HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

Primarily, we use it for SAP storage. At this moment, we are running an ERP system on it. 

SAP is our mission-critical app.

All-flash is positioning our company for growth. We need to improve our systems with better hardware and systems. That will happen in the next three to six months.

It is easy to use and understand. It is also very stable.

I would like the documentation easy to find. There is a lot of documentation, but sometimes it is hard to find. You have to do a lot of searching to find it.

Before you could go on the HPE website, and download every driver that you wanted. Now, you need to have a service contract, or something else, to be able to get the drivers. Sometimes, you just need a simple driver, because your machine needs to restart and reinstall. If the machine is not under warranty anymore, it's hard to get the driver. That is a setback when compared to other solutions.

We are in the Caribbean, but we are Sint Maarten. Sint Maarten is French and Dutch. We are on the Dutch side. We speak Dutch and English, but because we are in the Caribbean, the way the system is set up with HPE in Latin America, a lot of times when we contact support, we get a Spanish-speaking people instead of an English-speaking people. I find that is a problem. When we are dealing with support to send somebody over, for example, we make sure to always put the emphasis on, "Make sure you send somebody who is English-speaking to us."

The product is really stable. The main thing is the solution is easy to use, and my administrators don't spend a lot of time on maintaining or troubleshooting issues because of it.

We never have a problem. The system runs. One of the main things is that we are in the Caribbean. The amount of power outages that we have compared to the US is more than 60 percent higher. The 3PAR can handle that. A lot of systems, when power goes out and it come back, they just don't work. We never had that. The 3PAR was one thing that always used to backup. I had problem with other servers, but not with the 3PAR.

It is very scalable and simple. The moment that you understand the product, it is straightforward to use. That is one of the most important things when it comes to our administrators. They don't like complex things.

Because we are in the Caribbean, sometimes our waiting time for a problem is a bit longer than when you are in United States.

For the solution that we were looking at an ERP system, and what we need to do with it, 3PAR was one of the best. On top of that, the company used to use another product called, LeftHand. After LeftHand, we moved over to 3PAR. When I saw the performance from LeftHand compared to 3PAR, it was a very good improvement and the way to go.

Speed is what we are all looking for right now. Before, people could wait for data, but now, the moment they wait five minutes, and are not typing, that's the minute they say the system is down. In the past, we used to have a different way of storing data. Since we moved over to the 3PAR, where we have two different sizes, the replication and accessibility are much faster.

The initial setup is straightforward. The moment that you are ordering a product, you pay for your support. When they come, there is communication going on between you and them. They check what is available for you. They send a person over, and that's it. After that, once the engineer has left, you have a working product.

We used HPE support, who are special for implementation and installation. When we order a product, we have good support from them. They come and install it for us. Then, we pay for the support after that. We use external support too.

I can't complain about the support. Usually, they send somebody over because we are in the Caribbean. When we install a new product, they have to send a person over, and they are with us a week sorting the system. The fact that we're doing it together is always a very nice experience, because it is hands-on. I find it really good. I'd give them a 10 out of 10 for that. For the last, I will say six to 10 years, we have had three different engineers from HPE, and they were all awesome.

We used to get somebody from Houston, but now, they switched us to somebody from Barbados.

We have seen ROI. We have less of maintenance. Our administration has been cut down by a lot. The people who used to administrate other databases are not buy improving the system. 

3PAR has increased our performance by at least 40 percent.

The solution has reduced our time to deployment by at least 60 percent, because there is less maintenance and time to spend on the storage.

Our licensing cost are $32,000 annually.

We are a fully HPE shop since 2000. Since then, we never really went over to a different vendor. We were approached by Dell EMC back then. They wanted to change up our whole server room and data center with their product. However, we are happy with HPE.

I don't really know the other products out there, but I love this product.

We are not running SSDs drive yet. When we move to SSDs, I think it will be much faster.

We are not yet using the HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity offering.

Biggest lesson learnt: if you have a good product, you have less maintenance.

We use this solution for mixed, unpredicted workloads.

This solution has allowed for massive performance acceleration of all workloads and massively increased availability (with peer persistence/transparent failover feature).

The most valuable features are:

• Peer Persistence, where storage failover is transparent to servers and there is no complex cluster-software integration.
  
• Thin Provisioning translates to reduced efforts in management on the server-side, where calculated growth of application data and LUNs can be provisioned on the first install.

The Unified Multiprotocol Access to the storage array needs to be improved.

We use it for our file shares, our virtual hard drives, and for all of our Hyper-V clusters. It stores everything, like backups. 

We have virtualized almost all of our servers, except the ones that require high I/O, like maybe our SQL Servers. Everything else in the entire organization runs off of our 3PARs.

We actually aren't all-flash, but we do have flash drives for our hottest data which is used most often. This definitely makes everything much more efficient.

The 3PAR arrays replicate offsite. Everything is safe and optimized. There's automatic promoting and demoting of blocks, moving hot ones to the flash storage and the less used ones onto Nearline storage. This optimizes everything and uses the resources to their best ability.

It has increased performance since we added the flash drives. Originally, we had 2-Tier storage (the Nearline storage and SAS storage), but adding the flash storage really improved performance by maybe 30 percent.

We can cut a VM quite quickly, so we can probably stand up a workload in half an hour. So, the time to deployment is quite good.

We have been able to back up our data more frequently now that we have everything on flash. It responds a lot faster, so the IOPs are a lot faster.

The failover/failback: Just to keep our mission-critical stuff running all the time.

The solution’s deduplication functionality has helped us save a lot of space. People save their files over and over again or email them around, then everybody has a copy of the same thing. Therefore, the deduplication is very helpful.

if it were easier for us to manage the product ourselves without having to get HPE to connect, because it sometimes it does take a bit to get the scheduling worked out with the HPE support. If it were simpler, then it might be easier for us to handle it ourselves.

The stability is very good. We have HPE connecting in remotely to help us with any of the major firmware updates. This keeps everything running great.

It has not failed us yet, so it is very highly available and error free, so far.

We could add more drive cages, so I'm sure it's quite scalable. We haven't hit our limits yet, so we haven't had to do that. However, it's supposed to be quite scalable.

Technical support is very good. We bought the support package where they will connect remotely to help us with upgrades and firmware changes. So, it's very solid.

Previously, we had all sorts of different storage arrays, e.g., the MSAs, which are also from HPE. We also had just servers with hard drives in them scattered around everywhere. Now, we have centralized everything onto the 3PAR arrays. 

It was a little complicated to set up originally, as it takes quite a bit of rack space and we are a small organization. Once it was set up, it was well worth the effort.

We bought through a reseller called PC Corp in Alberta, Canada. PC Corp was very good.

I would definitely recommend it. It is a good fit for our organization, and if it works for you, that would be great too.

File Persona is now included, so we might explore doing file shares straight off of the 3PAR array.

We do not use HPE GreenLake.

Biggest lesson learnt: The initial pain is worth it.

The primary use case would be disaster recovery and uptime. 

The entire company and our fire pump division, for the most part, are run on this solution.

Getting rid of spinning media is our primary objective.

We had a major down five years ago where we actually lost our entire data center, which caused the company to go down for over 12 days. In that time, we bought and implemented a full 3PAR product to get us up and running. We were able to buy a smaller set of storage and invest in the actual technology to get our company back up and running. Then, we were able to buy a second 3PAR to allow us to set up a secondary data center and immediately replicate over to that and succeed in designing a DR strategy without having to relearn everything.

We don't use InfoSight for management. We use it to help us determine if we have our workloads in the wrong place or set up incorrectly.

My users are happier because the response time is there. We haven't really analyzed the true IOPs, or anything. We are just trying to give them a solid user experience.

The solution has improved our throughput. It has allowed our SQL databases and report servers to run at a much higher capacity. Reports which used to take the better part of a day can now run in under an hour.

• Uptime
• Technical support
• Speed

The solution’s deduplication functionality does a really nice job for us in that we are able to leverage the money in a more productive way.

We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly.

The upgrade in the firmware and software need improvement.

The user interface is still a little kludgy.

It is very stable. We have had no downtime since putting it in.

We have not found the maximum scalability yet. For what our initial purchase was, we have been able to grow over the past five years. It has not limited us in anyway with our initial investment.

When I can call and talk to somebody who does not repeat back the question I am asking and we can get to working on it, whether it takes an hour, a day, or a week, I have support for the solution. That is the most important thing for me.

We start of with the EVAs, and as the EVAs aged out, we were moving up. However, it was the EVA that failed on us and 3PAR was just the next, better solution for our scale of need.

The initial setup was complex only that we had never seen the solution before. There were some decisions that we didn’t understand the implications of in the beginning that we were able to redesign as the years of owning it allowed us to better understand what were being offered and how we could better utilize it.

We used Logicalis for the deployment. Our experience with them is wonderful. We appreciate them being our partners and implementing all of our solutions.

The solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by about 60 to 70 percent, because I am able to spin up new systems within four to six hours, where it used to take me two to three days.

Think seriously about the very long-term: the three, four, and five-year costs of the solution. Will it still be there doing what your company needs? Do not just look at the initial capital outlay of year one.

We didn’t really look at anybody other than HPE because we wanted a one stop solution for a single technical support problem, and we knew from Locigalis and from our years with HPE that they would give us an enterprise class solution the first time out.

We like it so much that we are in the process of evaluating our next three to five year roadmap. We are planning to reinvest in the next generation of the systems.

Everything can always get better, but I’ve been very happy with it. I have not been called in during the middle of the night because of it. It is the right solution for the right people.

Biggest lesson learnt: You get what you pay for.

We use 3PAR as our centralized storage for database use, mostly. It's also data stores for our VMs. We have a few Oracle Databases running on 3PAR and we have our production VMs running on 3PAR, as well.

Before using centralized storage, we needed to make sure that we have enough physical disks installed in a server. Now, we know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers. Again, in our case, it's mostly the databases.

All-flash positions our organization for growth in a way, mostly for performance, because again, we're using all-flash for the performance that it provides, and we have critical databases running on it. It's providing day-to-day functionality, the way I see it.

• The ease of use, from one perspective
• The centralized storage
• The ease of copying, backing up, and moving data from one server to the other

I would like to see more visibility regarding issues - active alerting. I know that InfoSight is currently trying to do what Nimble did for its storage. If it were proactively alerting regarding maintenance or something that's going to go bust, it could be very useful for us.

All in all, it's a stable solution. From an availability perspective, we have it in both data centers. 

We found one huge bug when we implemented the solution, a critical bug that eventually crashed and shut down the storage, which is something that we cannot live with. But since then, a patch was provided for this issue, and over the last a year-and-a-half we haven't had any stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is problematic. We would like to scale with our current infrastructure but we can't. We need to actually buy additional components, not just add disks. We actually need to buy additional controllers and, eventually, another storage unit. So it's not good enough.

The technical support is not good. Usually, when we have a problem, it takes ages until we get a response. We need to escalate several times, using HPE and the partner in Israel to make sure that we get the appropriate response. Usually, what we know or what we find out right away, is the same response that we get from support a week or two later - that something is happening. And only a month after that do we get a good solution that we can do something with.

From a technical perspective, we understood the benefits of having centralized storage. From that point on we looked for what was supposed to be the right solution for us. Eventually, we zeroed in on the 3PAR solution and not the competition.

The initial setup was complex. It's not a straightforward integration. There are a lot of parameters that you need to configure, and each parameter affects a lot of other things. Even though we used a partner for the implementation, after the installation in the data center we needed to rebuild everything and reconfigure everything several times. At the beginning, it wasn't good. Now we are stable so, except for the performance issue, everything is working as we expect it to work.

We used an integrator. The guys are great, responsible. They did what they were supposed to do. They worked with HPE regarding the sizing of the storage solution, and it seems like someone there didn't do his job correctly. I don't know if it was HPE or the partner. But eventually, we had a problem.

It's a much more expensive solution than just buying local disks. On the other hand, it provides us a centralized point of management for all our storage. I can't tell you the exact ROI, but the simplicity and the centralization of the storage probably provide us with some kind of a return.

We looked at NetApp. We also evaluated hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix, but it was not relevant at the time. And we were approached by HPE regarding SimpliVity but it was not relevant as well, at the time.

We went with 3PAR because, at the time, we were convinced that this would provide us the solution that we need, from several KPIs that we were looking at. We were promised performance that we didn't get in the end.

Check the performance and every technical aspect that you can, as much as you can. Don't trust anyone else telling you otherwise. Test everything yourself.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that having centralized storage is the right way to go and that sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected.

What every IT guy will tell you is that we disable the dedupe, mostly because of the hit on the performance. Regarding InfoSight predictive analytics, we tried to use it. It was not that predictive because it doesn't give as much information as we were told. We had actually turned it on and we had a few critical issues but we got no alerts from InfoSight regarding them.

It increased performance for a while, but then, as we grew, and we did not grow significantly, performance dropped down. For a few of our critical, online systems, we went back to using the physical disks and not the centralized storage.

It was supposed to improve throughput but it was not enough, not as much as we were told before we bought the product.

We have talked about using the flex-capacity offering, HPE GreenLake, but we haven't used it yet.

From our experience, I would rate low, but I don't want to rate it low because from a technical perspective, it's a stable solution, it works. I would give the product a seven out of ten, even though our experience has not been that good. A seven is fair at this point.

The primary use case is production data. The mission-critical app that we run on this solution is SQL.

1. Performance that it gives me.
2. The speed of how we process data on the manufacturing floor.

• Ease of use
• The speed of the performance of the unit.

The solution should have better integration with legacy systems.

We would like memory-driven performance on the storage.

So far, the stability has been good. We have not had any outages.

In theory, the scalability is supposed to be fast, but we don't know until we try.

It does position our organization for growth by making things faster and easier.

The technical support is very good.

We were previously using NetApp.

We needed a new solution because:

1. Our old unit was very old.
2. We had requirements from our production.

The initial setup was complex, due to calculating the amount of performance that we needed for the floor.

We used Compucare for the deployment, which was rocky at the start. Now, it's very stable.

We have not seen ROI yet.

The solutions has increased our performance. We went from 24,000 IOPS to around 70,000 IOPS.

The solution has improved our throughput. We have less downtime.

We didn't have a shortlist. We worked directly with HPE.

The reasons for switching to HPE were:

1. The performance. 
2. The technology that HPE uses had more integration with our servers.

Never go with your first impression regarding 3PAR. They say that hybrid is the best thing anytime, but if you read the small print, it depends on how you use it, etc. So, we went with an all-flash for that reason. So, don't go with your first feeling. Investigate and try it out. Try to get a demo to make sure it works.

I like that the solution's availability gives me: 

• Ease of use
• Performance
• Good support from HPE.

The primary use case is DR. We use it in the automation industry.

I has helped our organization with DR and replication of our VM environment and Oracle databases.

The solution has improved our throughput, which has improved our performance.

It has improved our company's performance.

It has an easy implementation and the support is awesome.

We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution.

The integration has room for improvement.

The stability is awesome.

The scalability is awesome.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. We have more places for Oracle applications, VMware, and servers.

We have had to contact technical support. We have had no problems with them. The support is great.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has increased our performance by about 40 percent.

This solution has helped our organization reduce time to deployment by 50 percent.

The performance is great. 

It is for the storage that we use. Our entire banking system is on it, which is mission-critical.

It has provided us our solution for VDIs, so it has been working very well.

Any infrastructure is an enabler that provides services for the applications that you run.

The ability to have a solid state and deduplication on that solid state.

The deduplication functionality is great. We have seen a lot of benefits in the deduplication ratio. So, it has proven that it is a good cost savings.

It is easy to manage and performs very well.

There is always the case where there are the little things that bother you, but you live with them.

There are features that we would like to deep dive into more, but that is where the consultants would come in and help.

We are using Synergy, so it is the next evolution of blades, which has been great. We have had no complaints, except for the problem with the Spectre vulnerability.

The scalability is great, because if we need to, we can just turn on a blade and start paying for it. Also, if we want, we can shut it down, and the next month, we don't pay.

The technical support is good. We haven't had any major issues where we have had to call them, as of late, so it has been fairly good. They help us when we do our upgrades, but that has been going well.

At the time, we needed a better solution than our previous solution (Dell EMC) for storage, so we looked to HPE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We been setting up 3PARs for 10 years now. It is like second nature for us.

The straightforward setup also applies to experiences with Synergy and Flex Capacity.

We mostly deployed it ourselves. We also had help from HPE, because we purchased directly from them. Our experience with HPE was great. This is the case when they give you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services.

We have seen ROI.

We did not look at other vendors beside HPE. We were one of the first adopters of 3PAR. We had one of the old T800s. We were early in the adoption of HP 3PAR.

Management made a decision to go with 3PAR, because HPE came and made it appealing.

It is a great solution. There are others out there, but we have always been using 3PAR. We are pretty happy with it.

We are using the GreenLake Flex Capacity offering. At first, the service was great, because we had a configuration that was meeting our needs. However, when the issue came with Spectre, and then the L1TF vulnerability came out, those really affected us, so hopefully we will find a solution that meets our needs going forward. That is what we are looking at now.

We just started getting into InfoSight predictive analytics. It is something that I want to explore more, and something that I want to get going.

I can say that, "All-flash is the way that the future will be."

It is storage for our SAP environment. SAP is the mission-critical application that we run on the solution.

The snapshotting capability allows us to do a database replication very quickly. As a result, we have some applications which need a fresh copy of the production database everyday, and we are able to give that to them by eight o'clock in the morning.

Its snapshot capability is the most valuable feature, because replicate our databases from production to nonproduction for development. This allows us to do it very quickly.

The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent.

It has latency issues.

It seems pretty stable. Once we got over the birthing pains, it has been pretty reliable.

As long as the array is not full, it is available. We filled it up.

It is very scalable. We can grow it up to the size that it will contain. Then, we have to move to another array, a bigger one, if we have to. However, my understanding is that is a pretty seamless process.

We moved to 3PAR from a different array, which was a smaller array with fewer controller cards in it. So, 3PAR did not increase our performance, and it has increased our latency by at least double.

We went with 3PAR because we have HP-UX systems. Since we already knew HP-UX, they offered us a significantly cheaper solution than the one that we had for storage.

The first array that they sent us was in some type of a factory mode. We didn't find that out until we loaded a bunch of data onto it, then we had to back it all off. We had to replace the array, which was sort of painful.

We are actually a federal customer, so we get the HPE Federal direct team helping us. Our experience was good, except for that one problem with the first array.

We evaluated Dell EMC, HPE, and some other competitors. We went with HPE because of the price point.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using 3PAR is the snapshot capability.

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?