What advice do you have for others considering HPE 3PAR Flash Storage?

The setup is pretty straightforward but HP only allows their engineers to do the setup. This gives us peace of mind for the setup.

I would recommend this product for sure. At a minimum, I would rate this product at eight out of ten. I give it an eight because of the support, that I can't get support in my country. This is the worst part. Support cannot be sold until we are out of the sanctions. It's not anything to do with HPE, it's political issues.

We are happy with what we have in place. You should consider getting this solution if you are in the process of acquiring or switching. I would suggest giving this a good look. The biggest lesson we have learned from using the solution is the stability. This is what I always tell people. The stability is what surprises us. It's a stable solution. In terms of growth, we are planning on going from 35 terabytes to around 50 terabytes in the six months. We will probably keep using 3PAR but we may change to something better. We are here at HPE Discover 2019 looking for other solutions. If we cannot find something better we will continue using the same technology, the 3PAR. I would rate 3PAR at eight out of ten because we love the stability but sometimes we still lack upgrades for the solution.

It's not necessarily about the price. The price is certainly an important factor, but what the solution does and how it supports you is even more important than price. Our biggest lesson was that we need to do our homework and make sure that we're going with a vendor that can support us in the long term. I would probably rate this as eight and a half out of ten. It does what it's supposed to and does that very well, even if there are areas to improve on. More integration with cloud would be great. But what it does, it does very well.

Using this solution has increased our system performance. We will continue to use HP products in the future, and this is a solution that is worth investing in. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's a great product. Their support is great. We even have the ability to have loaner products provided to us as an option. We can have the products come inside and test and use them before we make our final decision. That helps with the analysis and recommendation process, so it's been a great partnership with HPE. We haven't really had any significant issues. So other than that it's able to provide what we need and that the customer service is great, we haven't learned any big lessons from using it. We don't use too much deduplication, but from what we've seen so far, it seems to execute what we need it to execute. Once we get this issue that we've had recently resolved then I would say it's a ten out of ten. We haven't had any real issues with it.

This product has met our expectations. Once we got past the minor configuration issues, it's been smooth sailing, so I'm very happy with it. It is important to understand the terminology upfront because it helps prepare to do the actual implementation. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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."

I would recommend 3PAR, especially in the financial industry where data is mission-critical. It's very good.

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.

Look at HPE's roadmap for 3PAR, SimpliVity, and Nimble. Do your research, then pick the right one that works for you with the future that you envision. I'm highly interested in using InfoSight going forward. One of the things that I have always tried to do is get to where I had just one dashboard for everything from managing from the desktop up to my Internet perimeter security. I want to look more at Aruba Networks and Cloud services to see how that might be able to help me integrate my WatchGuard perimeter security. I'm looking at Commvault and switching to Commvault for my backups, because eventually I just want one dashboard that shows me everything: servers, storage, switches, access points, and security perimeter points. That is the platform that can get me there. That's one of the reasons why I'm at the conference is to check out HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity. Biggest lesson learnt: Don't be absent during the design phase.

The performance is great.

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?

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

Check out HPE. They are well worth it. It pretty much checks all the boxes that I have concerns about moving forward. This version will do dedupe better. We will start to use some of the data classifications where it tiers the storage for us. Of all the bubbles that I care about, it checks them all. We don't use dedupe on our old 3PAR. We're hoping to use it on the new one. We don't use InfoSight at the moment. It's something we're looking into, though. I'm very happy with it. It has performed as I expected.

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.

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.

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 All-flash has better performance, which means that our applications are faster. Our performance has increased by twenty to thirty percent. The biggest lesson that I learned from this solution is to try something before you reject it. My advice for anybody considering this solution is to test all of the functions that the vendor tells you about. It is important to see how it works in order to see whether it suits your business. This is a good solution, but it is not perfect. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

3PAR provides high performance and HPE's service is good. In terms of HPE GreenLake, we have just introduced this service to our client. We expect it will help with our client's capacity management efforts, but for now we have just presented and explained the service.

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 solution’s deduplication functionality is alright.

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 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.

It is a solid product. It works really well for our situation and what we need at a disaster recovery site. It is fairly simple to set up. We do not use InfoSight.

I rate the product itself at nine out of 10, but support gets a four out of 10.

We are happy with it. However, there is always room for improvement.

I will recommend going with the all-flash arrays, especially on 3PAR, because that is something that I have personally experience with and I have not seen any issues.

You couldn't go wrong with the 3PAR system.

I would recommend 3PAR or Nimble. Nimble is all-flash arrays, if you have the budget. Otherwise, we favor 3PAR, the 8000 and 10000 series. I rate 3PAR at nine out of 10 because of the provisioning, the interface; and now there is InfoSight. We are planning to integrate all our arrays. I see that as valuable.

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.

Definitely check it out, especially in your hypervisor environments. That is where the compression has really been a huge benefit for us, allowed us to regain some data center floor space because we're now able to put more of the environment in a smaller number of 3PARs. It's almost a 10 out of 10 but the reason it's not is that some of the upgrade processes have been a little challenging, not always technically, sometimes services-oriented. But other than that, the product itself, the ease of use and the value it's provided for us make it a valuable asset for us.

I would definitely recommend evaluating it. Depending on what you need for your business, it could be a good fit. It has been rather stable, other than the couple of hiccups that we've had. Once we've gotten through those, it has been rock solid for us.

* Get a proof-of-concept * Draw a list of testing criteria * Have a testing matrix * Be clear in your objectives 3PAR is a great solution but it has a big physical footprint for the amount of data. There are other solutions out there. If you don't necessarily require the performance and the redundancy, there are other things to consider. But, it's a really solid storage appliance. I would give the 3PAR an eight out of 10. Because we don't have any issues with it, it's hard to complain about it. But obviously giving it a 10 out of 10 would mean that there is no work to be done. I give it a strong eight.

If you can afford it on-premise, and that is the way you want to go, then it is a good solution. Overall, it has been a good product, and it is stable.

Give the product a good, hard look, because HPE does a very good job. They are a market leader. They are not a small player in the space. You can be very comfortable when dealing with a company like HPE. It is doing everything that we want it to do. We are not that big, so we did not have a lot of crazy requirements. Therefore, it is doing everything we want it to do. The other big factor is that it is easy to use. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: * Price * Easy of use * Ability to have two arrays back each other up. In case one of them has a problem, the other one can take over.

It's a very good solution. It doesn't come without some of its own quirks. We had a few struggles to get certain things working and HPE worked with us through them. Not everything was well-defined in the HPE White Papers. It definitely required working with HPE engineering and the solutions architects to get through that. That being said, the promise of what 3PAR was supposed to do for us, we were able to achieve that.

Go out, do your research first on the different products that are out there and make the judgment for yourself. The information is out there.

My advice would be, make sure you know your workloads going into it and how you will best be able to utilize a solution, especially when deciding what disk structure to get and how to lay it out. Overall, I would rate 3PAR at eight out of 10. The biggest issues we had were performance issues with the older version, but this one has been doing okay.

I've had a great experience with it and I would recommend it to a colleague. I rate it at nine out of 10. It's a very stable platform, it's very easy to learn how to use, has an easy user interface, tasks are very simple for an admin. As I said before, you set it up and you don't have to worry about it after that. With HPE you're in good hands.

The performance is pretty good and the usability is excellent. The only thing which will downgrade it is the stability.

Definitely learn the features of the product, what it takes to actually administer and manage it, what type of resource load is also required. It's not necessarily a tool that enables anyone who says, "Hey, we bought a SAN, go take it over." It really takes someone who has an understanding of and background in the tool, maybe even a little background with HPE. Just make sure you fully understand what you're getting into. I would rate it a nine out of 10. We've been fairly satisfied with the product, we haven't had any issues. It's definitely not something that you can easily jump into without that initial set of knowledge to help you understand how to use the tool. From our perspective, the way we went into it was backward. We bought and then learned, instead of learned and then bought. That has been a part of our hurdle but, overall, it has been a good product.

Just try it out. Do a PoC side-by-side. It wins. Most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: * The technical aspects of the price * The return on investment * The support. You are not making a decision based on just one or two things. If you are, you are not doing a good service for your company or your stakeholders

They do great things. The system is great. It is just a matter of cleaning up some of the support stuff, then the enhancements that are not there yet. Hopefully, they are coming in with InfoSight. That is where it could be better. Never have blinders; everybody has their favorite product, but do not turn away from keeping your vision open about a solution. Keep that in mind when you are looking at a product. Most important criteria for clients when they evaluate a vendor: A lot of that gets into supportability. What do they have for a track record? How easy is support to work with? How efficient are they? When things go wrong, I do not want be scrambling. How easy is it to get to support and get them on the line (an efficient use of support). As far as feature-rich, how does it work with everything from an availability aspect? Everybody talks about backup, and lot of times, they are talking about it after storage. They should be talking about it together, because storage is part of backing it up. The business should be asking: Am I backing it up fast enough? Are my RPOs and RTOs inline with what the business SLAs are? When we start talking backups and the availability aspect to a lot of businesses, they do not seem to be defining their SLAs. They often do not have any. That is where we find that we are having more of a discussion which helps drive a lot of what we need to do. You do not want buy stuff, then say, "What can we do with it?" You should be defining what you want to do with it, then purchasing. That is a lot of how we are changing the purchasing process.

It has been very beneficial for us. The most important criteria when evaluating a vendor: * Resiliency * The data replication features * An all-flash array * Performance.

Product-wise, it is good. In terms of cost, I will leave the choice to them. Most important criteria that our customers select a vendor: * Supportability * Scalability * Financing. The main reason that our customers choose 3PAR is because of price.

It does a great job and I do not have to worry about it. It worries about itself. It tells me if there is something wrong. Go to Houston, the executive briefing center, if you can. It is very good because you get a very deep dive and you can ask questions to obtain information. I did it and thought it was helpful.

I would have rated it higher, but there was a length of time that it took to resolve and get the product working the way we wanted it to. This happened on day 60 rather than day one.

Be extremely careful if you want to use the iSCSI feature of the 3PAR. It was not designed for it initially. We were using low-end storage from HPE. I was hoping to get something a bit midrange in their storage, in terms of price with the reliability. I am still hoping that it will be reliable despite poor initial performance previously. As the problem was fixed, I am hopeful it would be reliable in the long run. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We need something stable and reliable in the long run. Our contracts are at least five years, and they can be extended all of the way to seven to 10 years.

Evaluate if the money savings is worth it. One of the problems that we have had is HPE spec'd it out for us. They underspec'd it, so this was one of our problems with performance. It did not have the amount of drives in it that we needed. Pay attention to what you are spec'ing out and make sure that it will meet your requirements. It is a good product, but it is very software driven, and it has some software problems. That will be our challenge going forward. Once we go out of maintenance, how do we keep the system up-to-date software-wise, if we have problems purchasing maintenance? Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is definitely part of it and reliability has to be there. When you buy something, you do not know what you are getting until you purchase it and put it into production. We did not do any type of try and buy. It was just off the word of the vendor.

Support is great. The hardware is great. Unfortunately, we are running on an older version. I would recommend taking a look at it. I have been looking at the newer options and technology. Not much has changed with it, so the expectations are still there that it would be a solid choice for somebody else.

They are very good, and I like the product.

Evaluate your needs. Prepare a cost comparison comparing it to what your needs are. Sometimes, you may not need a 3PAR if you are looking for secondary storage. You may want to go with Nimble. You need to look at what your requirements are, then make your determination that way. Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: * Price * Best of breed * Reliability.

Understand your needs first. If you do not have a need for a highly technical solution, or you have workloads which are not high-performing. 3PAR is a perfect fit. Understand your environment. Know what you are getting into. Research the different tools which are out there. Make sure that it is a good fit. It is nice to have the high performance stuff, but if you do not have high performance workloads, keep it simple and 3PAR is simple for us. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Our biggest requirement was ease of use. Scalability was another. We can scale it up pretty much as big as we need to. Those were the two biggest criteria.

I give it a nine out of 10. 3PAR is very good, but not perfect.

This system has been (by far) the easiest to use, manage, and expand.

I am not on the latest release yet. We are still trying to get there. The people that I work with at HPE have recommended where we should be in our version. We are not to the 3.3 version yet. I am looking forward to upgrading, because you can do them yourself. You do not have to have HPE do them. Also, it will integrate with InfoSight, which I am looking forward to. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: In our case, price is usually the biggest factor, because we are a university and have no money. Price is always big when we make a decision.

Nine out of 10 times, the system does exactly what we need it to do. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Knowing that the product works. We like to choose bigger companies. We do not like to invest in startups because you never know if they will be acquired. We have a good existing relationship with HPE, which was a lot of what steered us toward using them in the storage space.

We have fewer limitations, but there are still limitations that we have work though. Overall, it is a good solution. We set out to do something very specific with this, and that's the stretch metro cluster. A single VMware cluster across two data centers acting as one, not a lot of people do it in the way that we did it. I am not sure I could advise somebody unless they were doing the exact same thing. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Speed, scalability, and the ability to support a metro storage cluster environment.

The HPE enterprise name is crucial for my clients when considering which vendor to go with. They have been HPE clients for a long time, many years. To them, this brand gives them confidence that the solution will work. They also have great local support from the HPE team and from us.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because the product just works; we haven't had a lot of problems. I'm satisfied with the product. 3PAR is a proven, more reliable and stable SAN solution. Go with it.

I would rate 3PAR a nine out of 10, primarily for a couple reasons. First, we've never had problems with it. It has been super stable, it has done everything that we've wanted it to do, and the performance is great. Second, I never give anything a 10, because there are always improvements that can be made.

I recommend this system to everybody because it doesn't fail. I am just installing another one now. Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: * Good customer support * Good technical support * Price of the product * Advanced features of the system. These were all deciding factors.

I would give 3PAR an eight because, first, I don't think anything is ever a 10. It's still really good - but since 9 is really close to 10, and that's almost perfect - it's about an eight. The reliability is really there. Once it's there, it's there. You don't really have to worry about it, which is really nice because we have enough things to worry about.

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.

My advice is, look beyond the sales pitch. Talk to customers, and find out how they're really using it and how easy it is to use. Because, sometimes the sales pitches, in my opinion, it doesn't really get how people are using it day to day. I can't imagine not having 3PAR. We're very happy with it. I just bought more storage and actually bought another 3PAR which is being installed next week. We're continually adding on to it, and I would consider that one of the bests things we could do because you can never have enough space to put everything. I work for a local government. We now even now have body-worn camera videos, and we somehow have to store them temporarily before they put out to cloud storage. We need good, reliable data because we never want to get caught not having something we need.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10 because administrative functionality requires five days of training.

In our limited experience so far, it has been excellent. Support has been fantastic, the setup process was smooth.

My current 3PAR, three years ago I would have rated it a 10 out of 10. Today, just because it's aged, I'd give it a solid seven. It's because the drive architecture has changed over the years. Comparing it to the new ones that are out... it comes back to "better, faster, stronger." Without me spending another six figures to swap out hundreds of terabytes of storage, I can't get the added performance. It comes down to me making a critical decision of, "Okay, how do I balance my current IOPS, deliver what I need to deliver to my customer, and still meet the budget?"

Do some benchmarks on it and compare the requirements for whoever will be installing this product.