HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it for virtualization, vCenter, and infrastructure. 

We have simple needs. We are a very small shop and are not a technology company, but we do have mobile apps and websites that we provide to our customers.

I am new with the company. I have only been there about a year now, but I understand that they have had this system for at least three to five years.

The performance has been fantastic. It has not had many issues whatsoever, and what issues they do have, the support picks up on it quickly. They send us tickets saying that they are doing work without us even having to engage them. So, that is very nice.

All-in-one containment: I do not have to worry about cross systems talking to each other or multiple systems trying to interact with each other. Our entire vCenter infrastructure is one large stack, which is nice.

I would like to see a little better integration with OneView and provisioning ESX Hosts, but other than that it meets our needs.

Possibly because of the version that we are running, but we do not have not enough features.

I am very impressed with the stability. We have had a stable environment for at least the year that I have been at the organization.

You can't beat its scalability. Just add more storage space when you need it, which is very simple.

Technical support is very responsive. Most of the time, they are engaged before we even know about problems that are there. However, for things like disk outages, you have to arrange for somebody to come out and do something. 

They have been very helpful, and worked within our schedules and our maintenance windows. We are very pleased with them.

We absolutely see the ROI. Sometimes when you purchase large pieces of equipment like this, uptiming is a huge thing that we need. Also, the stability of the system along with the fact that we have had to put very little time into the product once it was up, established, and running has reduced our costs. It allows us to focus on other important projects, rather than having to constantly restructure the infrastructure.

Support is great. The hardware is great. Unfortunately, we are running on an older version.

I would recommend taking a look at it. I have been looking at the newer options and technology. Not much has changed with it, so the expectations are still there that it would be a solid choice for somebody else.

We target 3PAR because of the availability aspects that it brings with a synchronous replication. I work with a lot of medical and larger business organizations which are looking for the ability to run stretch clustering between data centers. If they lose a full data center, they can use this to flap over live without application downtime. This is probably the biggest thing that comes into play from an availability aspect. Then, there is also inherently a lot of the performance which comes with it. E.g., if I have a lot of high demand applications, it is one of those where the system, the all-flash array, the 8450, and even the 9450 that recently came out, can keep the latency and response time down.

A lot of it has to do with its ability to stretch between data centers. It has helped a lot for times when our customers do DR testing. Instead of having to spin down and spin up, I can do it live and seamless. Therefore, I do not have to schedule downtime with an organization. Especially maintenance on arrays, if I need to do some maintenance, it could potentially slow down somethings or even take things offline. 

With 3PAR, I can transparently sort of flap over to that other data center and do all the maintenance I need to do (even if it means forklift upgrading things). I can do this without having to take applications down. For a place like a hospital, which is open 24/7/365, it can't suffer downtime. That is why this product is one of those nice game changers. 

It allows me to do so much and worry about taking care of the clients, instead of how do I keep things up.

Its biggest feature is the ability to do a lot of stretch clustering. When I look at a couple of the other arrays, sometimes I have to put extra layers on top where I can do this natively. It works with Hyper-V, VMware, and physical servers. I can keep that storage up transparently when it flops over and also to the kind of the way that it integrates with other stuff in the portfolio, like a Nimble and StoreOnce, to offload like snapshots. Therefore, I am not eating up a lot of what we call Tier 1 data for retention, when I am trying to keep data for archival purposes. I can offload it to less expensive storage. 

It all works in concert using Recovery Manager Central (RMC). HPE coordinates it all, so it is more of a solution instead of products trying to do things together.

Some people are talking about getting NVMe drives in with faster flash. However, I think that is on the roadmap. I was at Aspire this year, and they were talking about the next chassis and they are ready for it. It is just a matter of getting them in. 

Feature-wise, with the InfoSight additions, there is a lot of the stuff missing in the intelligent interface. As they grow and push, a lot of it will not tie into Hyper-V. I have a lot of clients with Hyper V, so having that put into InfoSight because I have a lot of clients who run half-and-half or a lot on Hyper-V, especially a lot of schools with public domains. There has been a shift more to Hyper V because the features are really good now, and getting those analytics would really help.

With OneView, there are some challenges. When I set up the Peer Persistence, it is very hard to manage zoning from OneView for arrays. We have eight 3PARs out there right now, and we do all our zoning outside of OneView, which is the opposite of what they say to do. 

Stability is nice. A lot of other systems have two to four controllers. From a performance perspective that gets into availability, it can suffer parts failures. The nice part about 3PAR is it starts getting into the six to eight node controllers, if I want to scale up. It is built-in there, and what helps with that is they from almost a managed services, or service provider background, before HPE even acquired them. They have a great structure, where if I have different business units, I need to get granular access. I can create separate domains for clients, but then manage it a little bit differently. The flexibility and ability to adjust to business needs is where its robustness is. Sometimes that adds some complications to the setup and the configuration, but sometimes that is needed based on what the business is trying to do with it.

If I need to step up performance-wise, I can add additional controllers. As far as different systems, if I need to go between the 8000, 9000 or the 20000, I can get into the multi-petabyte and still maintain massive performance, if needed. Therefore, I can start low, even with small businesses. I can look at a two-node 8200, but then if I need to go big, I can get into the eight-node 20000. 

It is a nice family of products. It adjusts for even the smallest client and largest business clients.

Usually if it gets to the point where we can't solve it, we will getting on the horn with technical support. Recently, we did have an under the hood issue which came up, and we know where to go or who to contact. Normal support has been good, but if I have to, we can get with their team that is developing the code. 

HPE even hooked me up. There is one guy who is writing their Remote Copy Software, and there is an inherent little bug we found. We have a pretty complex solution, and unfortunately, somebody always has to be the person to find the bug. The nice part is how they responded to it. Their team all came together, and everybody has been real responsive, even to this day. The VP and their product manager are emailing me, and I receive email updates, even as recent as yesterday. They are staying involved and care about the client.

Reactive is normal support, you do not go there. What will happen, and this is what we are excited about, InfoSight from the Nimble acquisition has a lot more of that predictive information because that is where I am pushing my clients to shift. They should be at the right OS level, so we can get those heuristics in there, because a lot of that information is will help. If something is going wrong, then we can identify it ahead of time, because it is easier to prevent than it is to repair. 

One of the reason why I think HPE bought Nimble is not so much for the Nimble Storage, but for the InfoSight part of it. A lot of the intelligence and data center will help resolve those last little issues regarding, "Why did we have downtime?" We should have seen this coming.

There have been a couple bumps with some of the support stuff, but HPE needs to sort that stuff out and that is where I hope Nimble will help because they are well-known for their support. For example, there were a few goofy things with support where we were trying to do OS upgrades and HPE MyRoom failed. However, they would not get on WebEx because they are only allowed to get on HPE MyRoom. Therefore, we had to reschedule an upgrade three times because of it. It was one of those where it was no one person's fault. It was just a policy and procedure issues. So, I am looking forward to getting some of these things cleaned up.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of 10.

It is the availability aspect. Over the last few years, I have done a lot of shifts where people come off of Dell, Hitachi arrays, or even some other products within the HPE line, and they need either the performance or the availability. The availability that they want to put in is a lot of time a type of Peer Persistence setup. We are selling at least two 3PARS where they have multiple data centers, so if an array goes down in the same data center, the customer can lose a whole array and still stay up because they have peer persistence set up. That has probably been the single biggest selling feature: availability. Nobody wants to be the person in the news that is down or costing their shareholders money. Thus, availability has been a real big push, and 3PAR does availability really well.

If you have never set up a 3PAR, it can be daunting. There are a lot nerd knobs. There are a lot of things that we can turn on and adjust. It is easy to get lost in 3PAR. This is where our organization gives a lot of our time, in the setup. 

A lot of times people play with buttons just because they are there. That is where you can get in a little trouble with 3PAR. This is because there is plenty of stuff to do. That is where we try to get ahead of the game, and help them with planning and architecture, e.g., here is what we will do and here is what we will set up and do, because you can get yourself into trouble playing with everything.

We have a pretty good routine down now where the last two arrays that I did were all-flash 8450s, including racking time, and it took less than probably a handful of hours before we were up and running. We did about eight shelves. It is not overly complicated. It is more the OS and configuration which take more time. Usually, most installs never go beyond a day. The rest of it is just fine tuning and adjusting to the environment, depending on the size of the array.

Even as we have upgraded the product, one client that I work with a lot has eight 3PARs. They had two of the old 10000 arrays, all three tiers of disks, and they traversed about three to three and a half racks each. Therefore, we had almost six and a half to seven racks of storage. When we went to the 8450s, we went to all-flash and were able to go down to a 16U a piece, so that is 32U total. That is almost a six rack reduction. 

They are out in New Hampshire, in a very green state and very green conscious. I spent an extra 30 days getting the proper numbers from the state of New Hampshire about power consumption, even the air conditioning, such as calculating BTUs an hour. The benefit was already showing that they would save over five years over $400,000 from power cooling. That does not even get into buying less racks.

They were going to more of a fixed pod structure, like a service provider. This was six racks that I do not have to put PDUs into. It is less hardware to maintain. It is less likely to fail because there are less moving parts. Obviously, there are the SSDs, which was a big part of a green initiative (less waste and power being used). 

I do not sell 3PAR all the time because it may not fit in with everything a client is trying to do. It is more about finding the right product for the solution. 

The big ones who comes up is obviously Dell technologies, VMAX and PowerMax, when I am looking for availability and performance. Another one that comes up a lot is Unity when we are looking at Nimble. Unity is a big player too right now. 

Also, what usually comes up quite a bit, is just Nimble. That is another one of those things where if I do not want all the nerd knobs, just a simple, great easy product that performs well, and if I want to be less focused on watching the data center moving forward, Nimble is a nice thing. The only thing that is missing right now is that synchronous for availability. They do not do synchronous replication, everything is asynchronous. Therefore, they are missing that availability, but it is on the roadmap for them. If peer persistence is not needed, Nimble is usually a great fit.

They chose HPE 3PAR because of the scale and the adjustability of it. If I need to get bigger, I can get pretty large with the product and still maintain good performance. There are not many vendors that go beyond the four nodes and maintain performance. Having the ability to scale from four to eight nodes allows that additional performance, because I can put 100 SSDs behind two controllers, but I will only be able to see about 20 disks worth of performance because I will outrun the controller. Therefore, getting that in the throughput  helps, but also in its ability to do Peer Persistence, which is the availability aspect where I can lose a whole 3PAR and it is seamless to the host. These are the biggest things: the availability and the speed of it.

They do great things. The system is great. It is just a matter of cleaning up some of the support stuff, then the enhancements that are not there yet. Hopefully, they are coming in with InfoSight. That is where it could be better.

Never have blinders; everybody has their favorite product, but do not turn away from keeping your vision open about a solution. Keep that in mind when you are looking at a product. 

Most important criteria for clients when they evaluate a vendor: A lot of that gets into supportability. What do they have for a track record? How easy is support to work with? How efficient are they? When things go wrong, I do not want be scrambling. How easy is it to get to support and get them on the line (an efficient use of support). 

As far as feature-rich, how does it work with everything from an availability aspect?

Everybody talks about backup, and lot of times, they are talking about it after storage. They should be talking about it together, because storage is part of backing it up. The business should be asking: Am I backing it up fast enough? Are my RPOs and RTOs inline with what the business SLAs are? 

When we start talking backups and the availability aspect to a lot of businesses, they do not seem to be defining their SLAs. They often do not have any. That is where we find that we are having more of a discussion which helps drive a lot of what we need to do. 

You do not want buy stuff, then say, "What can we do with it?" You should be defining what you want to do with it, then purchasing. That is a lot of how we are changing the purchasing process. 

It is our main point of storage for many applications. We use VMware so we have all the hosts connected to the 3PAR and that's the central point of storage for our whole organization. It's definitely critical, we can't live without it because that's where all the servers and data are hosted, on the 3PAR.

The interface to manage it could be improved. I was looking at OneView. Something basic like that should be available with the 3PAR. OneView has all the bells and whistles, all the features, but I think something basic and similar to that should be come with the 3PAR, at least for monitoring managing it.

It has definitly been very stable. We haven't had any issues with the 3PAR for years.

We believe it will meet our needs in the future. In fact, we already did an upgrade to the 3PAR, because another company was moving to the same location we use and we didn't have enough space. It was really easy, we just had to add more hard drives and another chassis. It was very straightforward to do the upgrade and scale the 3PAR.

It was a matter of hours. Once the chassis was installed, and then the upgrade was added to the chassis - adding the drive - it took a couple hours to do the whole thing.

The support is very good, they're generally very responsive. I haven't had any issues with them in terms of responding in a timely manner to any request that I have had.

We came from the EVA which was the previous version and this is, hands-down, way better. It has a smaller footprint and is actually quicker than the EVA.

There has definitely been a return on investment. Usually what we do is lease equipment. We are leasing the 3PAR for three years, but after the three years I know we are going to use it for longer. I don't think that we are going to use it for less than five years, so at the time I bought the support for five years, knowing that after the three years with the lease, we were going to buy it out. We are probably going to keep it for five to seven years.

The ease of management is its most valuable feature. It is so much easier to manage storage on a 3PAR array than anything that we have had before. 

I really love the thin provisioning part of it. It has saved us tremendously by being able to provide storage to our Windows guys. They think that they have a terabyte and are happy about it, but they do not use anywhere near that, so it does not chew up space on the array, which is nice. 

Being able to snapshot things for backup purposes has been key. We do that on our databases four times a day. 

We are an all-flash environment, which is really good. One thing that I would like to see is the ability to take storage on 3PAR array and copy it up to the cloud, any type of cloud I want, e.g., Azure, AWS, etc. HPE has StoreOnce CloudBank integration, but I would like to see a little bit more integration from a cloud perspective. In this way, I would have some more flexibility to do more with data, how to store it, and where I have it.

Stability has been awesome. We have a couple of 8440s that have been in production now for about a year and a half with no hiccups; nothing. Its performance has been steady, very good, and it stays up. 

That is why we had P9500s and Symmetrix in the day, because they just stayed up, and they just always worked. 3PAR has been every bit as reliable and available as those systems.

We are in a mid-size company, and the 8000 series has been good. We are not utilizing all of it, so we have the ability to expand. We have a project right now that we are looking at expanding, so from that standpoint it is good. 

You can get way into the 20000 series and just cut into petabytes of data out there. I like that it moves from entry level to as high as you need to go.

Support has been very good. Upgrade-wise, we have had HPE guys call us up, and say, "You need to apply this firmware. We need to get you to this level." Then, we get it scheduled.

They are on time and work with us when we need to get anything done. They get things done, so we do not have to do them, which is awesome. 

I have gone the gamut of old EMC arrays, Clarion arrays, and XP arrays, and 3PAR is just so simple. 

Initial setup was straightforward. It is not a hard array to set up and install. Even though we had purchased installation, this was back when we had the previous 3PAR for a performance tool. I got it and set it up.

I installed 3PAR on the server, and it was not hard to do. 

HPE called us up and said, "Here are the things that you can do with this." I replied, "I already went through all of that." They said, "Okay."

They are very good, and I like the product.

It's primarily used as our primary SAN, storage area network. We store all sorts of data and VMs on that particular set of disks. It's for local data center usage. We have three data centers now, one in Atlanta, one in Dallas, one in Provo. We aren't doing any site to site replication. It's really just localized and we're trying to get to a point where we are actually doing site to site replication for DR and things of that nature.

The performance is good. We enjoy it. We like it.

The ease of management is what changed. Where we had, in simple terms, about an hour's worth of work, it has minimized that to maybe one-tenth, or something to that effect. Instead of us having to do a lot of steps to ensure that our environment is where it needs to be from a storage perspective, because of the ease of management, the UI differences, it has allowed us to manage our environment.

• The intuitiveness of the SAN itself, a lot of the built-in logic and functionality
• The tiering that it uses to determine what type of disk is best for the various types of workloads
• The automation that is built in 

We used to have EMC and we have found that it's a lot easier to manage.

Stability is very good. No issues thus far.

We haven't really had to scale it yet. We got a pretty large footprint initially. I think we've added some SSDs, some nearline disk. But from that perspective, no issues, no complaints.

Most of what we have had to engage support on has been, "Hey, how do we do this?" or, "Hey, I see this, but I don't understand. What can I do?" We've had pretty good experiences so far.

We had a set of vendors come in and do proofs of concept to help us better understand what options and features were available. Based upon what we found with HPE and 3PAR - I wasn't actually a part of the initial assessment, this is all stuff that I heard when I came on board - it just was the best solution for us at the time.

My team was involved in the initial setup and I managed the team. We had three resources that were a part of the setup, so they were onsite with the engineers. They got a week or so of training each. That was pretty much all we were a part of during the initial setup.

It was probably complicated because most of our team were used to EMC and it's a different kind of mindset. Even today, there are a lot of things that we haven't leveraged because we simply don't have the expertise. Over time, though, as we've used the tool, we've become more comfortable with it.

I don't know if we've done enough analysis to gauge ROI yet.

As far as I know, we had three vendors on our short-list: HPE, EMC, and a third vendor I don't recall at the moment.

Definitely learn the features of the product, what it takes to actually administer and manage it, what type of resource load is also required. It's not necessarily a tool that enables anyone who says, "Hey, we bought a SAN, go take it over." It really takes someone who has an understanding of and background in the tool, maybe even a little background with HPE. Just make sure you fully understand what you're getting into.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We've been fairly satisfied with the product, we haven't had any issues. It's definitely not something that you can easily jump into without that initial set of knowledge to help you understand how to use the tool. From our perspective, the way we went into it was backward. We bought and then learned, instead of learned and then bought. That has been a part of our hurdle but, overall, it has been a good product.

We use this for our highest tier level applications, our tier 0 through tier 2, so those are our mission critical and business essential type of applications. We want to make sure that we have the most critical things running on the best equipment that we have, and it is performing well right now. 

We have been working with 3PAR for almost three years now. We leased two arrays, struggling with it a bit. However, HPE did right by us and provided the resources (people, hardware, and additional storage) to do what we needed to do.

It has been reliable recently. In the past we did not have very good luck with it the first year or so that we owned it. Now that HPE has put the right resources, as well as the additional solid state drives, it has helped improve the performance and stability.

We are taking somewhat of a different approach. We are going more towards a hybrid solution in our data center. We are focusing more on developing our hyperconverged technology, and expanding it. We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward.

Tech support is great, and that is for any of their team who has ever worked with us. They are willing and committed to making sure the customer is treated the way we need to be. For example, they were there for about a month or so when we were having calls every day with them. 

Initial setup was straightforward and fairly easy. The hard part was that we were on EMC VNX and trying to get those converted over into the HPE 3PAR, that process took awhile, along with scheduling downtime to get some of the physical stuff migrated over to the new device.

We ran into some struggles when we were trying to implement it. We have two production data centers running Active-Active. Our arrays did not like talking, reading, and writing to each other. Therefore, they were causing some hiccups, but after several phone calls and meetings with HPE reps, and some additional storage, we were able to get it working exactly where we needed it to.

I would have rated it higher, but there was a length of time that it took to resolve and get the product working the way we wanted it to. This happened on day 60 rather than day one.

Low latency storage for production trading systems.

We have multiple trading platforms which are trading different products regionally. The complexity comes when we are applying those trading algorithms globally. It has to be efficient in executing those trades, getting the right prices for the customers with the right spreads for the customer. You have every global FX currency that is present plus equities and future options. If you put all these things together, it gets quite complex.

We have been extremely happy with 3PAR so far.

We have more uptime, better trade times, and less hassle opening tickets with HPE.

• Remote Copy Groups
• Peer Persistence
• Redundancy
• Fairly easy user interface
• InfoSight

It's a very stable platform. It has been running pretty smoothly. It's one of those things where you set it and forget it. We tweak it here and there and we add things to it a little bit, but nothing crazy.

We haven't really had to add anything to it recently.

Technical support is very good. They're very prompt. They know about stuff before we do sometimes.

Last night was a perfect example. We had a problem last night and before we knew it, there was an email and then, about 15 minutes, later HPE Support sent another email saying don't worry about it, it corrected itself, nothing to worry about.

I would think we are seeing return on investment. I'm not sure of the exact numbers.

I've had a great experience with it and I would recommend it to a colleague.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's a very stable platform, it's very easy to learn how to use, has an easy user interface, tasks are very simple for an admin. As I said before, you set it up and you don't have to worry about it after that. With HPE you're in good hands.

The primary use case for 3PAR would be security video recording, and the security video is used for multiple purposes. In the healthcare environment, it will be used for real-time locating, patient wandering, infant abduction, asset tracking, and staff duress.

Taking it to the next level of healthcare, in pharmaceuticals one has to keep track of the production and movement of products and retain those records for a period of two years, as per federal regulations. So now, we need multiple levels of storage: immediate storage, short-term, and long-term, with the data being kept for up to two years.

In these scenarios, 3PAR is an ideal solution, and we've had a lot of success because of its capabilities and the different types of storage. You can mix SSDs with running drives and slower drives for longer-term storage, minimizing your cost but maximizing your storage. And you can also evolve storage as needed. You can increase the amount of storage by adding in drives on the fly, as the need arises. 3PAR provides a very ideal solution for some of my customers.

It gives organizations a single point of storage and single point of backup. I would call it a "single repository" of all your data with a good archiving system. Those are the biggest benefits I see.

There are lots of valuable features, so it's difficult to isolate a few. Number one, being able to provision drives on demand, as opposed to populating a whole stack of drives and not using them. In the latter scenario, you are locking your money in, you don't get a return on investment. On the fly, you can build up your storage as needed, so that's a very good feature. 

The second one is the mixture of drives. 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. This is a huge advantage as opposed to some other systems out there.

And of course, there are plugins and compatibility with the standard HPE hardware and it gives you a single panel to view the performance of your devices. From a single panel, I can see the performance of my service, my network, and my storage.

I would like to see them lower costs.

It would also help if they integrate current technologies, newer technologies, and more efficient technologies, as time progresses. For example, integrate the fourth level of NAND devices. I believe at the moment we have third-level NAND load-leveling in place. I know these devices are around the corner. In the not too distant future, they should add these types of drives in there. That will give us much faster access. Hopefully, in time, we will replace the spinning hard drives with SSDs only, and the different types of SSDs.

Hot-swappable drives and built-in redundancy gives stability to the solution.

Being able to add drives on the fly gives the solution scalability.

Most of my projects are large P3 (public-private partnership) projects, where we do design, build, and maintenance of a facility for up to 20 to 25 years. We then return it to the client with another 10 years of service. So, upfront, I have to decide what solutions to put in there that will give me the minimal refresh over a longer period of time. I have to weigh the pros and cons of how much I spend upfront and what my maintenance cost will be over time. That's where the 3PAR solution is a good solution for me. It gives me fewer refreshes over a period of time and yet, at the end of the contract, I can still return it to the client with another 10 years of service.

My clients rely on me for evaluating vendors. One of the things I do is take the data sheets from multiple suppliers, compare them, see what is the best fit for the client and then, of course, use my own judgment and experience with my other clients on the given product. Fortunately, 3PAR has been a good product, so, I have no hesitation in recommending it and moving forward with it.

My involvement is primarily in the initial design of the system. I'm not involved with the actual setup. I will engage vendors recommended by HPE, or HPE-authorized vendors, to do the setup for me.

Go out, do your research first on the different products that are out there and make the judgment for yourself. The information is out there.

It is status quo from what we came from. We came from ViON and Hitachi. Part of that is our own problem. It is not as much HPE, as to how we are using it. We lifted and shifted, identically from one system to another.

It is flexible. We receive a lot of flexibility. We do at capacity on demand (COD), so we do not buy it upfront. They have a convenient capacity model that works well for us. HPE are a sub to the ones we buy it from, but they are the best sub that you could ask for. Whenever we have a problem, they come right onsite.

I would like to see more openness with other platforms. InfoSight synergy as a whole is great, if I own all HPE products. 

It is whoever gets me the best price and value. They win the contract. I need that flexibility to work with, for example, if Dell were to win my server contract or ViON were to run the storage, and I still had HPE servers. I need flexibility for interoperability across multiple platforms, not just HPE.

We had major issues in years one and two. 

Now, it is stable. In the beginning, we had some stability and reliability issues. Over the last three years, it has been very stable and reliable.

It is definitely scalable. We do not have any issues.

The tech support is great. If we have a problem, we literally will have boots on the ground with senior sales people, as well as the people to fix the problem, to help make sure we are taken care of.

It was complex for us, but we were literally migrating nine data centers across the globe, from product A to product B. We got in our way more than anyone else did. I can't judge how the product would be in a typical environment, since we are talking about 75 petabytes over nine data centers. It was a big project. 

The product is straightforward enough. If we were to do it as a new implementation, it would not be an issue.

We are happy with it. However, there is always room for improvement.

It is our primary storage. We use it with our VMware environment and all of our high performance applications are stored on it.

I work for an equipment distributor, but we have various business lines: everything from earth moving to electric power generation. These are very different needs. Then, we have our accounting system which is on there, plus business intelligence. All these are different types of workloads.

We purchase the 3PAR that has flash tier and we can migrate between the spinning disk and flash. It seems to work very well. It self-optimizes. I do not need to worry about it. It does its job. It is the self-driving car. You let it do its thing and it gets you where you need to go.

It has improved the ability of the executives to get proper insights, because our old storage was not fast enough. 

It is worry-free. I do not have to sit there and tend it, because I have a lot of other things that I have to do. Once you set it, you can forget it until you need to go and add more storage. It does its thing and you can go do your work.

3PAR has StoreOnce and replication. I would like it if they worked together. Or, if I had Nimble and put that either in DR or a primary cohesive management, but still use the cool features of 3PAR, that would be awesome.

We have never had a problem.

It is good.

I have done two different upgrades with them. That is all I have done because the stuff is all working. 

Technical support was very helpful. They scheduled around me, then when it was time, we just met in a HPE room, they did the upgrade, and I saw everything they did. Then when they were done, we left the room and I was done. I had my stuff back.

We are using Tableau, and it is a heavy thing, especially when you start calling in a lot of data sources. At our old storage, it was iSCSI connected and not adequately responsive. Therefore, they had to trim down the searches, and as a result, they were getting less insight. Now, they get everything they want and in a timely manner. 

We were using Dell EqualLogic. The load from our VMware (when we first put it in was fine) had gone from approximately 20 virtual machines to 150 virtual machines on the same storage. The storage load had increased so drastically that we just could not keep up with it, so we looked at different things. I mentioned 3PAR is an excellent enterprise cost product. 

We switched because noticed there was a lag in our previous storage, then went ahead and got 3PAR. 

We certainly have seen value and everybody is happy, including our executives. They are very glad that things are working smoothly and they can get good insights and information from Tableau.

It is a little more money, but it is worth it because it does it better.

We looked at Dell's competing product. This is prior to them buying EMC. We looked at Compellent. We also looked at EMC and Pure Storage. 

We bought EqualLogic before Dell bought it. After Dell bought it, some things changed. Now I am afraid of buying a small player that might get purchased and the story changes. Therefore, we thought HPE is a very stable partner. Nobody will buy HPE. We can go ahead and trust that it will be a stable, supported product for the foreseeable future.

It does a great job and I do not have to worry about it. It worries about itself. It tells me if there is something wrong.

Go to Houston, the executive briefing center, if you can. It is very good because you get a very deep dive and you can ask questions to obtain information. I did it and thought it was helpful.