HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It's dynamic and easy to manage. It really meets our requirements.

We are in healthcare and we do a lot of imaging with huge amounts of data. If and when we need more storage space, extending 3PAR is easy. It has made everything more simple.

There aren’t many things to improve, but better monitoring would help us get a better look at everything we are doing. I would like to see more monitoring and graphs. It's not easy to pick up the correct numbers. Graphs would make it easier to measure performance. It could be that we don't know everything yet. There is a learning curve. I don't think we have seen the whole potential yet. Maybe I would give it a 10 rating soon.

We have had the solution for approximately 5 years.

It's stable. There haven’t been any problems. If something goes wrong, HPE support helps us.

Technical support is easily 9 out of 10. It's really good.

We weren’t using a previous solution, but we did upgrade from HP EVA. Once we starting using this solution, there were some problems with the performance. We tried to see what the reason was. The system was slow. It has been fixed, but at the time, it was difficult to get an idea of where the problem was. This problem was resolved.

I was involved with the installation, but I didn’t do too much. We had HP EVA and we upgraded to 3PAR. It went smoothly. There was a lot of old data that had to be moved to the new tool, and there were no problems at all.

Our shortlist of vendors including Fujitsu. We have something from them. However, I think it benefits us the most when we stick with one vendor, which is HPE. We try to stick with HPE and HPE tools.

All of the products with every vendor have their strong points. The strong point for HPE was that we had used HPE before. We were able to transform from the old system (EVA) to 3PAR, and that was the main reason at that time we switched. Now that we've been using it, we know a lot more.

For us, the most important feature is reliability. It must be tough because we work in a hospital and we want it to be solid. It must work always, always, always.

We count on that it works and it's always on; at a quarter of the price. The price and the reliability are key for us.

We need faster disks, but their solid-state disk takes care of that. But they are expensive. I think the solution is to spend more money.

It is really stable actually. We never have unplanned downtime. It is really on call for us. We upgraded from the HPE EVA systems to the 3PAR and I think it's better than our last EVA system.

We have had to scale up a couple times now because our imaging is growing about 30% per year. We cannot plan it; we have to upgrade it. The scalability is really good. We just put in more hardware and it starts to run.

Technical support is not so good. They don't understand us and we don't understand them. We had quite simple questions and tend to be transferred somewhere else.

Actually, it was HPE old technology. We really didn't switch anything. It's HPE already just old hardware, so we just upgraded.

I was not involved with the setup.

We didn't consider any other vendors because we did an upgrade from old HPE hardware. We can trust it. The whole process works very smoothly. No downtime; that is important for us.

We like the system, so I can suggest to a friend that 3PAR is okay.

The great value is the integration with the hardware and the software which really has great features that they develop over time. The system we bought back in 2012/13 and installed in 2013 is no longer in the system we are using now in 2016. This is because the software evolved so much and features were added to the system we purchased three years ago. It still adds new features that which we can leverage on the day-to-day use and make the storage investment more profitable and the storage resources more efficient.

The things I keep asking for are certain features which are now available but not to all the systems that are on the market. Sometimes they say we don't think the hardware you have can sustain this feature. We don't let you try it if it probably can't sustain the feature. There are other features where they say they don't support it on this type of spinning media, we only do that on flash. We don't have flash on our RA, so we are out of that. We get so many other features just by a software update, like transparent frame level between sites which is a huge thing. There's nothing really to complain about.

We introduced this solution into our system in early 2013. We were one of the first customers in Germany and Europe who really received the new 3PAR 7400 storage systems. We transferred all our data from our previous system which was the HP EVA system to the 3PAR system. We did that not by means of the online import, but rather the MPX solution. This solution transferred it over the wire, at wire speed transfer, block for block, the data from the EVA to the 3PAR. Over a weekend, we had all the data for virtualization which was the MRV sphere, the file services on top of Windows storage. We were able to transfer into the new system so we can break down the old system, erect the second new system then have everything merge across the sites again, like we had before.

There is no doubt that the 3PAR system is the most stable system we ever had in the storage space. When I look left and right at other systems we had and others still have in the university, we never had any unplanned downtime. We never lost any data. It really does the job the way it should be doing it.

There might be some mishaps, but nothing that's out of the ordinary, like losing the website for three days in a row. There's nothing like that. Of course, you have to do all the work to maintain the system. That's hard work, and you have to do it, but the system really rewards you for doing that.

In terms of scalability, we did careful planning on that in the beginning. I don’t think we will outrun the system within its natural lifetime. Once it gets replaced by the next generation of systems, whatever those might be, it might be 3PAR, or it might be something software defined. We don't know because that will be in 2019.

The support at HPE is not great, but it is good. We have some fights about it. That's basically at the stages where we have a way to think how it should be done. Then HPE has a supported way. Then HPE has a way that will also work. Basically, our way is the way that will also work. That's kind of our fight, but at the end, we settle for the best of both worlds. They're typically deliver what they promise. There's no worry about that with 3PAR. On the StoreEasy side, it's a little bit more of a challenge because half the product is HPE, and the other half is Microsoft. You have a lot of components that play together and if you get to the line where it is stitched together, sometimes you have just these problems. Is it Microsoft? Is it HPE? How do you get that together and then run into all the troubles you are with having multiple vendors included into that, even though you purchased a product from HPE.

I think it is a complex setup. We didn't set it up ourselves. We had an HPE partner come in to set it up for us. Then we only dealt with the maintenance in running it. The hardware maintenance is done by HPE. Other than that, we do it ourselves now. I think that's fairly reasonable. Have somebody set it up professionally, explain to you how it should work, and then you can take it from there. That's the way it was in old-fashioned IT. This is transforming with all the cloud stuff that's going on, with all the automation. I think that's really getting to a different level going forward.

We looked at all the major competitors at the time when we chose it. We looked at the EMCs, the NetApps, the IBMs, and the Dells. In the end, it turned out only one, namely HPE, not only for storage but also for server and all the other requirements we had, was able to bring it to the market at a price point that we were willing to pay. For the 3PAR, of course, the transparency between sites is valuable. That used to be the huge feature for NetApp. At that time, they weren't able to deliver it in the way we wanted it. Also HPE had to wait about half a year to be able to deliver that. It was just a software update, some more setup, and then we were up and running. I think with NetApp, it would have been little bit of a harder journey.

In terms of choosing a vendor, there is a mix of capabilities. You need to find someone who is proven in the field, in general. But if you want to go for latest products, we bought a 7400 even before it was announced. There is nothing in the field. You have to have good partners with whom you can work and with whom you can speak. It only becomes apparent over the course of a project how well of a partner you chose. If you have a product where you spent several million Euros, there's nothing that will work on the first instance. There's not anything that will work, but there are some things that won't work on the first instance. Then every partner shines. You have to ask how they get these problems resolved.

We have been an HPE customer for over 20 years. HPE consistently delivered on target. They are always in a bidding process. They can never be sure where they will get the next project because they run against the Dells, the Lenovos, and all the others. You have to have the right portfolio, you have to have the right features, the right product, the right services around it, and you have to deliver it for the right price. That's basically it.

For me, the most valuable feature is its flexibility. You don't have to pre-plan everything. With more traditional storage systems, you had to decide on the size of your RAID groups and what RAID groups you wanted. A lot of customers don't know that upfront. The nice thing about 3PAR is you can set it up and just let the system essentially tune itself.

Since 3PAR is self tuning and it optimizes itself to a better level of performance, then that translates to the application level and the business users can get their functions done quicker and more efficiently.

I think it needs to become even more automated, especially with all this new hyper-converged functionality, which is really easy to upgrade. It should also be self-healing. The upgrade process is still quite clunky for 3PAR. It receives an alert from itself and then tells you what to do. At the moment it's not that intuitive.

I've been working with 3PAR for about four years now.

We've had very little problems with stability.

It can scale as long as the customer's got the budget.

Technical support could be better. The guys you get on the phone generally are not very knowledgeable. It can often take a while to go through several levels of support to get to the solution.

Initial setup is relatively complex.

I think the license structure is quite transparent and fair.

I'd say are the main two qualities vendor must have is good product and good technical support. Obviously, they must also have a reasonable price.

3PAR is reliable. Although it takes a little bit of time to get set up, once you get set up, it runs itself. The other nice thing about it is that, the 3PAR scales from small to large nicely. Not like other vendors where you have to have several solutions for different size environments.

The data deduplication is one valuable feature. Another thing is the fast storage possibility and the whole clustering mode. Because we have a dual data center set-up and we wanted to have a high availability solution, we chose HPE 3PAR.

This has helped our organization with fast storage and the whole administration which is handled quite automatically. In this way, I can save one full time equivalent (FTE) a year in my team, so that alone is a great benefit.

I would like to see a more stable deduplication because with the deduplication we have right now, the percentage that we can save is not as high as we hoped for. The second thing I’d like to see is a more scalable and faster storage possibility without the main licenses increasing in cost. Now that we are in a full flash set-up, we want to go to a set-up where we can use flash and slower disks. While that set-up possibility exists, there is a whole license step-up that has to be done. It takes too long to do all the licenses. The license and the flexibility towards licensing needs improvement.

The stability, “knock on wood”, is okay. My feeling is that this solution is rock solid stable.

We are on the verge of the next step up. We implemented last year and now we are going to double the capacity. Based on how it’s going so far, it will be an easy step up.

We rely on our partner for technical support. They have a direct connection with HPE for the support. So, at the moment, we have no issues.

Before we were using the EVA solution and HPE LeftHand. We had a large IOPS problems with our ERP system. They weren’t stable enough and they did not have a proven record for us. Our ERP system has a large database, lots of IOPS, and these solutions couldn’t handle it. That was why we changed to HPE 3PAR that has a full SSD solution that could handle the IOPS. The main competitor was NetApp. We chose HPE because of the stability. We know HPE, we have a multi-year contract with them. We looked at several reference cases and those convinced us to choose this solution.

When looking for a vendor, stability and a proven track record are the things to look for. I would absolutely recommend it. When you need fast storage, high capacity, and deduplication, it's a good solution.

It's probably the most cost-effective, value-for-money system for the mid-market.

Besides from being cost effective, it's got a low-cost disk, upon which you can load any of your imaging stuff. Then, there are also the higher-cost disks, and the SSDs, which are phenomenally fast. SSDs make our systems work significantly faster. I've used SSDs before when I was a customer. Previous to this job, I was the infrastructure executive for a much larger company and we invested quite heavily in HPE 3PAR.

In the next release, I think I would like to see lower-cost SSD features. I would prefer to spend a little bit less there so I can afford to actually move my entire 3PAR system into SSDs.

The stability is pretty good.

The scalability is very good.

We have used technical support. Sometimes we used HPE's technical support out of India and it is quite difficult to understand them. I think that HPE needs to look at that. Besides that, the technical support is relatively good.

Before this solution, we were in a situation where the disk capacity we had continued to grow. When I joined the company three years ago, each system had their own stuff so we invested in 3PAR. We were just using all internal disks. I've used one or two other disk systems, but I don’t recall the names. We also used HPE's EVA, which I don't think was necessarily the best environment. We also used their XP environment which was very good. EVA was not as fast as it should have been. I think it was too costly. When we chose this solution, we were looking for the most value for our money. We had a short list of other vendors, but I've been buying HPE since 1982, I think, so it didn't take long for me to think about HPE.

I don't do this sort of leg work, the keyboard stuff, because I'm an executive responsible for other matters. However, I have a technical background, so I know quite a lot about it. The feedback I received was that it went very well. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.

I have heard of a solution called "Clear" or something like that. If you look at them, trolley-for-trolley, or pound for pound, I think that HPE 3PAR is probably the best system around.

The service and the support, as well as the technology. Yes, there are plenty of technical features that it offers, which we would expect from HPE. One of the reasons that we use HPE is because they tend to provide a quality product with all the latest advances in technology; so, its storage level, things like deduplication, all-flash array, real-time replication.

In addition to that, it's just as important that the ongoing support and monitoring of the system is proactive, and also the account management side. If we have particular challenges with either the specific design and build of the array or we need to upgrade, we feel like we have good support from the people who own our relationship to help guide us through that process.

It's a very critical technology component within our service offering. The storage sits central to everything else, such that it needs to be really robust. It needs to be highly available and it needs to be secure as well. All those things are very important. Because we're a service provider and we offer multitenancy, we need to be available to do that in a way such that we can host multiple clients’ data on the same storage system and in a secure fashion.

I suppose I’d like to see more security in terms of encryption on the device without it impacting performance. For all I know, that might exist. It’s something occasionally we get asked for. Our understanding has been that there are challenges around introducing inline encryption to a storage system because it increases the performance overhead.

Initially, some years ago, it missed a few important features. Until reasonably recently, one feature that was missing was the asynchronous real-time replication. In the last year or so, that's been introduced. I think that's taken too long. That was a little bit of a step back.

We've been using 3PAR for about five or six years.

Overall, touch wood, we've never had a major failure. We found it to be very, very stable. I think there are some challenges when it comes to upgrading the firmware on the system, and making those incremental updates. Apart from that, it's pretty rock solid.

I suppose that those types of highly scalable environments that perhaps larger service providers need; we don't really push the boundaries of the product in that sense, too much. There are some step changes you have to make, I suppose, as you grow, which you'd prefer not to. You have to invest, maybe, in more enclosures or those kind of things, whereas you'd like it to be a bit smoother.

From a financial point of view, which is probably the main challenge there, HPE are providing solutions for that in the terms of flexible capacity, where they help part share the financial responsibility and give you a more linear and smooth scaling of the system, and help you fund that.

Before 3PAR, we used the HPE EVA technology. We’ve always used HPE.

We have looked at EMC as an alternative to HPE 3PAR, but in terms of servers and storage, we are very much aligned with HPE and have been for over 20 years, so there are a lot of reasons why we use them.

One of the reasons we selected 3PAR was a similar reason that HP first acquired 3PAR: It's used by the world's biggest service and cloud providers. They're particularly focused on the multitenancy elements. It provides virtual domain technology that allows you to securely separate different customers' environments and where they store that data. You basically create multiple virtual SANs within a SAN. For a service provider who's doing multitenancy, clearly that's a big advantage for us.

The most important criteria when selecting 3PAR was the multitenancy piece, because we get a lot of questions from our clients around how we securely segment their data; if we can prove to them that our administrators can only log into their specific domain within that shared storage system and we can provide an audit trail.

Absolutely get the design of the system right. Work very closely with the right pre-sales technical teams. If you don't, it can be expensive to try and rectify that after you've bought it.

The features I like are the reliability, the cost, and support. It is quite an expensive kit, but the support we get and the reliability is what we pay for, and that's important to us.

The scalability has improved our organization. We can add to it, and we can future-proof it in that regard. It's flexible in that we can grow it or shrink it as our business demands require. It allows us to be flexible. Since we do have peaks and troughs in our data storage, we need to be able to either add, take stuff away, move things around for projects, and that's just what they can provide.

I would like to see, obviously, regular disks and more storage on them. I would like to be able to fit more data into the same amount of space or smaller. That's always where disk storage is going to go. They continue to innovate on the disks, bigger capacity disks in the same amount of space so we can get more storage for the same amount of room of physical space.

The stability is excellent. It has been very stable, and we do give the storage quite a good workout. It's busy all the time, most of the day, 24/7, most of the weekends. Our account manager says it's one of the most worked three-part storage devices he's seen. We do use it a lot. It's been perfectly stable, and we have, “touch wood”, not had any particular bother with it.

We absolutely have used tech support, and they have been great. They're very good. Luckily we haven't had many issues, but when we do, we contact tech support. They're usually very good at getting back to us, because it's automated tech support. They will actually call us, and tell us there's a problem before we even notice it ourselves.

We were using an HPE product, and that basically folded, as it got quite old. We went and looked around in the market for what is current, and HPE came along and said, "We can do that. Our replacement for this unit is now the HPE one, and this is what we recommend." We got some consultancy from them just to go through our requirements and our needs. They did lot of graphs and showed that it was right for us. It was recommended to us by them.

We considered Dell before HPE. We chose HPE due to its reputation. We had a relationship with HPE previously, and actually they were able to come in and recommend, and actually spend time with us to sit down and ask what our needs were, analyze, project and give us both sets of figures of what we need, how quickly to fulfill them, how long it would take, and that sort of thing. They were able to come in and do this. Other vendors really just tell us, "Here's what you'd like." That certainly won't do as we need to have some details in pre-sales. This solution does fit our needs very well. It is flexible, and we get good support with it. It's stable, and it works, and so I'm happy with it.

When looking for a vendor, look for reliability, backup, support, and reputation. It's got to be someone we know who has a good reputation in the industry. We do go with some newer sort of vendors as well, but we like HPE for their reputation. We know their stuff is good because we've been using them for years.

The most valuable features are the functions and the flash disks. They make our storage system much faster than previous systems.

The benefit is that it's one big solution and then we have all of the flash functions.

I would you like to see compression included in a future release. That’s what we are missing.

The stability’s fine.

Scalability is extremely fine.

Technical support is very good.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of lifecycle management. It was time to lifecycle the product.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup, but I think it was pretty straightforward.

My organization is a government authority, so we issue requirements and solutions, and the best price wins, when comparing the functions. Any company offering this type of enterprise flash array storage solution in Sweden could have made a bid.

Look at the vendor’s support and the setup; the benefits. HPE is great.

In a word, performance. It was primarily brought in to replace our EVA with something that was more capable from a performance perspective. We did not order solid state in our original configuration and we were looking for something which could grow with us, that could handle unpredictable VMware workloads better, and that didn't have the bottlenecks of a traditional monolithic array. Since that time, we have added solid state to accelerate the performance further.

My 3PAR array is too old to support File Persona, and I would love to be able to do that, but that's something that we would need more powerful controllers. We've got the first generation, so at some point we will get it, but we've got to wait for a refresh cycle.

3PAR stability has been there since day one. It's one of the platforms that has just been a joy to work with, because it changed the way that we are able to protect our entire environment. Being a telecom, we've got really good high speed links between our two data centers and we are able to do with 3PAR in a Peer Persistence configuration, and that's a feature where it clusters the two 3PAR rays together with seamless failover for LUNs from one array to another.

Now I've got disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery of a traditional replication technology. So Peer Persistence for us is kind of nirvana. It's been a great solution for us.

It started out just with VMware, then they added support for our Windows clusters. Most of the things we run on the blades are things that we can do this with. So if we have a blade fail, the great thing about a blade is the server profiles, move that to another blade, spare, in the enclosure, it comes back up in the same server running again, and if we have a storage failure, it automatically switches over in the backend, and our users never know.

We've got plenty of room to grow. We're about three or four years into our 3PARs and we've still got more than at least about 50% of our drive shelves open, so we have a lot more room to grow. With each generation of drive that comes out, we can install bigger and more capable drives in it, so we haven't hit any scale issues there.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

We were using HP EVA, and before that we were HP HSG. So when I first started we had two small HSG arrays that were primarily behind DMS and maybe a couple of other systems, but we had a very small amount of data on a san. VMware changed all of that. So we had all of this data running on EVA and we were staring to hit some limits, and the EVA didn't have good telemetry to let us know where the edge of the cliff actually was, so we were teetering right on the edge and about to fall off when we got the 3PARs in. So that kind of saved our bacon.

When we were evaluating potential replacements for our HP EVA storage array, we looked at Tintri and Tegile. We ended up doing evaluations for both of them.

Our company purchased Tegile for another project. Internally, my security officer didn't like the NFS of Tegile. That was kind of a no-go for internal use. Otherwise it has really great features for virtualization. That was really appealing to me as a VMWare administrator. We talked with them after a VMUG meeting and brought it in, did a proof of concept on it. It didn't perform as expected in our environment and we found out after the fact why. We would have needed a second active controller and a second disk shelf to get the full IOPS we were expecting out of it. That kind of killed our evaluation. It had good features, it had good reporting, which was one of our big criteria moving from the EVA. We wanted something that was going to let us know how it was performing. That was really strong, in Tintri. It's also been three and a half years since then, so that product has changed a lot also.

3PAR installation was an easy one. We had really good consulting services that came in and walked us through that process. We've done a couple of field upgrades and those have gone smoothly also, so 9/10.

From a storage perspective we've looked at some other vendors, but once the 3PAR 7000 series was announced with its capabilities, it made the most sense, being mostly an HPE shop.

I really love that platform. It's rocked for us. It's, like I said before, it's near nirvana for our environment, because we are trying to do something where we want to avoid disasters and have seamless fail-over, and I don't know of another solution that can accomplish that in our environment.