HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The solution is very stable. HPE is always stable.

The scalability has always been great because of one idea from HPE: no need for us to pay from the beginning for the full machine. We can purchase based on the budget of our company. This makes it scalable. It's great.

Technical support for both 3PAR and Dell EMC in my country, Iran, is very difficult because we are under sanctions. We can get it through other countries.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Any action we want to do with a Dell EMC product needs a license. But with 3PAR's converged solution, at least there is no need to purchase more licenses to get all the features that we need. We can get basic and mid-range features without licenses. But for simple activities with Dell EMC, we need a license. Also, HPE is simpler than Dell EMC for the end-user.

I would recommend this product for sure.

At a minimum, I would rate this product at eight out of ten. I give it an eight because of the support, that I can't get support in my country. This is the worst part. Support cannot be sold until we are out of the sanctions. It's not anything to do with HPE, it's political issues.

This solution provides flash storage for our servers. Our environment contains Linux operating systems, VMware, and some web servers.

The availability of the server has given us increased stability in our environment.

The mission-critical apps and processes that we use are our Oracle database, VMware, and some web services.

The All-flash positions us for growth because of its better performance, which means that our applications are faster.

This solution has improved throughput. It has helped when we deploy non-production servers.

This solution has great availability that works for us.

This solution should be easier to use.

The stability of this solution is good.

We have not yet tried to scale this solution.

I think that technical support is good. We have only had one report.

We implemented this solution when it was time to renew the servers. Prior to this, we used HP EVA, but it had reached end-of-life.

Although I don't recall the details of the initial setup, I think that it was a little complex. The people that normally work with storage had to ask for help.

We used a consultant to assist with our deployment.

The vendors that we evaluated were HPE and IBM.

The All-flash has better performance, which means that our applications are faster. Our performance has increased by twenty to thirty percent.

The biggest lesson that I learned from this solution is to try something before you reject it.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to test all of the functions that the vendor tells you about. It is important to see how it works in order to see whether it suits your business.

This is a good solution, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

As a partner, we use it to run databases and for virtualization. Another use case is the cloud.

All-flash provides optimization through deduplication and compression and provides high performance for both databases and virtualization. It has increased IOPS by 200 percent. In addition, it has reduced deployment time by ten percent.

One of our customers, using SAP, had 16 terabytes of data. When we implemented this solution for them, their storage was reduced to two terabytes.

• High-Availability 
• Security
• High performance

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

It's stable and uses Call-Home. Support is 24/7.

The 3PAR solution has a problem with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. It's predictive. If my customer has a problem, they inform the customer of the problem and send any necessary parts. They also email the customer to let them know when they need updates.

The initial setup is easy.

We see ROI after six to eight months, by using all the capacities of all-flash, including deduplication and compression.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good.

In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

We use it for mission-critical apps and database. It runs our core banking applications.

It helps our core applications run very fast. It has increased overall performance by about 60 percent. There is one process which has gone from taking seven hours to taking one hour. It's a key for storage in our organization.

They provide very good support for our mission-critical processes. It's also very solid and reliable in our environment.

We would like to see full virtual. We would also like to see improvements to the ease of administration of 3PAR.

The hardware stability is very good.

It's very scalable. For our organization, it's very scalable and at low cost.

Overall, technical support depends, but mission-critical support is a nine out of ten.

We needed the capacity and faster processing.

The initial setup was very easy. It went very quickly.

We used an integrator, HPE Enterprise Support. Our experience with them was very good.

HPE is the preferred solution for our company.

I would recommend 3PAR, especially in the financial industry where data is mission-critical. It's very good.

We use this solution for mixed, unpredicted workloads.

This solution has allowed for massive performance acceleration of all workloads and massively increased availability (with peer persistence/transparent failover feature).

The most valuable features are:

• Peer Persistence, where storage failover is transparent to servers and there is no complex cluster-software integration.
  
• Thin Provisioning translates to reduced efforts in management on the server-side, where calculated growth of application data and LUNs can be provisioned on the first install.

The Unified Multiprotocol Access to the storage array needs to be improved.

The primary use case would be disaster recovery and uptime. 

The entire company and our fire pump division, for the most part, are run on this solution.

Getting rid of spinning media is our primary objective.

We had a major down five years ago where we actually lost our entire data center, which caused the company to go down for over 12 days. In that time, we bought and implemented a full 3PAR product to get us up and running. We were able to buy a smaller set of storage and invest in the actual technology to get our company back up and running. Then, we were able to buy a second 3PAR to allow us to set up a secondary data center and immediately replicate over to that and succeed in designing a DR strategy without having to relearn everything.

We don't use InfoSight for management. We use it to help us determine if we have our workloads in the wrong place or set up incorrectly.

My users are happier because the response time is there. We haven't really analyzed the true IOPs, or anything. We are just trying to give them a solid user experience.

The solution has improved our throughput. It has allowed our SQL databases and report servers to run at a much higher capacity. Reports which used to take the better part of a day can now run in under an hour.

• Uptime
• Technical support
• Speed

The solution’s deduplication functionality does a really nice job for us in that we are able to leverage the money in a more productive way.

We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly.

The upgrade in the firmware and software need improvement.

The user interface is still a little kludgy.

It is very stable. We have had no downtime since putting it in.

We have not found the maximum scalability yet. For what our initial purchase was, we have been able to grow over the past five years. It has not limited us in anyway with our initial investment.

When I can call and talk to somebody who does not repeat back the question I am asking and we can get to working on it, whether it takes an hour, a day, or a week, I have support for the solution. That is the most important thing for me.

We start of with the EVAs, and as the EVAs aged out, we were moving up. However, it was the EVA that failed on us and 3PAR was just the next, better solution for our scale of need.

The initial setup was complex only that we had never seen the solution before. There were some decisions that we didn’t understand the implications of in the beginning that we were able to redesign as the years of owning it allowed us to better understand what were being offered and how we could better utilize it.

We used Logicalis for the deployment. Our experience with them is wonderful. We appreciate them being our partners and implementing all of our solutions.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by about 60 to 70 percent, because I am able to spin up new systems within four to six hours, where it used to take me two to three days.

Think seriously about the very long-term: the three, four, and five-year costs of the solution. Will it still be there doing what your company needs? Do not just look at the initial capital outlay of year one.

We didn’t really look at anybody other than HPE because we wanted a one stop solution for a single technical support problem, and we knew from Locigalis and from our years with HPE that they would give us an enterprise class solution the first time out.

We like it so much that we are in the process of evaluating our next three to five year roadmap. We are planning to reinvest in the next generation of the systems.

Everything can always get better, but I’ve been very happy with it. I have not been called in during the middle of the night because of it. It is the right solution for the right people.

Biggest lesson learnt: You get what you pay for.

We use 3PAR as our centralized storage for database use, mostly. It's also data stores for our VMs. We have a few Oracle Databases running on 3PAR and we have our production VMs running on 3PAR, as well.

Before using centralized storage, we needed to make sure that we have enough physical disks installed in a server. Now, we know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers. Again, in our case, it's mostly the databases.

All-flash positions our organization for growth in a way, mostly for performance, because again, we're using all-flash for the performance that it provides, and we have critical databases running on it. It's providing day-to-day functionality, the way I see it.

• The ease of use, from one perspective
• The centralized storage
• The ease of copying, backing up, and moving data from one server to the other

I would like to see more visibility regarding issues - active alerting. I know that InfoSight is currently trying to do what Nimble did for its storage. If it were proactively alerting regarding maintenance or something that's going to go bust, it could be very useful for us.

All in all, it's a stable solution. From an availability perspective, we have it in both data centers. 

We found one huge bug when we implemented the solution, a critical bug that eventually crashed and shut down the storage, which is something that we cannot live with. But since then, a patch was provided for this issue, and over the last a year-and-a-half we haven't had any stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is problematic. We would like to scale with our current infrastructure but we can't. We need to actually buy additional components, not just add disks. We actually need to buy additional controllers and, eventually, another storage unit. So it's not good enough.

The technical support is not good. Usually, when we have a problem, it takes ages until we get a response. We need to escalate several times, using HPE and the partner in Israel to make sure that we get the appropriate response. Usually, what we know or what we find out right away, is the same response that we get from support a week or two later - that something is happening. And only a month after that do we get a good solution that we can do something with.

From a technical perspective, we understood the benefits of having centralized storage. From that point on we looked for what was supposed to be the right solution for us. Eventually, we zeroed in on the 3PAR solution and not the competition.

The initial setup was complex. It's not a straightforward integration. There are a lot of parameters that you need to configure, and each parameter affects a lot of other things. Even though we used a partner for the implementation, after the installation in the data center we needed to rebuild everything and reconfigure everything several times. At the beginning, it wasn't good. Now we are stable so, except for the performance issue, everything is working as we expect it to work.

We used an integrator. The guys are great, responsible. They did what they were supposed to do. They worked with HPE regarding the sizing of the storage solution, and it seems like someone there didn't do his job correctly. I don't know if it was HPE or the partner. But eventually, we had a problem.

It's a much more expensive solution than just buying local disks. On the other hand, it provides us a centralized point of management for all our storage. I can't tell you the exact ROI, but the simplicity and the centralization of the storage probably provide us with some kind of a return.

We looked at NetApp. We also evaluated hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix, but it was not relevant at the time. And we were approached by HPE regarding SimpliVity but it was not relevant as well, at the time.

We went with 3PAR because, at the time, we were convinced that this would provide us the solution that we need, from several KPIs that we were looking at. We were promised performance that we didn't get in the end.

Check the performance and every technical aspect that you can, as much as you can. Don't trust anyone else telling you otherwise. Test everything yourself.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that having centralized storage is the right way to go and that sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected.

What every IT guy will tell you is that we disable the dedupe, mostly because of the hit on the performance. Regarding InfoSight predictive analytics, we tried to use it. It was not that predictive because it doesn't give as much information as we were told. We had actually turned it on and we had a few critical issues but we got no alerts from InfoSight regarding them.

It increased performance for a while, but then, as we grew, and we did not grow significantly, performance dropped down. For a few of our critical, online systems, we went back to using the physical disks and not the centralized storage.

It was supposed to improve throughput but it was not enough, not as much as we were told before we bought the product.

We have talked about using the flex-capacity offering, HPE GreenLake, but we haven't used it yet.

From our experience, I would rate low, but I don't want to rate it low because from a technical perspective, it's a stable solution, it works. I would give the product a seven out of ten, even though our experience has not been that good. A seven is fair at this point.

The primary use case is DR. We use it in the automation industry.

I has helped our organization with DR and replication of our VM environment and Oracle databases.

The solution has improved our throughput, which has improved our performance.

It has improved our company's performance.

It has an easy implementation and the support is awesome.

We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution.

The integration has room for improvement.

The stability is awesome.

The scalability is awesome.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. We have more places for Oracle applications, VMware, and servers.

We have had to contact technical support. We have had no problems with them. The support is great.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has increased our performance by about 40 percent.

This solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by 50 percent.

The performance is great.