we came from, but over the past few months, we've been running with the solution, it's been great.

We were previously using EMC. We looked at EMC, obviously, with the XtremIO product. We looked a little bit at NetApp. We haven't had a previous relationship with them, so we didn't look too deeply into it. And then we also obviously looked at HP 3PAR.

In the business that we're in, we deal with a lot of data. I like to think of ourselves as big data before big data was big data. We've been around since 1925. Obviously, there weren't computers back then, but a lot of the work that we did do as far as collecting performances was done paper based. In the last 25 years or so, we've since moved over to computer technology. In the last four or five years, what we've really seen with the advent of a lot of online musical sources, especially things like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, we're seeing a larger influx of the amount of information that we're having to digest or ingest as an organization we do processing on.

So one of the problems that we have is the throughput or the IOPS that was available to us through traditional storage array, we had a traditional tier SAN storage array and we knew that with all the new tech-all the new data that's coming in, we had to ensure that we were positioned well to be able to handle the increasing amount of data that was being sent to us on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.

The HP solution to us made a lot of sense. When I was at HP Discover last year and I saw the keynote about the $2.00 per gigabyte, that intrigued me very much so. Flash has been around for awhile, but as everyone knows, it's been a very expensive technology. For a company like ours, we really strive to drive value to our members. We've considered a not for profit, meaning that for every dollar that we collect, what's not used for operational purposes goes right back to our members. So obviously the lower we keep the cost, the more money we give back to our members and the greater benefit we provide to them. So that was one of the most intriguing things about the solution.

The other thing that really drew me to the HP 3PAR flash solution was the architecture of it. Being an architecture person infrastructure person, it made a lot of sense to me. XtremIO is a great product. but again, it was a great architecture, but a different approach to solving the same problem that we sort of had to address with the HP 3PAR system.

Performance is very important to us. Like I mentioned, we get a lot of data, we do a lot of data processing for a company of our size, and of course, costs and value for our money is very, very important to us

There's always room for improvement. You know, maybe two years from now we'll be seeing flash costing, 10 cents a gigabyte or something like that. But, no, we've been extremely happy with the solution. My team that manages it and as well as my customers, being the business and the application developers are all very excited about what flash can do for them, for their workloads.

What I recommend to other people looking at all flash solutions, I would take a look at not only the company that's selling it, but the background of the technology itself. There have been a lot of flash startups, a lot of flash startups being purchased by big name companies like Cisco, EMC, etc. So don't let the big name fool you. Do your homework. Make sure you ask the right questions, and look at the history of the product. Talk to some of the customers and get their feedback and see how they're doing with the solution.

I think there was one, I wouldn't say gotcha, but one thing that we kind of had to know going in to take advantage of some of the technology that the people had. Like the in-line de-duplication was the block size. So by default, when you deploy a Windows server it formats at the sort of 4K block size. Take advantage of that, you have to use 16K or higher, so if we had thought of that ahead of time, it would have, we would see benefits more sooner. But now that we're well into our deployment, we have obviously made that adjustment. So I would just say to make sure that people look into that before they deploy.

I would say peer reviewers are very important. You know, sales people being sales people that are trying to sell you their product, that's their job. But when you want to talk to the customers and get feedback from the people that are actually using it, the people that spend their hard earned dollars, that are actually supporting the product, I think that is very valuable in itself, and it's very important to me.

I normally go about finding info by networking, talking to some of my peers; when I do deal with sales people, I ask them for references. They obviously give you curated references, but, you know, ask the right questions and ensure that the people they're talking to are generally being honest, and they generally are. They don't want to mislead you, so it's good to have that relationship beforehand, and even afterwards, reaching out to speak to people.