HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

I found it easy to deploy and simple to configure the storage.

We have had no problems so far.

One of the points that moved us towards 3PAR was we wanted to escalate it in a very high way.

We have not used tech support often, but when we have, they have been clear with us.

We have already some IBM storage, but we are not happy with it. After checking out other models, we decided to work with 3PAR. Not only because we are familiar with HPE, but also the features combined well with our services.

The initial setup was easy. However, we get stuck on preconditions. We were not aware of some of the preconditions. For example, the need for a different, separate IP network for replication. We had to rethink how we were going to implement it.

We are using 3PAR for production workloads, processing insurance policies and claims, file shares, and storage.

It has been performing well so far. We have had a few hiccups on the configuration side, but we have been working with HPE on them. For the most part, the product has been pretty seamless.

It had our organization start to think like an actual organization. A lot of stuff came out where the management of our workloads has improved dramatically.

We have gotten out of the mindset of physical is better; virtualization has taken hold and is starting to take off. We are going through the process of consolidation to 100% virtual. It has been incremental growth over a short period of time.

I live in Houston, so disaster recovery (DR) is very important, and the site-to-site replication is huge. I love that feature. We have our backups set up to replicate between two sites, then we also have our storage set up to replicate between two sites. The next piece would probably be to stack on a synergy appliance and be able to get our compute layer replicated between the two sites as well, which would round out that whole DR scenario.

What appeals to me is having mobile functionality. There is a vendor portal for 3PAR for whatever you want to purchase. I would like to see something from an administrator's standpoint, as opposed to having to go to a web browser, where you get a ping on your phone which says, "Your license is coming up for renewal," or, "You have a drive that is bad," in conjunction with stuff, such as InfoSight.

This is something which provides value back to me, because then I am not having to constantly babysit my vendors and say, "When do I have renewals coming due?" It is tough to get vendors who engage with you on that level. They go back and say, "Just a heads up, but these are what are coming due." Maybe they can backfill that with a mobile app.

My admins like having this functionality and direct integration, where it is like, "I need to do this, this, and this." If they could do it all from their phone that would be better. Though, sometimes it is tough, because of tiny phones, and all there is to use is a web browser. It can be hard to read on a smaller screen. If it is a mobile app, maybe it could be finessed into something where basic tasks could be done.

After we got past all the hiccups with the conditional configuration, the stability has been rock solid. I like the simplicity of it. We do not have to fidget with it a whole lot once we have it set up correctly. It has been stable and performs well, so I have no complaints whatsoever.

Scalability is incredible. We have a single server cabinet today, but we can grow it to as many cabinets as we need.

We go through a third party. We did not use HPE tech support unless we need to escalate an issue.

Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have.

I was not involved in the initial setup. When I came onboard, the product was already in the environment. 

We have already seen ROI. We have had it in the environment for about three months. It has been absolutely tremendous. Workloads have improved in performance. We do not have a lot of the same struggles that we used to.

It is stable. It does what its supposed to. You can feed it compute and storage as you need to. Whereas with our standard DL380 and ML350 servers, once you get to a certain point, that is as big as you can get. With this product, you can throw another shelf of storage or blade at it and grow it as much as you need to. 

As our workloads have increased, we have been able to finesse those into a good size to where they are valuable for us.

We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution.

Our organization looked at NetApp and Pure Storage. Pure Storage was just too expensive. NetApp was good, but they did not have anybody familiar with the NetApp configuration.

Our biggest requirement was ease of use. HPE seemed to have all the pieces that we needed, and it easy enough to get somebody trained up on how to manage it.

Understand your needs first. If you do not have a need for a highly technical solution, or you have workloads which are not high-performing. 3PAR is a perfect fit.

Understand your environment. Know what you are getting into. Research the different tools which are out there. Make sure that it is a good fit. It is nice to have the high performance stuff, but if you do not have high performance workloads, keep it simple and 3PAR is simple for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:  Our biggest requirement was ease of use. Scalability was another. We can scale it up pretty much as big as we need to. Those were the two biggest criteria.

Our customers use it for primary SAN storage. They have multiple business needs for their enterprise-class business, e.g., for high-end data processing, oil, and natural gas. We also have media customers, who are trying to use it. The businesses are predominantly all verticals who use it.

The performance is awesome. It is one of the best storage products comparatively to like size competitors. I am a big fan of 3PAR.

It is about the availability and predictably. The performance is also good. 

It is a rugged, performance system; it is trouble-free and a workhorse. We have a c7000, which with 3PAR makes a great combination for any workload.

The following need to be improved:

• The ability to contact the correct HPE resource to give you the right product. 
• We had to undergo at least two or three iterations before we finalized a product which fit. This took time.
• The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability. They are possibly all busy, or maybe at the headquarters less. I don't know the reason, but this happens every time we have to burn the midnight oil to get some solution out and running.
• 3PAR needs to keep on increasing its capacity.
• It needs more array support.
• It needs to be more data-driven. 

It is stable.

We have to go through the non-rolling part of it, and that takes time. We are waiting from HPE to hear (possibly next year) how better InfoSight will be coming into the picture. We are looking for more developments on that front.

So far, technical support has been good. However, we use our own in-house expertise to resolve issues.

We help our customers decide on purchasing new solutions. This is our process:

1. We have a headroom of about 20 to 30 percentage depending on the customer's business. The visibility for the next year on the future annual growth. 
2. Once we hit a headroom of about 60 percentage, we talk to the customer and tell them that they are up for either scalability, compression, or dedupe for their data. 
3. When the capacity hits about 80 percentage, then we buy a new product and app.

Earlier, it used to be complex. Now, we have our own skill set, which has made the installation easier. From the time we gather all the necessary data, it takes about a week (five business days) to set it up and have it running.

We do the system integration for our customers.

Not all of them see ROI, because there is definitely good competition available from NetApp and Hitachi. When you look at the ROI, those are the other two organizations who are making inroads. In terms of product performance, 3PAR is really good.

Cost-wise, it is a little bit on the higher side, but it is an awesome product. 

Other competitors in this marketplace are Dell EMC, NetApp, and Hitachi. These vendors are very competitive in terms of pricing.

Product-wise, it is good. In terms of cost, I will leave the choice to them.

Most important criteria that our customers select a vendor:

• Supportability
• Scalability
• Financing.

The main reason that our customers choose 3PAR is because of price.

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.