HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

It is our primary storage. The entire company runs off 3PAR. Right now, we are in a VMware environment. All of our virtual machines are stored on 3PAR, along with all of our EMR applications, practice management solutions, and email. All of our virtual machines are running off of 3PAR. Our file server is on there too.

The product has heavily improved the way our organizations functions. Before we got the 3PAR, we were running an HPE Generation 6 server as our storage server. It was slow, and we were getting low on space, so we weren't able to expand capacity that easily. Since we went to 3PAR, it has fiber connections connecting all the cabinets together. Therefore, data access has been tremendously better, especially when we have to constantly recall, all day long everyday, patients charts or when we are doing scheduling. We see over 2000 patients on a daily basis, so we have to have speed and reliability. By implementing 3PAR over the old, regular file storage server that we had before, it has drastically improved our patient care.

Reliability is its most valuable feature. We have multiple cabinets with multiple failure points, so if there is one failure then we don't have worry about it. It is easy to replace a part of the cabinet when we are up and running. We can replicate back over, then we are good to go. Our uptime has to be there, so we can continue seeing patients. That is the biggest part of the reliability that I am looking for.

I would like an easier user interface and setup to help with deployment. There were many areas of the setup where I was like, “Why don't we do it this way?” Therefore, some of the things in the user interface could have been more refined, so you don't have to click in 5000 different places to accomplish one goal. Less clicks means more efficiency.  

I feel like there is a big training gap. Obviously, the HPE engineers know all about the product and can come in and do the setup with ease. However, once they hand off the product to the in-house IT group, there might be a learning gap there. E.g,, I have to call them now every time I have a problem. 

I feel like they should've spent more time with us. They were only onsite for two days, and I feel like there should be more outside training to explain how to use the product.

It has been pretty stable. We have only had one major issue. It was because of a redundancy that we had set up. HPE sent us a new part, then we swapped it in and were back up and running.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with the solution's availability.

So far, we have not had to scale up. However, that day may be coming, and we actually provisioned our 3PAR to be scalable in the future. So, I think the scalability is pretty good considering HPE helped us design and implement it in a way where we can scale up when needed.

So far, the technical support has been good. We had one major failure and the technical support team sent us a part within four hours. Then, we had the new part, and it was everything was back up and running. We were able to talk to a 3PAR specialist to walk us through how to get everything reconfigured. So, there was virtually no down time.

The previous solution that we had was about 10 years old. It was an HPE Generation 6 server. We had some management changes, and it was time for a refresh which we hadn't done in many years.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There were a lot of different things that had to happen which was the reason why they had to send out the HPE engineers to help us. 

My philosophy is if you have to send out an engineer to do it, then it is probably more complicated for the end user.

Softchoice helped us procure the equipment, and HPE sent out 3PAR specialists to help us configure and deploy the product. Our experience with Softchoice was great.

It was pretty easy to deploy the product to begin with because HPE helped us do it. They sent product specialists in. So, deployment of this particular product was definitely easy-breezy.

We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice.

3PAR has increased our performance.

The product has definitely improved throughput. We are able to more efficiently see patients because all of our medical records and practice management software seems to run faster. Uploading images and charts is a lot faster. Recalling information in the exam rooms is faster. The overall throughput of data, going back and forth, is so we can more efficiently see patients, and it also helps increase our patient flow. We can see patients a lot faster, getting them in and out a lot more quickly.

Spend your time doing the research on the product and learn the system.

So far, it has been pretty reliable. It has been a set it and forget it type product, which has been great, except for when there are some minor issues. However, the issues that we have had were resolved fairly quickly.

We are flash and standard disk combo, or hybrid. Having flash though does not mean that we have faster performance. What it does helps us with is being able to see more patients, because we're not having to wait as long for applications to load or waiting for the data to get sent to where it needs to be.

Biggest lesson learnt: Why didn't we do it a long time ago?

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

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

It makes for less administrative overhead.

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

• Easy to use
• Easy to deploy

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did it all on our own.

The solution has increased our performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use 3PAR for everything. There is not much we don't use it for. Most of our storage is on 3PAR at this point. We run SAP, VDIs, and all of our server infrastructure on it for the most part as mission-critical applications.

• Reliability
• Speed
• Stability
• Easy to expand
• Easy to maintain

The solution’s deduplication functionality works great. We are getting about a 16:1 dedupe ratio on our VM workloads.

It is good and stable.

The availability has been great. We haven't had any outages from the 3PAR itself. Although, we have had two or three outages from the techs coming onsite and working on it, then causing an outage.

The scalability is good. Our storage is small. We don't have petabytes. We have an 8200 right now and only have 16 drives on it. Therefore, we have a lot of room for growth.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Currently, we are using all-flash, and with the dedupe, it makes it cheaper for us to deploy than other systems.

The call-in support is fine. 

The onsite techs have caused outages. However, this issue has been fixed as HPE is now outsourcing this.

We were running out of capacity on our 3PAR 7200, so we bought a new one.

The initial setup was straightforward. The seller came and installed it, setting it up. We had just enough money. It wasn't that big of a deal to start creating LUNs at that point.

We used a reseller, High Performance Technologies, for the deployment. Our experience with them was okay. 

They are not a good fit for what we need now. So, we have moved onto another provider.

The solution has increased our performance.

The solution has improved our throughput, as jobs and servers run faster.

Our licensing costs are all lumped together with everything else, so I don't know the breakout.

We looked at 3PAR, Nimble, and Pure storage.

Look at both the 3PAR and Nimble, then see which one is best for your needs. They are both reliable systems which work great. They just run.

We have had 3PAR for a while. So, it has reduced time to deployment by about 10 percent, which is the same as our older platform.

We have two use cases: 

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

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

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

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

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

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

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution has improved our throughput.

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

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

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

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

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

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

We run a High Performance Computing grid for Nuance and run GPFS on top of 3PAR. We are using SAS-based 3PAR for data and the 8450s, all SSD, for the metadata.

It has been performing great. We have had SSD based 3PARs since 2013 and we have only lost about four drives so far.

We are an R&D group, so it does not change the function. However, it improves the performance for our grids. 

It allows us to buy less capacity for performance. We would buy spindles just for the IOPs, so we were wasting space for the performance. Now, we don't have to.

The performance is the most valuable. We had the spindle problem that most places have. With the chunklet technology, it allowed us to spread our load across all our drives, unlike traditional raid groups that can leave some disks idle while other take the load.

It is more specific to High Performance Computing, but I would like to see a faster Ethernet connection. Right now, it is 10G. If they could do multiple hundred gigs to speed up the transfer from the array to the servers, that would be good. We are trying to get away from Fibre Channel.

When we went to 3PAR, it has the Call-Home function. Now, I do not have to do a whole lot for monitoring and problems. The sales engineer (SE) will show up with a drive, and say "You've got a drive down." Therefore, we don't even monitor it.

This makes our job so much easier.

We typically max them out. When we buy an array, we buy a SAS-based array with 480 drives. We use a clustered file system on it that prefills the LUNs, so it looks likes it's full the day that we get it. We receive sales calls asking, "You are beyond 95 percent full, do you want to buy another one?" However, we have not even started yet! 

When we want to scale, we buy another one. We spread the filesystem horizontally across arrays.

We used the technical support early on for tuning and configuration. We went pretty deep with tech support onsite to get the most out of the arrays.

We had the MSA P2000 series previously. We had 120 of them in one data center. Therefore, we went from the MSAs to the 3PAR, and the decision-making was based on the performance. Our issues was neither a throughput nor an IOP problem, but more of a file open issue. We have billions of files where you need a lot of different spindles with different heads moving around independently of each other. 3PAR provided this for us.

We first started with the 3PAR V400 series, which is two racks that had to be wired together to provide 600TB of storage.  With the 15TB SSD based arrays we replace 6 racks of V400's with 8U of 8450's. 

In R&D, it is hard to put an ROI on time. We are a worldwide company with Ph.D.'s working on the system 24/7. We don't want them waiting around so everything we do to speed up their process helps.

You can find cheaper storage but you pay for performance.  3PARs performance has been consistent.  I have seen other arrays slow down as the load increases due to controller saturation.

We had been an HPE customer before, and when we first started with the MSAs, we had an issue where HPE got a batch of drives in from one of their vendors that had a bad firmware on it. Basically, we had to replace 960 drives with the system online.  HPE recognized replacing 750G drives with 500G drives was less capacity than what we purchased so they gave us three more arrays just so they could match the space. That was a huge turning point for us going to HPE. We have had vendors say, "It's your problem. Deal with it." We have had vendors walk away from us. For HPE to actually come up and do this, that was a big deal.

We benchmark vendor solutions ourselves, and knowing the internal technology that makes it work is important.

We had a project where we did get somebody else's storage. It got to the point where we could not keep it performing enough to keep up with the load. We ended up just getting rid of it after a year of problems.

With our 3PARs, we have never lost data.

I would really push the chunklet technology. That is the main benefit out of 3PAR. The way it subdivides a disk into 1GB chunks. 

We deploy 3PAR across all of our locations, Canada-wide. It provides primary storage. It covers complex business needs. All of our financial applications sit on it, all of our databases sit on it. We also use it for unstructured data storage, and we're about 95 percent virtualized so it runs all of our virtual workloads.

At one point, we had HPE EVAs and when we were changing them out we didn't just look at 3PAR, we looked at all the solutions. We actually started out with a V400 which is an older version of the 3PAR - they didn't have the 7400s as yet - at our data center. Eventually, when the V400 became end-of-life, we looked at all the EVAs and by that time, they had come out with the 7400 and 7200, which are a lot less expensive and a better fit for a smaller organization. We were able to throw any workload on it and not worry about performance. It certainly made my job easy and my team's job easy in terms of maintenance and management of the platform.

The most valuable feature is the uptime. It doesn't go down. You can do firmware updates on it, no issues.

Integration with some cloud services would be nice. That's not so much of a 3PAR thing, it's more of an HPE dashboard and management platform. The 3PAR is also a part of it. We would like to be able to provision from the 3PAR and decide whether or not we are going to provision onsite or the cloud. 

And something that I know that they're already bringing in is cloud-based analytics, which they are bringing in from their acquisition of Nimble. When that comes to 3PAR, that is going to be a game changer for us, that predictive analysis.

It's very stable.

I think it does a very good job. We're a law firm. So we store a lot of data. The way a law firm operates, you can't really predict the growth of data because they don't know the cases they're going to take on. A given case may have a terabyte of data and another case will have 15 terabytes of data. You really can't tell.

So the ability for us to quickly grow the platform, scale the platform up, is important. But as important is ensuring that, as we scale, it doesn't impact the existing users. We definitely don't have much of an issue with the growth of any of the platforms, be it the 7200 or the 7400. For us, especially on the 3PAR, HPE tends to hand-hold us through most of the scaling so I really don't have too much of an issue with it. We have a huge 7400 in our data center with about 200 or 300 terabytes of data on it.

HPE has very good support on the 3PAR, including the predictive support. We have turned on the Phone Home feature, which allows the HPE engineers to figure out what's happening to the box. At the time they'll actually call us and tell us about the problem. We have actually had a replacement drive show up before we knew there was a problem.

They are one of the best in support, for sure. We're an HPE shop through and through except for networking. We are HPE for desktop, HPE for laptop, HPE for primary storage, HPE for backup, as well as HPE for archive.

The existing solution that we had was getting to end-of-life. And the workloads that we had on it were driving the IOPS through the roof. Everything was slowing down. We knew we needed a solution that would take us through at least the next five or six years. We really didn't know where the business was going and some of the things that it was going to do. We needed a solution that could guarantee us that level of performance. With any vendor, your platform is as good as the support. And traditionally, with HPE, we have had good support on the service side.

And with 3PAR we have actually had better support compared to what we had before on the EVAs, the older version of the platform.

In terms of the most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: 

• support is very important to us
• the kind of relationship that we think we will have with the vendor
• our relationships with account managers. 

And the reason those relationships are important is that we really can't deal with a buy-it-and-forget-it type of vendor. Even though you might spend less money to get the platform in, when you have a buy-it-and-forget-it vendor and you need to strategize, there is nobody there to help you to strategize. If you can't find the account manager, you don't know the direction that the organization is going. It's like you buy something and then you just drop into a black hole. So it's important for us to work with a vendor who will work with us.

When you buy a platform like a storage array, it's seven years. You have to have some strategy over the seven years. By year three or year four you want to know what you should do. Do I buy the next version? Instead of one platform, they now have six platforms. Where do they fit? So that kind of interaction is important to us. So we are looking for vendors that we think we can work with.

And price is also important. At the end of the day, even though HPE makes a good platform we still have to hold them accountable and make sure that they are working within the price range of their competitors. 

Features are important too. We were looking at a platform that would enable us to maximize our investment. Features like deduplication and tiering were an important part of our platform as well, the ability to move workloads from one tier to the next and to automate that using AO. In addition, features like replication, because we have our primary data center and our backup data center. And then, we're a highly virtualized environment so we needed a platform a storage platform that would be advantageous in that environment; one that would give us a better deduplication ratio built into the platform.

The setup is complex. I don't think it's something that we could take on ourselves. I'm not sure if HPE does the same thing now, but when we bought it, HPE was actually the one that did all of the deployment. They did the "birth" right through deployment. You have to update the firmware, you have to update all the drives, you have to update the controllers. It's a pretty complex platform. In fact, I don't even think they allow you to do it. I think when you buy it, they do it.

I think it's complex enough. Hopefully, some of the tools that they are deploying now will simplify that process. But for us, when we buy maintenance, we also buy the support for them to do it. Even though it was complex, it didn't really make a difference to us because we weren't the ones doing it.

From set up to burn-in it was probably about a week. A couple of days to get it up and running, but then they had to upgrade all the firmware, upgrade all the drives. Then they had to do the validation.

As a law firm, we don't really measure ROI for 3PAR. It's difficult for us to comment. I wouldn't be able to put a number on it. What I can say, though, is that 3PAR has enabled us to bring additional services to the organization that we wouldn't have been able to bring on. The organization has been able to focus on things other than infrastructure performance.

No one cares about the performance. They simply expect that a platform is going to do what it's supposed to do. A lot of us take it for granted that nothing is going to break which, with 3PAR, is probably true - we have never had that problem with 3PAR. It has given us the flexibility of just not worrying about the infrastructure. It gives the business the confidence to roll out services.

The business has grown by leaps and bounds because we have a solid infrastructure and a part of that solid infrastructure is 3PAR.

We looked at all the other major vendors. We looked at EMC back then. We looked at IBM. IBM had some storage platforms back then as well. And since the transition, we have looked at some of the new players like Pure Storage. We looked at SimpliVity and Nimble before HPE bought them.

Some of them were just young. Most of those organizations came on about three or four years ago, so they were just coming onto the scene. While they were very innovative with their technology, with an organization that young, it's a risk to buy a platform when you don't know how long they're going to be around. If we had known HPE was going to buy them we'd probably be using them.

Anyone looking into 3PAR or a similar solution needs to know the direction that the organization is going, and they need to make sure that they are are working with a vendor that is going in the same direction as the business is going. With hybrid IT, there are so many flavors of platforms out there. There's hyperconverged, the cloud is also in the mix, you have edge computing. So if you are looking for storage, you need a storage platform that can take care of the now, but from a manufacturer with the vision to know where the technology is going, so you feel like you can future-proof that platform. You don't want to buy a platform now and then, in a year and a half say, "Okay, well can my storage platform tie into this and this?" And they say, "No, no. We don't do that," and we have no intention of doing that. The important thing is to find a vendor that has a vision that matches your organization and provides the things that you want. You have to know what you want first as an organization, and then find the vendor that shares that vision with you.

Why do I rate  3PAR an eight out 10 and not a 10? It's a very complex platform to manage and it's not cheap either. It didn't really give us the level of flexibility we had for very, very small workloads. With Simplivity and Nimble, they are buying into that mid-range space. But back then, we didn't have a choice. 3PAR was the best choice, that fit everything that we had.

We use the product for virtualization environment. 

I am impressed with the product's online upgrades. 

The engagement of the tool's vendor is costly. 

I have been using the tool for five years. 

The product's support is both good and bad. 

Neutral

The tool's deployment is straightforward due to experience. Initially, it was difficult. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. A stable and performance-oriented product. 

This solution helps to store data for high-loaded and high-performing systems like business communications systems and telecommunications.

It fetches quick responses in milliseconds which can be within 40-50 milliseconds.

The tool has low storage and low performance. This can be solved by adding more disco to the solution. The product’s pricing is also suited for enterprise businesses rather than smaller ones.I would like to see better performance, UI, and compatibility with other products in future releases.

I have been working with the solution for ten years.

The solution’s tech support is good. You will get a dedicated account manager.

The solution is easy to deploy.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. You need to properly assess your needs before buying the solution since there are chances of overpaying. The type of configuration that you choose can make the price go higher or lower.