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HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VMAX [EOL] comparison

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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)
VMAX [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
Ali Yazıcı - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Service Manager at Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank
Good interface that is customizable, and the technical support is good
Our primary use of this product is for our core banking servers over FC It is a high end storage, minimal downtime, reliable, good performance, get speedy support when we need. The user interface is good, and it is also customizable. snap and clone operations easy.  Stability and availability…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"The administration is very easy and quite minimal, the performance is very good, the installation is pretty straightforward, and technical support is good."
"It's a great return on investment, based on the mission."
"It gives us capacity planning."
"The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup, and it meets the customer's expectations."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"We use 3PAR for storage of all the city's data, everything from videos of sewer lines, to orthophotos for our GIS system, to storage of our databases, data in general; it's performing awesomely."
"Do it, you will never look back."
"We can quickly see performance per CPG and per LUN. You can drill right down to see actual performance to the virtual volumes themselves. That's really good."
"You can have SSD drives, fast disk drives, and slower drives, redundancy between drives, and hot-swappable drives on the SSDs, the faster hard drives, and the slower drives."
"It's advantageous in terms of the cost, in terms of the performance, and taking up less space."
"The solution is easy to install."
"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."
"It is a great solution; there are others out there, but we have always been using 3PAR and we are pretty happy with it."
"I like the many new features, especially the all-flash solution."
"EMC has made remarkable improvements in the overall management simplicity."
"Resilience, speed, flexibility, system reliability, and a strong refresh strategy are the most valuable features."
"This product has enabled dynamic allocation of disk resources, and at the same time, improved the data access speed and application performance by a large extent."
"VMAX3 is our main system for storage. All our systems and all our virtualizations are connected to it. In terms of expanding it, we are replacing it with a new system, the PowerMax 2000. So our current VMAX3 platform will be decommissioned soon. We are switching to PowerMax 2000 because we are looking for improved performance. We see it as the best fit for our requirements in terms of the performance and the overall cost."
"VMAX is a rock solid foundation to deploy applications which cannot incur a disruption of service."
"VMAX is more scalable and has better performance (gives more IOPS, more front end ports...)."
"This solution is resilient."
 

Cons

"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"When creating a support case, visibility should be extended to others involved in assisting."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"The setup is one of the drawbacks of 3PAR system, it's a fairly complicated piece of hardware."
"I cannot recommend 3PAR."
"Setting up 3PAR is somewhat complicated, and it took about a week."
"There are some weird things that we can't figure out."
"We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down."
"As a management tool, it would help us to have more customer reports."
"The product used to be very scalable but its end of life will be in about a year so there's no point to upgrade or enhance it."
"It is suitable for medium-sized businesses and data centers with less number of users and less important data. It is not really an enterprise-level solution. It needs more capacity. It is also not really stable. It should be more stable. It should also support any server model. It is really weak in this area."
"I'm always interested in ways we can scale out and avoid monolithic migrations from one array to another every four to five years."
"Resilience replication, reporting, and performance need to be improved."
"I would like this solution to integrate the solution that Dell EMC vPlex offers."
"It is still expensive."
"Better speed to release new features that have become industry standards. EMC created so many standards in the past. Now, it seems they are playing a me-too game and lagging behind in some areas, specifically data reduction."
"Manageability is a bit of a challenge, as the user interface to access the array is not very user-friendly."
"We are trying to scale a vintage VMAX. As far as increasing capacity, it is a real nightmare."
"I'd like to see improvements where we can scale out an existing array and remove older controllers\drives\etc., within the same subsystem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny."
"3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors."
"It makes for less administrative overhead."
"I have to renew support in October for the existing solution. That will cost me roughly $50,000 this year, which in the grand scheme of things, $50,000 is not that much compared to paying $850,000. However, it will be the last year that I'll be able to get direct support from HPE. Therefore, product has to be replaced in 2020."
"You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown."
"This solution is expensive. We pay every year for support. It's a lump sum because we pay for data center support services, and everything is included in one."
"They have added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI."
"This is not an expensive product but every time you add capacity to it, you need to pay for re-balancing."
"Our licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis."
"There are additional costs to the standard licensing fee, and it just depends on the package."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
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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…
 

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%
Performing Arts
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
 

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 Business2
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise17
 

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 ...
Ask a question
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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
Symmetrix VMAX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, Kindred Healthcare, Cosentry, Sumitomo Life Insurance Company, Shriners, BZWBK
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.