HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

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.

For use with a major database for telecom customers who need to collect all of their customers' information.

Provides amazing performance all day in multiple workloads. We applied different usage models which showed great performance.

Scalability, because our customer is fast growing and our solution should be able to start very small and grow very quickly.

Security is a mandatory feature because our customer needs to protect delicate information.

The our primary use cases for 3PAR are:

• We have some secure applications which use it.
• We have some built-in, embedded applications that we use on it. 
• We have some major critical applications which run on 3PAR. 
• We are using flash arrays 2850 and 8440.

The company has been using 3PAR for approximately eight to 10 years. I joined in 2015, and since the day I joined, we had these 8440s flash arrays. Lately, this year only, we bought these new flash arrays, because we had some issues with the 8440s, especially with the drives. After we migrated the 8440s to the 2850s, we have not been seeing performance issues anymore. It seems as if all of the performance issues have disappeared, which is a big achievement.

With the new flash arrays, 3PAR has improved our performance. Also, the new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) tool is more user-friendly.

We are using the SSMC tool. In combination with it, there is a lot happening around InfoSight, and we are spending a lot of time on it. It does seem like there is some additional functionality built into InfoSight that we can use effectively.

We need additional enhancements to InfoSight, especially from a VM standpoint. Today, we can see in the Azure VM performance stats in 3PAR, but it is so huge, we can't just drill down on each and every VM and look at its performance. We want to add rates of performance issues from VM points of time frame. Therefore, we can look, for example at 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and see how the VMs performed. That particularly feature is not there today in InfoSight.

We are also 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. E.g., if the 3PAR is not completely healthy because the remote copy helps are not performing, the dashboard will show all green, so there are some additional enhancements required. 

We are not seeing any issues. No hardware failures.

I would rate stability as a nine out of 10.

I would rate scalability as a nine out of 10.

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

As a storage admin, my return on investment is having the system up at all times functioning properly and seeing no performance issues. This is what we are seeing after we recently migrated to our new flash arrays.

Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries. 

We are a multi-vendor shop, even today. We do have some IBM storage in our environment, but most of our critical applications sit on 3PAR.

I will recommend going with the all-flash arrays, especially on 3PAR, because that is something that I have personally experience with and I have not seen any issues.

We are using it for the storage for our on-premise servers, which are both Oracle workloads, as well as having many VMs. We have a lot of complex business needs around legacy things.

Our organization has been using 3PAR for about a decade. The performance has been good.

Everything runs smoothly.

The expandability is good. 

HPE can login, fix things, alert us to things, and upgrade. We are there and aware, but we do not do the work. So, that is good.

There are some weird things that we can't figure out.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

My team is happy with technical support. However, I have not called them personally.

We had EVAs before, then switched to an earlier generation of 3PAR.

If you can afford it on-premise, and that is the way you want to go, then it is a good solution. 

Overall, it has been a good product, and it is stable.

We use 3PAR as our main production environment. Therefore, we use it for everything from VMware to our NAS solutions. It is used for complex business needs, because we also store all of our databases on the 3PAR as well.

We have a lot of systems at the airport where I work. So, we have a lot of Oracle databases, which run a lot of core functionality. This includes the financial systems. We have a large maintenance program, and we have to track all of our maintenance needs. This is all done through an Oracle database. All of these databases are on the 3PAR. 

We have about 500 users. All of their user data is stored on the 3PAR for groups and user data. Then, most of our environment is in VMware. Thus, we have a reasonable sized VMware environment of about 700 servers, and that all runs off of the 3PAR.

It has improved our functions because we have a very small IT team. We have to do a lot of things. The more solutions that we can bring onboard which are easy to use and do not require too much maintenance, this is good for us. We just do not have enough bandwidth to cover everything.

Therefore, we are always looking for good solutions which do their job well and are easy to use. 

3PAR is fairly easy to use. We have used a few different arrays in the past, and they were a lot more complicated. This one was fast to bring up and start using right away. It is easy to keep running and does not require too much effort. It has been very reliable, which is key.

Foremost, we look for a reliable solution foremost, and 3PAR has been very reliable.

I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly. That would be a great feature.

The controllers are going to age out, then eventually they will need new controllers. If we could upgrade those controllers live without interruption, that would be great.

The stability has been great. We have had zero issues.

The scalability is good because it is easy to add in new disks. We just add them on the fly, and they are available for use. We do not have to go in, then configure then. We just put the disks in, then they are available, so it is easy.

I needed to invest in a new solution because the previous solution was getting old.

We wanted to go to market to find a better solution. We wanted something that had a little more intelligence. However, because we are a semi-public company, we had to go to market. We could not just pick 3PAR.

The 3PAR actually had to prove itself. It had to be scored and graded across a panel of people in order to win the bid. Not only that, it had to have a good price.

It was not complex.

We had a third-party vendor help set it up. We had two weeks to set it up, and we had it done within one week. We had a whole week to sit back and enjoy it.

I have seen ROI, because it has performed extremely well so far. The amount of data that we have flowing through it has worked out very well.

The return on investment for me is that all of my customers are happy. That is a really good return on investment: less complaining.

We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, Dell, and 3PAR. We went with 3PAR because of price and the functionality had everything that we wanted it to do. Also, the presentation that the HPE team put together went really well.

Give the product a good, hard look, because HPE does a very good job. They are a market leader. They are not a small player in the space. You can be very comfortable when dealing with a company like HPE.

It is doing everything that we want it to do. We are not that big, so we did not have a lot of crazy requirements. Therefore, it is doing everything we want it to do. The other big factor is that it is easy to use.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Easy of use
• Ability to have two arrays back each other up. In case one of them has a problem, the other one can take over.

We use it as a shared storage solution for a virtualized environment. It is not for complex business needs. It is really just for storage, and not even a very large amount of storage: between 20 to 40 terabytes.

We have used it in three environments. We were not happy with the performance initially, because it turned out the system was initially designed for Fibre Channel, and we needed iSCSI. So, we used the iSCSI configuration option off of 3PAR. This was probably when 3PAR was purchased by HPE, but the performance were extraordinarily bad in terms of I/O capabilities. It took a long time to obtain HPE's help and resolve the issue. This was for iSCSI in the context of VMware for shared storage.

The product is not for us. We deploy solutions on-premise. We use this product for one of our customers.

We would like to see better support for iSCSI.

After being properly configured, it has been a very stable product.

Our systems are fairly static once they have been deployed.

Their technical support is bad. I would rate it as a two out of 10. 

After we insisted for quite some time, then we did receive good support. However, it was a bother, we would have liked to have known initially that the system was not designed for iSCSI.

In the end, we ended up selecting something else.

We were previously using multiple vendors. We switched to 3PAR for more performance, reliability, and we had challenges with MSAs (low-end storage).

The initial setup takes about two days.

I have not seen any ROI so far.

We evaluated Nexsan. However, we wanted to stay with HPE.

Be extremely careful if you want to use the iSCSI feature of the 3PAR. It was not designed for it initially.

We were using low-end storage from HPE. I was hoping to get something a bit midrange in their storage, in terms of price with the reliability. I am still hoping that it will be reliable despite poor initial performance previously. As the problem was fixed, I am hopeful it would be reliable in the long run.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We need something stable and reliable in the long run. Our contracts are at least five years, and they can be extended all of the way to seven to 10 years.

It runs all our tier one and two apps. Right now, we are replicating between two 3PARs and two different data centers. We use for our tier one and two apps, so they can do failover, synchronous replication.

We have been running 3PAR for three years. It was running well until we tried to split our two 3PARs and put them into two different data centers. Then, we had a lot of problems.

I do not think it has changed the way that we function.

When we were having problems, it actually hurt us. Before that, we did not have any problems.

The most valuable feature when we purchased it was that it was a four-node system. However, the throughput knowledge should be a lot better than what we previously had (EMC).

A lot of tasks, you have to manually set up. They need to already have them set up and working. Then, you can just go in and tweak them if you need to. There are a lot of things that we did not know that we needed to schedule and make happen, and that is what we found out six months ago.

Stability is a little lower than EMC, because of the problems that we have had. We ran EMC for the last 10 years and never had any problems with it.

We have not scaled it up yet.

We worked with technical support for six months to get the splitting 3PAR issue resolved. We met every day, until it was finally resolved, but it took six months. It was good that the issue was resolved, but we were disappointed it took so long.

3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors. 

We switched because of the cost and 3PAR's four-node system, because they said we should get more throughput from the four-node system, since EMC is a two-node system.

3PAR is more complex to set up and start than EMC. There are a lot more things that you have to do and know that you need to do. Where with EMC, stuff sits there and runs.

The initial setup only took a few weeks to get it going. However, this is when we found out there were a lot of things that we did not have set up right. We just got these fixed about six months ago.

HPE assisted us with the initial setup, but they did not tell us about all these other things which needed to be done.

For the amount of downtime that we have had, I do not know if it was a good option. We might have been better to spend the extra money and stay with EMC, therefore not experiencing any downtime.

Purchasing maintenance: You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

Evaluate if the money savings is worth it. One of the problems that we have had is HPE spec'd it out for us. They underspec'd it, so this was one of our problems with performance. It did not have the amount of drives in it that we needed.

Pay attention to what you are spec'ing out and make sure that it will meet your requirements.

It is a good product, but it is very software driven, and it has some software problems. That will be our challenge going forward. Once we go out of maintenance, how do we keep the system up-to-date software-wise, if we have problems purchasing maintenance?

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is definitely part of it and reliability has to be there. When you buy something, you do not know what you are getting until you purchase it and put it into production. We did not do any type of try and buy. It was just off the word of the vendor.

It is for mission critical storage. We use it to keep high uptime. We have two 3PAR systems that we leverage.

Its performance is good. We have a lot of applications that have high I/O, and 3PAR handles those with no problem.

It has improved uptime, as well as speed to delivery.

The uptime for mission critical, because have website services that provides 24/7 roadside support. Therefore, we treat it like it is an emergency service and always has to be up.

We would like to see smoother firmware upgrades going forward. We cannot afford to go down. When we went down, it was very painful for all our mission critical system. When we bought the system, we were under the impression that we were supposed to do firmware upgrades transparently, and on the fly with no impact, and it was very impacting. However, this is the only time that we had any issues.

The reliability has been good, except for upgrades. We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us. The proactive support help us with the set up.

We have no issues with scalability. We have been scaling up.

Support was good. They keep wanting us to always upgrade. However, with this failure that we had, it has made us nervous moving forward.

We had HPE EVAs. Then, we had to move away from EVAs, and the 3PARs were the next ones in the line.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days.

We had HPE support help us. 

We have seen ROI with the product. Overall, the 3PAR has been performing very well.

We looked a EMC before Dell purchased them. Cost is what made us decide on HPE, plus we had a relationship with HPE. We have always been a big HPE shop. Otherwise, the products were apples to apples.

Evaluate your needs. Prepare a cost comparison comparing it to what your needs are. Sometimes, you may not need a 3PAR if you are looking for secondary storage. You may want to go with Nimble. You need to look at what your requirements are, then make your determination that way.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

1. Price
2. Best of breed
3. Reliability.