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HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VNX [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (2nd), All-Flash Storage (10th)
VNX [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Community Director at PeerSpot
Jul 31, 2018
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Hybrid Tech
Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support
I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.
AZ
Works at AIT
The Nimble CS-Series has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime
When we started the process of looking for a SAN vendor I had four primary criteria: reliability, performance, cost, and simplicity. We were really looking for a unicorn and were fully expected to have to make compromises in one of those areas. The Nimble CS-Series was recommended by our solutions provider, and we were blown away. Not only was it the most affordable option, but it was the easiest to deploy, had the best performance, and has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%."
"The support from Pure Storage Flash Array is amazing."
"It gives us capacity planning."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"We transferred our old architecture from hyper storage to all-flash storage, which made our business faster and more connected to our customers."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"Their support is the most valuable. The support that we are getting from HP Turkey is very good. This product is better than some of the other products in terms of reliability. It is very reliable."
"I recommend this system to everybody because it doesn't fail."
"​We have much better performance than we managed earlier and are now saving lots of space.​"
"There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."
"It is affordable and trustworthy with high availability."
"The most valuable features are their tight integration with VMware, their multi-node architecture, and their copy services, such as Peer Persistence."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"The technical support on offer is very nice; they are knowledgeable and responsive, and we are very satisfied with their level of service so far."
"Integration with VMware"
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options."
"If you have a banking and finance domain, then go for EMC products as they offer better performance and scalability."
"I have worked on CLARiiON and all series of VNX."
"Depending on how simple the customer needs it to be, might sway my recommendation one way or the other, but in terms of functionality, VNX is very very good."
"Customer Service: It's great. Technical Support: It's great."
"Technical support is good."
 

Cons

"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"It is a bit expensive."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"In Pure Storage FlashArray, the area with room for improvement is local MFA login."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent."
"We are seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard."
"I'd like their technical support to be better."
"This solution only provides active-passive replication, as opposed to active-active."
"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."
"Their installation and design engineers leave something to be desired."
"The only drawback on it is that tech support seems really busy. We get a critical notification when an important patch comes out, but sometimes it's a month before we can get this critical piece on because they just don't have time on their schedules to do it sooner."
"In the next release, I would like to see faster upgrades, where it's really transparent to our host and our end-users."
"The management interface is not intuitive."
"Due to very complex structure and sophisticated architecture, it needs experts for trivial troubleshooting also."
"Storage processor architect for real active/active HA ASIC based functions are needed"
"We actually had data loss from too many simultaneous drive failures on the 7500."
"They don’t quite provide enough security in the data centre."
"There were scalability issues, the scalability options are limited due to supported SSD."
"You need a lot of licenses in order to use this product, which makes the product expensive; the maintenance contract price also increases significantly every year."
"With this product, the licensing software and capacity are very expensive."
"Oracle is never the cheaper solution. Compared to others, it is always among the most expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company."
"This product is quite expensive and in addition, we subscribe to 24/7 support with a four-hour response time."
"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."
"Take advantage of what HPE offers as far as professional services, and this will help you make the right decision."
"The cost is reasonable given that the licensing is all included once you purchase it."
"We purchased the total package for approximately $60,000."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an expensive solution."
"It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available."
"We purchased the solution as CapEx and we only pay support now. I find the pricing fantastic."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive"
"Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable. Yearly EMC is more expensive."
"Make sure you understand how the licensing works and that you are getting the right set of licenses if you need array-to-array replication."
"​Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages​ (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead.​"
"Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume."
"While EMC tends to be on the expensive side, the stability and support of their products are top-notch and I feel are worth the cost."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
May 1, 2015
Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR
Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…
 

Answers from the Community

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Community Director at PeerSpot
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018
Pros EMC VNX Multi-tiering positively affects the efficiency of the storage space. The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data. The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages. From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is ha...
2 out of 19 answers
reviewer325866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and General Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
May 29, 2018
As far as I know, VNX line is no longer available, therefore I think that the real comparison has to be with the Dell EMC Unity family systems
it_user551106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Solution Architect - HPE MASE - Storage with 5,001-10,000 employees
May 29, 2018
One user says about HPE 3PAR, "The optimization features move chunklets or hot spots to faster drives." The moving of Chunklets is to maintain performance. What kind of CPG or level of protection you choose for 3PAR volumes will determine your availability and protection level? Although Chunklets can be moved to higher levels of protection, that is not the stated purpose above. Another user says about EMC VNX, "The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data." The replication feature mentioned is for protection and not performance. VNX performance can be enhanced by FAST Cache. Availability is determined by the Virtual Provisioning of the VNX and by choosing a Storage Pool in which the proper RAID level is chosen.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise74
Large Enterprise170
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
As a customer, I always prefer to have a lower price. Any customer will always ask for the cheaper price.
What needs improvement with HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
I have no specific ideas for improvement at present. We just need to verify whether our current virtual server setup ...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
VNX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Samsonite, Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Kindred Healthcare
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