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.

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.

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.