What needs improvement with HPE 3PAR Flash Storage?

I would like to have support for On-The-fly reallocation Data when using VVoL.For further explanation I must say When using vvol , you can have 3 tier in Storage .This tiers different in IO an Capacity feature.Usually tier 0 can support maximum IO and minimum Capacity and use SSD in this tier, Tier 1 between Tier 0 and 2 for Support IO and Capacity This layer is known as FC (Fast Class) nad Finally in tier 2 you Have only capacity and usually used NL disk for capacity .from that side in vmware Cluster equivalent this tier have a concept called Gold,Silver,Bronze that define in Storage Policy.You may want to first move a virtual machine to the silver group with disks; and then move it to another group, such as gold or bronze.This feature is based on the feature that the storage device provides and This feature is not yet available on the storage device, according to the documentation of HPE company will be presented in an update called T05

The cloud-based monitoring Infosight would be better if users are automatically enrolled in the cloud/group based on the configuration or information gathered or uploaded on the internet. The auto-discovery of the system is not easy for first-time users.

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

Upgrades could be improved. We would like to see more upgrades.

As it is, it does its job very well, so it's very difficult for me to say what we should be looking for in the next platform. I think cloud integration would probably be the biggest part because that's where everyone is going and the seamless integration between on-premise and cloud is an important part of any IT strategy today.

This solution is becoming dated.

We've started to see an issue with the older models that we have. We've had issues where facilities would have unscheduled power outages or scheduled power outages and the 3PARs weren't able to come up successfully. We actually had an incident recently where it wiped data that we didn't anticipate would be wiped. We will be having sidebar conversations with them later today, here at HPE Discover 2019, to talk about some of the possibilities that we're looking at. Going forward, we're looking for bigger capacity and drives, which I know they're looking at. We want them to ensure the speed and reliability because keeping those systems up and running, 24/7, is important to us.

We had a minor error when we were configuring this system, which initially detracted from its overall stability.

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.

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.

We would like to see full virtual. We would also like to see improvements to the ease of administration of 3PAR.

One of the things I like about the Microsoft operating systems are Microsoft's built-in backups. It's not elegant nor real pretty, but it just works for a single server or single VM. What I would really like to see from HPE is backup built-in, not snapshots nor replaying snapshots, but true block or file level backups integrated into an HPE platform program. Today, I'm using StorageCraft, where I can have a VM recovered in 15 to 20 minutes. I run a continuous restore point on three of my primary domain controllers. I run a continuous restore point against my primary Microsoft SQL server. So, I always have that continuous, but it's taking up so much storage space that I keep running out and having to add. I need something better, as I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe having Arcserve Backup or Seagate Backup Exec more integrated into the hardware solution.

We would like to see deduplication and hybrid in the next release of the solution. The integration has room for improvement.

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 latency issues.

We do not use Memory-Driven Flash in the old 3PAR. Perhaps we will use it in the new 3PAR. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading. We aren't using HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity yet. We are looking into it. The old 3PAR didn't support it, but the new 3PAR does.

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.

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 GUI was a little hard to figure out how to use.

This solution should be easier to use.

The solution should have better integration with legacy systems. We would like memory-driven performance on the storage.

I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure. It's definitely problematic. It needs to scale out better.

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.

I would like to have single click upgrades because the process is cumbersome right now. The upgrade process is very tedious. It takes a lot of time and effort, in addition to coordination with HPE. We are looking for something which is more user-friendly and easy to deploy. Fixing the upgrade process is very critical.

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.

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.

We would like to see dedupe and compression allowed on all drive types.

* Made on three times a price comparison, and only on one occurrence, the largest enterprise infrastructure of all three was HPE able to compete with its competitors. * It's way too expensive for the SMB market. * HPE care packs like datacenter/enterprise provide highly automated reports and reviews. * I liked the periodic SAN performance reviews which are highly detailed reports in about 100 pages and provide recommendations and a final score. However, the price is outrageous!

Integrate to monitor with CentOS.

Security is a mandatory feature because our customer needs to protect delicate information.

We need additional enhancements to InfoSight, especially from a VM standpoint. Today, we can see in the Azure VM performance stats in 3PAR, but it is so huge, we can't just drill down on each and every VM and look at its performance. We want to add rates of performance issues from VM points of time frame. Therefore, we can look, for example at 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and see how the VMs performed. That particularly feature is not there today in InfoSight. We are also seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard. E.g., if the 3PAR is not completely healthy because the remote copy helps are not performing, the dashboard will show all green, so there are some additional enhancements required.

The interface to manage it could be improved. I was looking at OneView. Something basic like that should be available with the 3PAR. OneView has all the bells and whistles, all the features, but I think something basic and similar to that should be come with the 3PAR, at least for monitoring managing it.

The newer versions have some other characteristics that we are not using. We would like to use them and set them up in our current version.

The product is sturdy, it's robust, it fulfills its purpose. However, if the support guys or the installers, those who are deploying it, would show us all the features, I think that's would improve things.

I would like to see more openness with other platforms. InfoSight synergy as a whole is great, if I own all HPE products. It is whoever gets me the best price and value. They win the contract. I need that flexibility to work with, for example, if Dell were to win my server contract or ViON were to run the storage, and I still had HPE servers. I need flexibility for interoperability across multiple platforms, not just HPE.

In terms of features I'd like to see, I have been hearing a lot about InfoSight with the 3PAR, here at HPE Discover 2018. I'd be curious to see some of the additions that will bring to the system. We're fairly up to date, so we should easily be able to utilize some of it, once it's available. I know that came from the Nimble platform, so they are still integrating it in.

We would like to see automation. We are primarily looking at provisioning and deprovisioning the storage, based on the customer requirements.

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.

In the next release, I would like to see faster upgrades, where it's really transparent to our host and our end-users. No node reboots, those types of things are the next feature set I would like to see.

I know that the reporting functionality is changing. It's going to be much better and that's something that we're looking forward to. I would like to see more flexibility with the cloud. I've actually just been in a presentation about it, here at HPE Discover 2018, so those features are coming. It's still an older architecture, you've got a lot of physical spinning disks. I would imagine more the memory-based computing is coming.

Some people are talking about getting NVMe drives in with faster flash. However, I think that is on the roadmap. I was at Aspire this year, and they were talking about the next chassis and they are ready for it. It is just a matter of getting them in. Feature-wise, with the InfoSight additions, there is a lot of the stuff missing in the intelligent interface. As they grow and push, a lot of it will not tie into Hyper-V. I have a lot of clients with Hyper V, so having that put into InfoSight because I have a lot of clients who run half-and-half or a lot on Hyper-V, especially a lot of schools with public domains. There has been a shift more to Hyper V because the features are really good now, and getting those analytics would really help. With OneView, there are some challenges. When I set up the Peer Persistence, it is very hard to manage zoning from OneView for arrays. We have eight 3PARs out there right now, and we do all our zoning outside of OneView, which is the opposite of what they say to do.

I would like to see them lower costs. It would also help if they integrate current technologies, newer technologies, and more efficient technologies, as time progresses. For example, integrate the fourth level of NAND devices. I believe at the moment we have third-level NAND load-leveling in place. I know these devices are around the corner. In the not too distant future, they should add these types of drives in there. That will give us much faster access. Hopefully, in time, we will replace the spinning hard drives with SSDs only, and the different types of SSDs.

Nothing really comes to mind. We talked to somebody earlier today, here at HPE Discover 2018, about their Docker integration for it, so that's something we'll probably check out next for both the 3PAR and Nimble.

I would like to see the reliability improve. While it has been a good product, the QA of the product could be done a little more thoroughly.

Better dedupe. It is hard for all the older generation arrays to put up dedupe because they tend to do the other stuff so much better. They have to keep the stability before any other new feature. They have to get it right all the time, not just the first time.

It needs the addition of InfoSight, which is the most critical, along with predictive analytics and AI.

3PAR has StoreOnce and replication. I would like it if they worked together. Or, if I had Nimble and put that either in DR or a primary cohesive management, but still use the cool features of 3PAR, that would be awesome.

The following need to be improved: * The ability to contact the correct HPE resource to give you the right product. * We had to undergo at least two or three iterations before we finalized a product which fit. This took time. * The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability. They are possibly all busy, or maybe at the headquarters less. I don't know the reason, but this happens every time we have to burn the midnight oil to get some solution out and running. * 3PAR needs to keep on increasing its capacity. * It needs more array support. * It needs to be more data-driven.

We would like to see smoother firmware upgrades going forward. We cannot afford to go down. When we went down, it was very painful for all our mission critical system. When we bought the system, we were under the impression that we were supposed to do firmware upgrades transparently, and on the fly with no impact, and it was very impacting. However, this is the only time that we had any issues.

We are an all-flash environment, which is really good. One thing that I would like to see is the ability to take storage on 3PAR array and copy it up to the cloud, any type of cloud I want, e.g., Azure, AWS, etc. HPE has StoreOnce CloudBank integration, but I would like to see a little bit more integration from a cloud perspective. In this way, I would have some more flexibility to do more with data, how to store it, and where I have it.

I would like to see a little better integration with OneView and provisioning ESX Hosts, but other than that it meets our needs. Possibly because of the version that we are running, but we do not have not enough features.

What appeals to me is having mobile functionality. There is a vendor portal for 3PAR for whatever you want to purchase. I would like to see something from an administrator's standpoint, as opposed to having to go to a web browser, where you get a ping on your phone which says, "Your license is coming up for renewal," or, "You have a drive that is bad," in conjunction with stuff, such as InfoSight. This is something which provides value back to me, because then I am not having to constantly babysit my vendors and say, "When do I have renewals coming due?" It is tough to get vendors who engage with you on that level. They go back and say, "Just a heads up, but these are what are coming due." Maybe they can backfill that with a mobile app. My admins like having this functionality and direct integration, where it is like, "I need to do this, this, and this." If they could do it all from their phone that would be better. Though, sometimes it is tough, because of tiny phones, and all there is to use is a web browser. It can be hard to read on a smaller screen. If it is a mobile app, maybe it could be finessed into something where basic tasks could be done.

A lot of tasks, you have to manually set up. They need to already have them set up and working. Then, you can just go in and tweak them if you need to. There are a lot of things that we did not know that we needed to schedule and make happen, and that is what we found out six months ago.

We would like to see better support for iSCSI.

I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly. That would be a great feature. The controllers are going to age out, then eventually they will need new controllers. If we could upgrade those controllers live without interruption, that would be great.

There are some weird things that we can't figure out.

I have been looking into additional functionalities of 3PAR but at this moment we are very satisfied with the basic functionality.

I would like more integration with OneView. I would also like to be able to deploy and manage 3PAR within OneView Global Dashboard so we do not have to use the interface for 3PAR. Overall, I would like more integration, which I think is coming.

What I would like to see the SSMC management interface and the regular, Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interface. I would have to use both, because one of them has features, the other one does not, and vice versa.

I would like to see the following: * NVMe support, not only on the disk side, but also in the NVMe over Fibre Channel. * More advanced copy features. * A few user improvements on their SSMC product. * Mesh-Active, which I hear is coming. One improvement that they could do right now is with the way they do their metric clustering. With Peer Persistence, they use a Lua. It would be really nice to have a volume that is truly Active-Active in both of our data centers.

We have seen one area, where we have highly virtualized Solaris instances, where we're getting into the queue depth, so we probably need to do some work in the queue-depth area in the arrays. I'm not sure if its specific to Solaris, because we haven't encountered it on other platforms but, then again, on some of our largest Solaris frames, we are running several hundred virtual containers and we see the queue-depth issue there.

We have had a few issues with it. We had our virtual environment lock up a few times on storage-based things. We think we have it sorted out, but maybe it came down to a configuration issue on it. They have starting to do some integration with the VMware and reporting from that. I think continuing along that path would be pretty good.

I would like to see more cloud-based integrations and more file storage capabilities. They do have that now, but we haven't started using it.

I haven't really thought about what a future release should contain. We've liked what 3PAR has so far.

I'd really it to be able to interact with older 3PAR storage, and possibly even non-HPE. I would like to be able to pull stuff off of old things and bring it up to the standard that has been set, simply, quickly, and efficiently. That would be a really nice feature. Right now it is a big pain. It seems to work but we tend to get some latency behind. It seems it could be better.

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.

In the next release, I would like them to make it a little easier to find where everything is in the new console. It now has the OneView look and sometimes I don't think the OneView look is enough. It's too different from the original console that was a separate system. I haven't totally learned it. I knew where everything was, and now I think to myself, "Why do I have to go there? It doesn't logically make sense."

I would like to see compatibility with NVMe.

In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyperconverged. They are working that way with Greenlake and integrating their own "build your own" expansion environment within 3PAR. I would like to see some of the InfoSight integration. In the speech today, here at HPE Discover 2018, it was pretty clear that that is where it's heading. I think it's on track, on the whole, as far as where we're going. I'm probably two years away, maybe less, from a 3PAR purchase. LIkely, by the time I'm ready to buy, it's going to be in there.

I am hoping to see some snapshot functionalities: Oracle snapshots, snapshots for VMware, and hypervisor snapshots. We have had some bad issues on stability. Also, the new feature sets, like deduplication and compression, are complex to work with. I hope when I view the roadmap that they will be less complex.