HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an enterprise storage that is mainly deployed in enterprise scenarios like banking and insurance.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten for stability.

Around 20 customers use the solution extensively in their companies.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten for scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward if it is a single server. If there are multiple servers, the initial setup becomes complex.

A single server takes an hour to be deployed.

The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features.

One admin is enough to maintain the solution if it is single storage. A complex environment with a heavy workload will need more people to maintain the solution.

I would recommend HPE 3PAR StoreServ to users based on their use cases.

Overall, I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten.

We are using the solution for capacity storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We are planning to change the storage soon. The tool is old. We are looking for enterprise-grade storage with NVMe capabilities, low latency, and higher responses.

We have been using the solution since 2018.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. The product is not for users. It is used by an application. We are using 70% of the total capacity of the tool. We are looking to change the solution.

The support team has good capabilities. The team has people with good experience.

Positive

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. The deployment took three to four months.

We have an on-site team. One or two people are required for implementation and deployment.

We choose the solution because HPE is a long-term partner. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is mostly used for storage.

The user interface is very good. It's impressive. I find it very easy to understand. 

It offers good scalability.

The stability is very reliable. 

There is the possibility of using it in a hybrid way.

It's a very popular product for enterprise storage. It's good for medium to enterprise-level companies. 

It's easy to set up the product.

Technical support has been helpful.

This solution is now at end-of-life.

We have found the solution to be expensive. 

I've been using with the solution for the last six years. 

The solution is very stable and extremely reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is scalable and easily expands. 

We have various customers on the solution. They might have thousands of users overall, however, we have four to five clients using the product in general. 

We have been satisfied with the level of technical support we get. They are helpful and responsive. 

We also use Primera and PowerStore.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. We also use Primera and PowerStore and the setup is pretty much the same for all of those. 

How long it takes will be determined by the capacity and the formats. It can take anywhere from six or seven hours up to 24.

We might need two to three staff members to handle deployment and maintenance It depends on the SLA and the organizational structure. 

There is a one-time cost once you purchase the solution. There is no perpetual licensing. 

It is an expensive product. 

I'm an end-user and handle storage only. 

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the product as it is at end-of-life. However, I would rate it ten out of ten. 

It is for shared storage for virtual machines running VMware.

It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far. 

The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected. 

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is stable. I didn't have any issues.

It is scalable. You can add storage quite easily.

We have only 10 users. It is a small system.

I never contacted HPE support because I have a selling partner,  but we didn't have many issues. So, we rarely needed any support.

Its initial setup was done by our partner, who has previous experience. So, it was relatively easy. 

It is reasonable. As compared to other solutions, it doesn't seem to be much different.

I tried to look, but it was more about the products that our IT partner had available than me choosing. They had previous experience with HPE and 3PAR, and they recommended it to us, and we followed their advice.

I can't compare it with other brands because we only have this system. 

I would advise having some reference implementation that you can test and see if it's good for your needs. In my case, I would have liked to have the opportunity to test it first to see if it's good for our use case, but I couldn't.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Performance is the only thing that I would like them to improve.

It's very similar to most of the other arrays, which are available there. 

The auto-tiering is something that we like. The provisioning is quite good. 

Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud. That's the other important aspect of using 3PAR.

The initial setup is simple.

The solution should have a smaller footprint. It's large compared to, say, something like Pure Storage, which is a lot smaller. 

3PAR is not as fast as Pure Storage. That's something that 3PAR needs to look at.

They need to look at the frequent breakdowns. It's not as lag-free as some of the other HPE Arrays, the enterprise flash arrays. That's something that HPE needs to look at.

The pricing could be lowered. 

In the future, I'd like to see it being controlled more from the cloud itself.  

The solution lacks reliability. This aspect has gone down in the last few years.

I've been working with the solution for many years now. It's been five or more at this point.

Reliability is one area that needs improvement. I cannot afford to have a 4-node storage array suddenly having 2-nodes reboot for no reason. This has never happened on Pure or even on Dell EMC Storage Arrays. However, I've seen that happen on 3PAR on multiple accounts. That's something that HPE needs to work on. They need to work on their codes and make them more reliable. It was reliable to start with, however, somewhere down in the last three or four years, they just slipped.

Technical support has always been quite good. I have no complaints there. They're pretty good, very professional. I'm satisfied with the level of service.

I've been using it for so many years that, for me, the implementation process is quite easy.

The costs can be lowered. They're a little more expensive, especially on the support side of it. Even with us being that kind of partner, and getting discounted prices, it's still a little expensive.

We use it in our company as well as our customer's companies.

We've used all different versions of 3PAR from the smaller arrays to the newest one, which we have, even their 2400, 2800 versions as well.

StoreServ is good storage, which needs to get implemented alongside other products to allow it to be utilized in the way it's supposed to be - especially in a private cloud environment. Some of the other storage arrays, which came after StoreServ didn't really fully feature. For example, Nimble. We thought Nimble would do that, however, that's not the case. Still, StoreServ is quite well-rounded as storage, which we can still work with on multiple traditional environments plus with the new environments - with cloud and DevOps running the show. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

We use it for our financial system.

The interface could be improved to match the system.

The initial setup could be simplified.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for three years.

We are using a 3PAR 8800.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a stable solution. We haven't had it go down.

It's a scalable solution.

Our experience with technical support was good.

We did not use any other solution previously.

The initial setup was complex.

I would suggest that you don't install it on your own, and you get help from an HPE solution provider or an architect to assist you with that.

We had help from an HPE solution provider.

You are not spending that money to truly get ROI on the equipment. You are basically trusting that device to keep you safe.

We have had it for three years and we haven't had one hiccup. It was money well spent. The $60,000 was well spent.

We purchased the total package for approximately $60,000. That was purchasing it outright.

We are an HP shop. It was natural for us to go with HPE for the storage solution. When we were looking, there were other solutions out there such as Dell EMC but we opted not to go with them. We decided to stick with an HPE brand solution.

I would rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ and eight out of ten.

The main use for this solution is for storing large data in the backend. It is used in many companies, such as financial institutions. Unfortunately, it has come to the end of service life, companies are going to other solutions because there are cheaper products, it cost too much to maintain the 3PAR.

HPE could improve by making an old flash system in order to compete with the current market. For the solution to be more competitive in the mid-range market they could increase the performance.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for approximately 10 years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we have approximately 10 customers using this solution.

The technical support is very good.

The time it takes for the installation depends on the number of enclosures. However, the average time is approximately six hours. The most time-consuming part is doing the scaling.

Most of the installation is done by the HPE because at the time of the installation there were not any engineers trained. We had approximately two engineers that were new to the product and we did the installation with the help of the HPE engineers remotely.

We have three engineers doing the maintenance of the solution.

If HPE reduced the price of 3PAR StoreServ they would be more attractive to mid-range companies.

At this time I would not recommend this solution because it is at the end of its service life.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a nine out of ten.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

I've seen a lot of data storage systems. It's the only storage system you can watch over the application time and it keeps measuring it. We have some thresholds on our end on it, a very good graphical user interface and reporting. 

There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has limited flexibility in building replication solutions. There are limitations to the number of IOPS the system can do. It's not bad as it is doing its job. However, for the application, if you need a toolbox, you can build everything concerning periodic replication modes of synchronous or asynchronous three-site, four-site, with supported cascading which requires you to buy an IBM product. 

It also takes a few hours to one day to upgrade the system and sometimes; it takes more time because, in some HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage, you have an eight-node system. If you do an upgrade, you do it node by node and every node might take more than an hour.

I have been using HPE 3PAR StoreServ for the past seven years.

Last year after summer, HPE had to locate replication groups getting stopped and took a lot of time to find out what's happening, and yet we still don't know what's happening over there. It feels like the message is quite clear after replicating from A to B, and it states that B is not responding very well.

There is a timeout, and it stops the replication group because there is no stability or consistency and is not good at that moment. So that might be negative, but when was the last time? I think in November of last year.

At one point, some remote copy groups stopped working, and we used a disaster recovery plan because, in production, we replicate everything from A to B and then split up into some remote copy groups, gathering together some data source and clusters. If one of those remote copy groups stops, you don't have DFP anymore and you have to restart them. And last year after starting one of those replication groups; we had some performance issues because they're trying to get in sync as soon as possible using all the resources, so we had to plan very well outside the business hours.

We have proactive datacenter care; I call it a storage advocate, and we can send every question to them and we get quick answers. They also help to find out if new releases are available and other services. For now, they have more insights on that. They have better sources sometimes, and I have better sources than them sometimes, but they do a great job and they also assisted us concerning the compression issue we had at the beginning.

It is quite difficult to decide on the cost. At one point, I was the project lead to cover with some people, but the price was important and we had its compression calculated. At that moment, it was fair because that was one of the things moving their product due to the cost of HPE 3PAR StoreServ as they were competing with Hitachi and IBM A9000, which I'm not sure if is still available. 

We have done total cost of ownership calculations over the past five years, and we also ask for some cost prices for the sixth and seventh year so that we can get some insights into what happens after those five years. We have some systems that are five years old and we keep them because it's flash data storage. It's still almost a three terabyte solid-state drive, and the support cost is not that high. We'll have a look after that. I see other things happening on the Hitachi boxes with all those license defeats. This is also positive for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, everything is on the license. When we bought the systems, it was the case and then I've been reading something about it. You can buy the rest of the licenses. If you buy a system, that will not be replicated to another system, then you get a license without replication software.

The job of direct channel support to HPE 3PAR StoreServ is not an end of life or end of support but HPE Primera has now replaced it and I hope they get all the functionality in there like the HPE 3PAR. I remember it seems like HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera have support for volume plugins and that will be a big game if they can implement volumes on their system because that kind of release is much better than the datastore level.