HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use it for the production and backup environments. We use it for a service that we deliver directly in our data center for our customers. It's a live environment, directly for the customers.

The stability is what we consider to be the best feature it provides. The stability of this solution is what conquers us, every day.

The deduplication is pretty good too. It does the work.

Upgrades could be improved. We would like to see more upgrades.

We have already had situations where we had to optimize and put more space on the storage. It has been very simple to get done. We are happy with what we have in place.

Technical support is pretty good. We always have somebody available to support us. We do have a maintenance contract with third-party vendors for HPE but we've been attended to very well in this field.

It was the first solution that we defined, at the beginning of the data center, so it has always been there. Since I joined the team after the data center was already implemented, I don't have a previous scenario to compare it to, what it has improved or not.

The setup was straightforward, because of the partnership that we maintain with Logicalis. They supported us during the whole deployment.

We used a company named Logicalis. They are our partners for everything that we have. Any doubt that we have or any challenges that we face, they are our port of call. We have had a good experience with them.

We are happy with what we have in place. You should consider getting this solution if you are in the process of acquiring or switching. I would suggest giving this a good look.

The biggest lesson we have learned from using the solution is the stability. This is what I always tell people. The stability is what surprises us. It's a stable solution.

In terms of growth, we are planning on going from 35 terabytes to around 50 terabytes in the six months. We will probably keep using 3PAR but we may change to something better. We are here at HPE Discover 2019 looking for other solutions. If we cannot find something better we will continue using the same technology, the 3PAR.

I would rate 3PAR at eight out of ten because we love the stability but sometimes we still lack upgrades for the solution.

We use three power arrays. The first array is for video storage and video surveillance. The second array is for production of our virtual machines. Pretty much everything is run on one of these three systems.

It provides us some disaster recovery capabilities. The all-flash storage gives us the performance that we need.

The remote copy group failover is very useful and has helped us.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. The most useful part of it is being able to see the growth curve.

• The uptime
• Its reliability, that day in day out, it will continue to be running.

The solution's availability is very good.

I would like to have single click upgrades because the process is cumbersome right now. The upgrade process is very tedious. It takes a lot of time and effort, in addition to coordination with HPE. We are looking for something which is more user-friendly and easy to deploy. Fixing the upgrade process is very critical.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The scalability is alright. When we try to scale it, we do upgrades.

The all-flash positions our organization for growth. If somebody comes to us who needs an application with performance, we have that already formulated.

The technical support is good. We work with a local vendor.

Our previous solution was between five to six years old, so we were looking for something newer, like all-flash.

The initial setup was complex, but we had the partner there to help.

We used a partner for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

The solution has increased our performance.

The solution helped our organization reduce our time to deployment.

I would recommend looking at Nimble instead. It is a similar option and something that we are looking at now, though 3PAR has been a pretty solid product.

The solution’s deduplication functionality is alright.

3PAR is our primary storage for everything aside from VDI, which is where we are using our Nimble.

We use everything from point of sale to database. Those are the two big mission-critical applications. There is also virtualization for servers.

It makes for less administrative overhead.

The solution has improved our throughput by helping us keep up with the demand and acquisitions that we have been going through.

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

The quick, easy deployment, along with its administration, are its most valuable features.

I would like to have more details on alerting. It is not real granular right now. What It gives you is sort of basic, and we can't do a lot of tweaking on our own. We would like to be able to tweak some of the alerts for our team.

It has been a lot more stable over the past year that I have using it. Early on, we did have some issues, but working with HPE, we were quickly able to fix all that. Since then, it has been very stable.

It does help with the growth, mainly in some of the point of sale systems that we need.

I would rate the technical support about a seven or eight (out of ten). They have been pretty good. The response time has been pretty good for any issues that we have had. From a hardware standpoint, we haven't had that much. It has been more from a software side, and we have had some pretty good responses from HPE.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is quick and very intuitive. You can turn it on and figure out pretty much what you need to do right away. You don't have to have too much hand-holding for it. So, it's fairly easy to use.

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

It has reduced time to deployment by about 30 percent, mainly from the virtualization server standpoint.

I have used a number of different storage solutions, and the HPE products are probably the best from an ease of use and administrative standpoint. 

From my experience in the past with other storage solutions, it is very easy to use with pretty good support. So far, from what I have seen, I do like it.

It is a real good solution. It is probably one of the better storage solutions for large enterprises and main back-end storage that I have used in the past.

We do the InfoSight predictive analytics. We have just gotten into it with the 3PAR storage, as we have mainly used it on the Nimble side.

We actually don't use the deduplication right now. That is something that we have looked into, but haven't implemented yet.

It is our primary storage for all of our data. Everything from personnel systems to file shares, print services, and databases are mission-critical applications that we run on 3PAR.

It has allowed us to set up a fully functioning disaster recovery site with replication, which we have been able to configure between our 3PAR systems.

The solution has helped improved our throughput. It has helped our organization with our DR site and connections to our blade systems.

The replication that you can set up between remote 3PARs is its most valuable feature.

I would rate it a ten (out of ten) for its ease of use. We haven't had any issues when we have had to build anything out on it. There have been no major issues, as far as outages or hardware issues.

The GUI was a little hard to figure out how to use.

The stability has been great and solid, so far. We haven't had any hiccups or any major outages.

The scalability is very good. We are planning on adding another rack of hard drives.

The technical support was very knowledgeable when we first set it up. Outside of that, I haven't really had any experience with them.

We had an old HPE SAN. We compared one 3PAR to the SAN. Then, we wanted to set up replication between our DR sites, so we purchased another 3PAR.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment.

Our organization issued us an HPE 3PAR. There really wasn't any market research with other vendors.

It is a solid product. It works really well for our situation and what we need at a disaster recovery site. It is fairly simple to set up.

We do not use InfoSight.

We have two use cases: 

1. We use it with our internal applications, so for internal use. 
2. We are provider of national research computing infrastructure. Therefore, we are using it out there with all our systems.

There are not many mission critical applications or processes that we run on 3PAR. The mission critical applications are usually the ones for internal university purposes, like ERP systems. Our research systems are not a mission critical since our researchers can run their computing again in a week. 

If it runs, and you don't know about it, that is the best thing that you can have in IT infrastructure. This is what 3PAR does for us.

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything. I see this as a piece of hardware, which I don't want see and don't want to care about. I want some AI over it, not because I want to fire all my team, but what I want my team working on is definitely not to take care of our hardware.

It has basically never failed. It is a very stable thing in our environment. We don't have such experience with the other things that we have.

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

We are just a customer, who bought a solution and are running it. We don't really do much about it. From what I know, the scalability should be okay. Generally, it was one of the reasons why we purchased 3PAR, because we believed we will grow, etc. However, it is difficult in the public sector if you can't do an RFP for a specific product. So, you need to live with whatever you buy or whatever is the best combination on the market. 

We haven't really purchase any more 3PARs after our initial buy, and that was a few years ago.

I have never used the technical support, but my team is okay with it. At the time when we implemented 3PAR into our environment, we really needed some help. We had some issues, which were mostly on our side, but my team was very satisfied with the support.

We previously used a number of small servers with disks attached to it, distributed all over to data centers. This was absolutely not effective and terrible.

We had quite obsolete infrastructure. We were thinking about whether we should just upgrade it a little bit or if we should take a different path. At that time, a few years ago, 3PAR for us was a change to a very different type of storage. Today, I would say that it is standard. However, at that time, it was a change. We wanted to improve and start doing things differently. In general, at the time, 3PAR was from today's perspective, like implementing AI over our whole infrastructure. It was a giant leap forward.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't need any complex preparation or changing a lot of things in our environment to integrated it. It was quite straightforward. Bringing books and bringing it into the lab in a few days, then everything was migrated. It was very easy.

We had a reseller helping us implement it, then we took over. The experience with our Czech reseller was great. 

We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying.

3PAR has increased your performance. At the time that we purchased 3PAR, it was much more powerful than any of our previous storage.

3PAR has helped our company reduce the time to deployment by 60 percent. It is easier than before.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We did evaluate other vendors originally. We looked at Dell EMC and all the competitors in the market. We chose HPE because they had the best technology and performance.

We have had a very good experience with 3PAR, so we will probably not be looking at different vendors or solutions.

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

We do use the Memory-Drive Flash. We don't have any problems with latency anymore that we had eons ago. However, I can't really tell you from a technical perspective if it was from implementing 3PAR or something else.

We do not use InfoSight predictive analytics yet, but I would like to.

The biggest lesson learned is 3PAR is good, and I want it for future. Let us find a way how to do it. It was a giant leap in technology at the time that we purchased it, and I would like to do the same next time, which will be very close. While I wouldn't say not to buy a 3PAR again, we will need a new technology that will do the giant leap forward again. We need a big step once every few years instead of doing granular steps every year.

We use this solution for low latency, high-performance workloads.

This solution has given us improved application uptime and performance.

The most valuable features are Dedupe, Compression, and the simplicity of SSMC (StoreServ Management Console).

We would like to see dedupe and compression allowed on all drive types.

Our primary cases for HPE 3PAR Flash Storage 7000 are: 

• Transport sector
• Four nodes, 1000 virtual machines
• Entire rack solution
• Partially flash
• 350TB (dense IO).

The bad news: In its initial firmware, both four-node clusters were locked down. The downtime was 17hrs, and once patched, it worked like a charm — no outage for two years. Whereas, IBM SVC had three outages (node crashes) with impact in the 2 yrs before

• Four-node performance
• No split IO groups as on IBM SVC clusters.
• Easy tiering (with a small % of cache) did a good job in a large scale environment of 1000 VMs on 350TB external Monitoring, giving a detailed dashboard. A nicely virtual appliance for remote callout support to HPE services.

• Made on three times a price comparison, and only on one occurrence, the largest enterprise infrastructure of all three was HPE able to compete with its competitors.
• It's way too expensive for the SMB market.
• HPE care packs like datacenter/enterprise provide highly automated reports and reviews.
• I liked the periodic SAN performance reviews which are highly detailed reports in about 100 pages and provide recommendations and a final score. However, the price is outrageous!

It's used for allocating disk to many servers.

It has high availability, and it's flexible to tuning for system admin.

• AO
• CLI
• Performance report.

Integrate to monitor with CentOS.