I told the company that they needed to invest in 3PAR. They had one IBM DS 5600, a SAN that was huge, but was only eight terabytes, at the time. They were trying to go with the two LeftHand SANs to replace the IBM, but the LeftHand SANs IOPS could never succeed the IOPS from the IBM SAN. Then, the reseller that was helping them was let go and new management was brought in. That management decided to outsource IT to the company that I worked for. I was a huge HPE partner at the time.

3PAR has increased our performance over our old IBM SAN that was put in around 2009, prior to my time, which was 1G fiber and all SAS drives. The performance of the 3PAR, with its SSDs and controller nodes, was vastly superior to that older IBM. The HPE LeftHand SANs were all SAS and SATA, so the 3PAR SSD performance was just off the charts.

We use HP Enterprise, Dell EMC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, and Lenovo.

A lot of the solutions today are very similar. This was not the case five years ago. If some new functionality comes out with, for example, Dell, other vendors will have the same features in a short time.

We also use Hitachi storage as well as Dell VNX and Unity platforms.

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

I had looked at 3PAR before HPE bought it. Then, when HPE bought it, that solidified the decision - that they had the backing of such a big organization. But the biggest factors were the features and functionality, how the hardware worked. And Adaptive Optimization was something we were really wanting.

Initially, we were using another HPE DBA product and we were hitting its limits. So this was a great fit for us. We bought it just before HPE acquired it and the solution has been great ever since. This solution replaced a product that wasn't scaling well for us. Now we have a nice, scalable solution.

When we are looking for a vendor, we want somebody who can be a true partner with us and not just somebody trying to sell us something.

I have used Nimble and Primera.

Before HPE 3PAR, we were using Dell EMC. We have used three storages from EMC. The first one was very reliable. It was 300 series that we were using in 2003 or 2004. After that, we replaced it with the 400 series EMC storage, but it was not that reliable. Every three to four months, one of the disks would fail invariably, and we had to raise a ticket. After some time, they will review the ticket. They didn't ask any questions, and they would just replace it and take the faulty one. After that, we moved from the Dell EMC storage to HPE 3PAR, which has been very reliable. We haven't faced any issues in all these years.

We were using Synergy. The company wanted to go to an all-flash drive. At the time, HPE was one of the biggest manufacturers of all-flash drive. Therefore, it made sense to switch.

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.

The problem we had was scalability, and we tried a numerous amount of vendors, and HP, with its product portfolio, did a great job being cost effective and allowed us to scale to the point where we could run our business more effectively.

As a high performance computing environment, we needed storage and servers, and we're using 3PAR and the DL server family from HP. We double capacity every year, so we are looking always for scalable solutions that are cost effective, and HP has been a great partner so far for us.

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.

It is the availability aspect. Over the last few years, I have done a lot of shifts where people come off of Dell, Hitachi arrays, or even some other products within the HPE line, and they need either the performance or the availability. The availability that they want to put in is a lot of time a type of Peer Persistence setup. We are selling at least two 3PARS where they have multiple data centers, so if an array goes down in the same data center, the customer can lose a whole array and still stay up because they have peer persistence set up. That has probably been the single biggest selling feature: availability. Nobody wants to be the person in the news that is down or costing their shareholders money. Thus, availability has been a real big push, and 3PAR does availability really well.

I have PowerMax from Dell. I also have Dorado from Huawei in my environment, which is all-flash.

We used to have a Dell EqualLogic storage system prior to this one. On the phone, with support, they managed to tell us to do something that caused the whole system to come down. That was one of the determining factors to go completely away from anything Dell had their hands in and go with something else.

In our research, as much as I tried to look on the web to find anything negative about 3PAR, I couldn't find it. I found negatives about every other storage system we could find, but not on the 3PAR.

Among the most important criteria for us when evaluating a vendor is support. Support is always a concern. We don't have that many IT staff, so we do rely on vendor support and we usually keep the maintenance up on all of all our main equipment. So having a decent support relationship with vendors is critical.

We also use Primera and PowerStore.

I needed to invest in a new solution because the previous solution was getting old.

We wanted to go to market to find a better solution. We wanted something that had a little more intelligence. However, because we are a semi-public company, we had to go to market. We could not just pick 3PAR.

The 3PAR actually had to prove itself. It had to be scored and graded across a panel of people in order to win the bid. Not only that, it had to have a good price.

We were using HP EVA and direct attached storage. Our EVA’s were getting old and needed to be replaced within a year or two. The push to replace them sooner came after our main production array crashed due to LUN ownership issues between the controllers. A lot of I/O was coming into the non-owning controller and so it would switch ownership. Since ownership was set to fail-over/fail-back it would just keep hoping back and forth. It was a problem with VMWare losing its MPIO configuration but that caused major issues with the array. True Active-Active controller design really became an important criteria after this incident.

I have worked with other storage products from Dell, although that was more than ten years ago. The reason that we switched to HPE was the comparison between performance and price.

The 3PAR is high-level storage and at the time, it was cheaper than the competitors.

There were some older 3PARs that we wanted to replace and there were some Clariion EMC products that we wanted to replace. The reason why was due to the fact that the 3PARs, were four years old and we needed a technology revamp, so to speak. 

The other reason we switched was that EMC was just too slow. It was getting overwhelmed and we had to go to a stronger or newer technology controller. Therefore we decided to go with the 3PAR as it was a lot easier to use. We also liked the virtualization of the product and we appreciated the ease of being able to make changes without having an overall effect in the environment.

We were look for a refresh. At the time, IBM was not keeping up with their VMware integration, especially with VVols. It was quite obvious that HPE was a leader in it, and this steered us into looking at them. Then, we found out that the product could do everything we needed it to do.

We previously had Dell Compellent. We switched because we were using HPE Compute and HPE Blades, and it seemed like we might as well go all in on HPE. Also, we were not getting what we thought we wanted for performance out of Compellent.

We previously used HPE. We had to upgrade because our previous platform was end of life.

Previously we were using HP EVA but since this is an old solution, we wanted to upgrade. We wanted to try a newer solution with almost the same features, like HPE 3PAR.

Most of my projects are large P3 (public-private partnership) projects, where we do design, build, and maintenance of a facility for up to 20 to 25 years. We then return it to the client with another 10 years of service. So, upfront, I have to decide what solutions to put in there that will give me the minimal refresh over a longer period of time. I have to weigh the pros and cons of how much I spend upfront and what my maintenance cost will be over time. That's where the 3PAR solution is a good solution for me. It gives me fewer refreshes over a period of time and yet, at the end of the contract, I can still return it to the client with another 10 years of service.

My clients rely on me for evaluating vendors. One of the things I do is take the data sheets from multiple suppliers, compare them, see what is the best fit for the client and then, of course, use my own judgment and experience with my other clients on the given product. Fortunately, 3PAR has been a good product, so, I have no hesitation in recommending it and moving forward with it.

We were working with an HPE storage called HPE EVA. We switched over to HPE 3PAR StoreServ because EVA's technology was end-of-life.

Prior to implementing this solution we were using one by Dell. We were not meeting our commitments to customers because it was not meeting our performance requirements.

We had a lot of legacy hardware in our environment, and the step into the future by implementing this solution has been fantastic.

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.

We had HPE EVA storage. We switched because all of it was legacy storage. We migrated from legacy storage to the new 3PAR. The main reason we went with HPE was the migration from the old legacy to the new 3PAR was very seamless. They have Peer Motion integration so the data migration was easy. If we had gone with another vendor we would have had to do an offline migration.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, HPE is our business partner so we use their products.

We were using HPE EVA. We had a lot of issues with it to begin with. Anytime you wanted to do an upgrade, you had to take systems offline. That just would not work for us.

We switched when our warranties were up.

We purchased VMAX three years ago.

We also used the NetApp Series but decided to go with 3PAR.

We chose 3PAR because it has the best price compared to its competitors, and delivers the performance expected.

We did not use any other solution previously.

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.

We previously used EMC VMAX.

When I was at Level 3 Communications eight years ago, we were one of the first customers of 3PAR before HPE bought them. We did a PoC, and it literally made the others in the race look bad. It was that good.

We were using HP EVA, and before that we were HP HSG. So when I first started we had two small HSG arrays that were primarily behind DMS and maybe a couple of other systems, but we had a very small amount of data on a san. VMware changed all of that. So we had all of this data running on EVA and we were staring to hit some limits, and the EVA didn't have good telemetry to let us know where the edge of the cliff actually was, so we were teetering right on the edge and about to fall off when we got the 3PARs in. So that kind of saved our bacon.

When we were evaluating potential replacements for our HP EVA storage array, we looked at Tintri and Tegile. We ended up doing evaluations for both of them.

Our company purchased Tegile for another project. Internally, my security officer didn't like the NFS of Tegile. That was kind of a no-go for internal use. Otherwise it has really great features for virtualization. That was really appealing to me as a VMWare administrator. We talked with them after a VMUG meeting and brought it in, did a proof of concept on it. It didn't perform as expected in our environment and we found out after the fact why. We would have needed a second active controller and a second disk shelf to get the full IOPS we were expecting out of it. That kind of killed our evaluation. It had good features, it had good reporting, which was one of our big criteria moving from the EVA. We wanted something that was going to let us know how it was performing. That was really strong, in Tintri. It's also been three and a half years since then, so that product has changed a lot also.

Our previous solution was retired due to capacity and performance issues.

HPE really addressed our issues with their recommendation of the 3PAR 7450 for our specific needs.

It’s actually less expensive per Gigabyte than a conventional array when looking at the true cost of ownership. Not to mention the performance is six times greater than the competitor’s device.

We used EMC before but it was quite old, about 7 years, and it was time to change. There wasn't a good solution from them at that time. The ability to scale to size was important to us when choosing a vendor, as well as the speed. We want our solution to be future-proof to an extent.

We came from using Hitachi, so provisioning and that sort of thing is way easier with a small team. It's a lot easier to use, the SSMC and management tools for 3PAR than it was for any of the Hitachi tools that we used.

It was mostly just aging storage. We used HP AVA before, and so we just switched over to a new product.

Prior to this, we used the HPE3PAR StorServ 7200 series. With that version, sometimes the hard drive was broken. It's not about storage, but rather, it is about how the hard drive operates.

We went from an old XP24k, a long time ago, to an EMC VNX. The EMC storage was cheap on the front-end but expensive on the back-end for maintaining it. It was cheaper for us to jump into another 3PAR than it was to maintain support on the VNX. We quickly moved to 3PAR and we haven't looked back since.

In terms of important criteria in selecting a vendor besides price, we're primarily an HPE shop. I can count on one hand how many other pieces of hardware we have other than HPE: a Palo Alto firewall and maybe a couple of vendor-supplied Dell boxes. I always look to HPE first. If they can't do it, I call and complain to my regional sales VP and he tries his best. Sometimes he can pull one out and get something going for me, but if not then I start looking at others.

We were using direct attached storage. We moved to Sun; and then we decided to implement 3PAR.

We still have it. We have a Legacy Dell Compellent Array, it does great for file storage. It just really wasn’t meeting the mark for our infrastructure and once we put this 3PAR on our SAAS implementation things really stabilized, and performance really didn’t become an issue anymore. We have a somewhat weird fiscal week in that on Wednesdays it’s the beginning of the fiscal week. All of the finance department needs to get their data, all of our stores and our retail customers out in the field come in and they’re really mining through the sales, the labors, the costs, try to figure out how did they do the week before. So on this day it’s like a perfect storm for our implementation in that everybody’s getting a big bulk of data at the same time. Using the 3PAR flash array we were able to stabilize that environment so that I really can get their data on demand.

3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors. 

We switched because of the cost and 3PAR's four-node system, because they said we should get more throughput from the four-node system, since EMC is a two-node system.

When we knew we were at end-of-life. I have a product lifecycle that I keep track of, how long I want to keep things. We knew that our HPE EVA was running long enough that we really needed to replace it. I was looking, I got some ideas from our vendor - from HPE - on what solutions there were to replace it. We were able to cut our power consumption by 80 percent. We're very happy with 3PAR.

In selecting a vendor what was important to us were ease of use, that it was easy to transfer the current data without a lot of trouble, and it was. It was really easy. It was moved and it was done.

The importance of having thin provisioning was a key factor. And when we found out that 3PAR had been acquired by HPE, since we have good relations with HPE, it was a very efficient and easy decision to take. We have good support, and the functions that we are looking for come in one product.

We changed to the 3PAR solution to do a direct connect to 3PAR. Before that, we had a VND environment and we were connected to a larger SAN array. We actually had HPE come on-site. They drew up the solution and the architecture that we wanted to do and they actually were able to implement it based upon what our needs were. When selecting a vendor, we look for support, which is one of the biggest things. Other elements are up-time and hardware reliability.

Previously, we used Dell EqualLogic and switched because of some minor instability issues that we had, which, looking back now, were pretty petty. We actually pulled them from storage and powered them up to resolve stability issues with the 3PAR array.

This was actually a revolution of getting us into the cloud because one of our clients demanded that we start offering a cloud-based solution. This is when we went out and started really looking for solutions that would empower a cloud level enterprise.

So originally, we were actually running on EMC CX700 and VNX 5300s. The back end was front ended actually with AIXP5P6 series systems. We were needing to realistically bring our ERP system forward. Poor performance dictated that, you know, we can no longer really continue to do business the way we were doing business on that platform, so we looked at others, including EMC, Hitachi, IBM, and actually HP 3PAR was late to the game and came knocking.

We were previously using EMC. We looked at EMC, obviously, with the XtremIO product. We looked a little bit at NetApp. We haven't had a previous relationship with them, so we didn't look too deeply into it. And then we also obviously looked at HP 3PAR.

It was before my time, but they wanted to diversify from EMC. We are slowly migrating entirely to HP.

We had a XP24K and a EVA 6000 and we were experiencing challenges in replication and doing tiering. That was one of the main reasons we chose to switch.

We implemented this solution when it was time to renew the servers. Prior to this, we used HP EVA, but it had reached end-of-life.

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.

We've had a long-standing working relationship with HPE. They're a trusted solution, so we've continued working with them.

We help our customers decide on purchasing new solutions. This is our process:

1. We have a headroom of about 20 to 30 percentage depending on the customer's business. The visibility for the next year on the future annual growth. 
2. Once we hit a headroom of about 60 percentage, we talk to the customer and tell them that they are up for either scalability, compression, or dedupe for their data. 
3. When the capacity hits about 80 percentage, then we buy a new product and app.

We used older HPE solutions. We worked with our HPE rep. He described some of the functionality and we could see how it fit into our organization.

Our most important criteria when evaluating a vendor are

• performance
• support.

We went with HPE because we had worked with them and they met our requirements. Those were the main drivers. They had proven support and reliability.

About eight years ago, we had a bunch of different storage platforms, and we actually went through a proof of concept and selected 3PAR. Our company was expanding. We realized that our data footprint was going to grow massively in the next few years. We're a game developer so our data growth is completely mirrored by the hardware that we make our games on. At the time, we knew that there were new versions of PlayStation, Xbox 4K coming out for TV, so all of our assets just blew up, about 20 times the size.

We realized we needed to invest in an enterprise-grade solution. We looked at three or four different companies. Then, we rolled out the F400 series.

The factors we considered were the normal things: Obviously, cost per terabyte or gigabyte, performance, IOPS; scalability was a massive factor as well. We knew that we were going to grow and we needed to be able to just add shelves of disks or add SSD, add SaaS or add Nearline.

We had different storage. For instance, we used IBM storage. When the time for replacement came due to age of the old storage, we actually performed a tender. So, we didn't start with, "Okay. We are buying 3PAR." But, through the entire tendering process, we reached the place where it proved to be a good decision to buy HPE 3PAR.

We were using HPE EVA. The support on our old EVAs, the cost to keep them up was more than going to a new one. Then, by the time we added the power savings and the reduced space and the heating, it was just so much less that it was well worth it.

The old system was outdated. We were having performance issues with it and the support wasn't great. It was just time to shop for a new the solution. When selecting a vendor, I look for support, performance, and customization.

We were using a legacy EVA system. It was just a natural choice. We needed to maintain the CLX packages that were also available for the EVAs. So when we wanted to refresh, it was the natural solution because it supported that and it was more up-to-date technology.

We did not previously use a different solution.

We're aware of a few different storage options. 3PAR, Nimble, and Premier Storage are pretty expensive. This brings the cost up too high for some projects.

3PAR is our first all-flash storage array. We had a different storage solution before, but it wasn't all-flash.

This product is an improvement over what we had before. Our old solution, which was an HP Blade Server, was four years old. We wanted to switch to newer technology.

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.

We had HPE EVAs. Then, we had to move away from EVAs, and the 3PARs were the next ones in the line.

We came from the EVA which was the previous version and this is, hands-down, way better. It has a smaller footprint and is actually quicker than the EVA.

Our main reason for switching was based on age. We weren't having major issues with our storage, but we try and replace things on a five-year schedule, at that level.

When selecting a vendor the biggest factor is a vendor we know. In the past, we had used one that seemed to be leading edge. I had a guy on the financial side that was pushing more for that. He really liked how that vendor didn't require you to purchase their drives. You could use off-the-shelf, enterprise-rated drives, so the costs of expanding the array seemed to be cheaper going that way. But after two years that company went belly-up and disappeared. This time, even though there were a couple other vendors he liked better - Nimble was actually one of them at the time, but they were still new enough that I pushed back - I said, "Nope. I'm going with somebody whose name I know."

This was a net new solution for our remote facilities so we had nothing in place. This was something that we purchased and built out ourselves.

Before 3PAR, we used the HPE EVA technology. We’ve always used HPE.

We were using an HPE product, and that basically folded, as it got quite old. We went and looked around in the market for what is current, and HPE came along and said, "We can do that. Our replacement for this unit is now the HPE one, and this is what we recommend." We got some consultancy from them just to go through our requirements and our needs. They did lot of graphs and showed that it was right for us. It was recommended to us by them.

So before we went down the road of looking at the HP 3PAR, we were using another HP product, LeftHand, which was doing the job fine, but as we started to scale and started to see the demands of the client base that we were attracting, we knew we needed to make a change.

So prior to the HP 3PAR, we were using LeftHand products. That was really local disc in the servers themselves, which doesn't scale particularly well, certainly not back when we started, there was not a concept of a virtual SAN.

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.

I have gone the gamut of old EMC arrays, Clarion arrays, and XP arrays, and 3PAR is just so simple. 

We were an XP7 shop and we went from that to 3PAR.

Well, we had an EVA, which is another HP product, and our storage usage was growing so fast that we weren’t going to be able to expand that to cover what we needed.

As I mentioned earlier, we were using an HP EVA storage device, and it was not giving the right speed or IOPS we needed. We started to look at different solutions, starting with NetAPP and EMC, to HP and IBM. As the price and technologies of HP offered was better than the others, we decided to buy HP. And now, we are very happy with this solution and it is a great product!

We did use Hitachi last year.

We are using Tableau, and it is a heavy thing, especially when you start calling in a lot of data sources. At our old storage, it was iSCSI connected and not adequately responsive. Therefore, they had to trim down the searches, and as a result, they were getting less insight. Now, they get everything they want and in a timely manner. 

We were using Dell EqualLogic. The load from our VMware (when we first put it in was fine) had gone from approximately 20 virtual machines to 150 virtual machines on the same storage. The storage load had increased so drastically that we just could not keep up with it, so we looked at different things. I mentioned 3PAR is an excellent enterprise cost product. 

We switched because noticed there was a lag in our previous storage, then went ahead and got 3PAR. 

We were using another solution before. We were spread over different locations so it was the most affordable solution we found.

We needed a new solution. We were working with a partner and they showed us options. We discussed price and we got the point between stability, reliability, and price. These were the main factors in choosing this solution.

We were previously using HPE SAN, but we then went to the P4000, and now we're looking to upgrade our data centre again. So we're quite happy with their solutions and the help. We think it's one of the best ones out there.

Our prior solution was end-of-life, and this was about six or seven years ago.

We migrated pieces from various storage technologies - EVA, Nexsan, and an old EMC Clarion. They were all EOL and 3PAR appeared to have the performance to consolidate all the workloads at the right price.

Prior to the 7200, we had a HP P2000 storage array, and this proved not able to cope with the workload (it was designed/implemented and used to be managed by another company) since the 7200 has been installed, there haven't been any issues.

The 7400, replaced four EVAs (two 6500s and two 8400s) and we switched these because they becoming instable causing various issues. They also lacked the failover ability for our virtual environment (without having to buy SRM).

No, we owned its predecessor and were very happy with that.

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. 

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.

We took a look at what our current challenges were with just traditional compute and storage, and we were not fully integrated with those solutions. This solution allowed us to standardize on one platform and be able to deliver it in a quick way. That was all around the most beneficial.

We were predominantly an HPE customer, but in the middle we had other vendors also come in. But, gradually we are going back to HPE.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Before we were using the EVA solution and HPE LeftHand. We had a large IOPS problems with our ERP system. They weren’t stable enough and they did not have a proven record for us. Our ERP system has a large database, lots of IOPS, and these solutions couldn’t handle it. That was why we changed to HPE 3PAR that has a full SSD solution that could handle the IOPS. The main competitor was NetApp. We chose HPE because of the stability. We know HPE, we have a multi-year contract with them. We looked at several reference cases and those convinced us to choose this solution.

We're a pretty big data center, so we have a lot of EMC and IBM products. We're kind of starting to spread out though. I like 3PAR, that's what I'm in charge of.

EMC definitely has a better support structure. HP is not bad, it's just that with EMC, the their relationship with the customer is a little different than HP's. That's really the only thing that separates it. Performance is performance. 3PAR gets the job done.

Previously, we were using HPE MSA.

My old 3PAR is end of life, so it is time to switch.

We did not use another solution previously.

For storage we had Dell EMC, and we used to have IBM but not any more.

IBM is not a Windows platform, and Dell, they didn't have storage at that time. Now they have EMC. So they both have a full solution, like HPE. And they are presenting a solution to us everyday.

The system we had prior to 3PAR had a lot of drives. We didn't lose any data, but it was just not reliable.

Before this solution, we were in a situation where the disk capacity we had continued to grow. When I joined the company three years ago, each system had their own stuff so we invested in 3PAR. We were just using all internal disks. I've used one or two other disk systems, but I don’t recall the names. We also used HPE's EVA, which I don't think was necessarily the best environment. We also used their XP environment which was very good. EVA was not as fast as it should have been. I think it was too costly. When we chose this solution, we were looking for the most value for our money. We had a short list of other vendors, but I've been buying HPE since 1982, I think, so it didn't take long for me to think about HPE.

We switched from a really old legacy platform storage solution that was just into life. We were running it on Data Vault which was an HPE product.

We were previously using multiple vendors. We switched to 3PAR for more performance, reliability, and we had challenges with MSAs (low-end storage).

We had a set of vendors come in and do proofs of concept to help us better understand what options and features were available. Based upon what we found with HPE and 3PAR - I wasn't actually a part of the initial assessment, this is all stuff that I heard when I came on board - it just was the best solution for us at the time.

We used HP EVA previously.

We did use previous solutions, but it's a matter of quality and it's a matter of economics and that was the choice.

We're a large company of many, many small companies and we've realized through global projects that have an autonomous approach to IT departments, for example, where it doesn't work. That's exactly the same when it comes to the architecture behind your IT environment. We had to look at centralizing all of our systems, all of our platforms, so that we could offer a meaningful level of service to business. Without centralization, we couldn't guarantee the service of any of our platforms around the key business applications that the business expected us to deploy. That's how we knew to centralize all of our systems and platforms and host them on converged systems.

We didn't switch in terms of the technology. We switched to the latest 3PAR technology. We previously used 7400s. We wanted to move from a managed services to self-managing, and the contract was coming up for renewal, so that was a golden opportunity to swing off and do our own thing.

My company has used HP storage arrays since before I joined.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we had a lot of issues in our data centers. We needed to increase our resilience and make sure that we could have our teaching and learning and research continue while we might have data center outages or if there was any problems.

For development, we have an IBM DS5000 storage system.

As it is for development, I cannot compare the two solutions. Our 3PAR is adapted for production.

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.

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

We had an old HPE SAN. We compared one 3PAR to the SAN. Then, we wanted to set up replication between our DR sites, so we purchased another 3PAR.

We were in a position where we could reinvent our wheel. We had an older, aging architecture and we needed to update. So, as much as it is a replacement and an upgrade from our existing equipment, it is also brand new. It's a complete transition from where we were to this. It's hard to look at it as a transition when there is that much stark difference. When we get over to it, there's going to be a clear benefit upgrading from what our legacy networks and servers are.

When evaluating a vendor our criteria include

• price
• customer service 
• quality of the technology 
• whether or not it can serve our needs.

We worked hand in hand with our product management team to try and determine what the best fit was. In the past, we worked with HPE MSAs and HPE P2000s.

This was a logical step forward without going into any really crazy high-ends like Hitachi or EMC type of SAN which has all of its own problems that you get when you go in that direction.

We were using a different HP storage. I think it was MSA 7000 series storage that we were using. Right now, it is 3PAR.

We've been using 3PAR now for the last three years. Prior to that, the EVA 6000 for five years.

We scoped out and scaled 3PAR for three years. We're now approaching that three-year mark, so we're here at the HPE Discover conference to re-approach and scale and future view for the next three to five years.

We were using a slower solution, and then it went down a few times. So we were looking for something more stable.

There were HPE EVAs before and they were at the end of their life.

When looking at vendors, the most important aspect is openness; that they really talk open and are not just marketing.

Actually, it was HPE old technology. We really didn't switch anything. It's HPE already just old hardware, so we just upgraded.

3PAR is less costly than our previous solution. We were able to migrate from EVA to 3PAR.

I have used other HP arrays, EMC, Netapp, and Fujitsu. HP 3PAR by far has the best combination of great equipment, very good support, and good implementation staff. We have standardized on HP 3PAR for this reason.

We were previously using a different solution. We did a detailed paper analysis. We flew out to the guys in San Francisco, to their labs. We had a look at their storage and what they were doing, their software stack. We were really impressed with that.

We previously did not use another solution.

We were using HPE EVA before and the solution had been in place for like six years at that point, so it was ageing, we're limited on what we could do with it. So, it was time to switch over to something that was newer, had better features.

Yes, HPE EVA, the older one. It is at end of life. They are no longer updating it or supporting it, so we needed to switch.

It's not a different solution, same vendor with the follow-up product, with newer technology and more space.

We were using BlueArc. It is not as resilient and not as robust. It is not as enterprise-grade as an actual HPE 3PAR system is.

When selecting a vendor, you want name recognition. You want to know that you're getting the best of breed. You want hardware services because it's not just about the hardware. The hardware can be awesome, but if you don't have the service to support it, manage it, and maintain it, then it's kind of pointless. HPE brings all of that together: Hardware, service, and support. It's all there.

I used to use HPE EVA. We needed to switch because we couldn't expand anymore.

I utilized HP Lefthand devices and EVA SAN’s (Models 5000 and 4400)

We were using NetApp. We were seeing overall poor performance.

We ran on NetApp and had maintenance, performance, and troubleshooting issues.

We used a NetApp N6040n, and we switched in order to have more flexibility on our storage array as CPG moved LUNs between different RAID arrays.

We also previously used NetApp and Xiotech, and switched to 3PAR as HP presented a solution that addressed performance, scalability, and, I'm told, it was cost effective.

Previously, I used EMC VNX. We switched because we couldn't monitor anything unless we uploaded a data file to EMC and they send us back an analysis.

We have already some IBM storage, but we are not happy with it. After checking out other models, we decided to work with 3PAR. Not only because we are familiar with HPE, but also the features combined well with our services.

Our data center was compromised and I had to replace the entire data center. Our previous solution was HPE LeftHand.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor are

• cost
• reliability
• support.

We were using EMC VMAX, EMC VNX, and NetApp. We switched due to price.

Previously, we were on Sun Solaris, then we moved to a Windows platform, and it was really bad. The processing took too long. Start the load on Tuesday, Wednesday sometime around noon it would finish. Sometimes it would crash. Right now it is within four and a half hours. Starts at 6:00, 9:00 it's done. That is one big advantage we see.

We needed a faster storage and more capacity, so that's why we upgraded and switched from EMC to HPE.

The previous solution was getting old. It was getting harder to replace with lifecycle handling, so we knew that we needed a new storage system.

We weren’t using a previous solution, but we did upgrade from HP EVA. Once we starting using this solution, there were some problems with the performance. We tried to see what the reason was. The system was slow. It has been fixed, but at the time, it was difficult to get an idea of where the problem was. This problem was resolved.

We chose HP to improve on the latency because we knew we needed something that could solve our new needs. Our last system, Dell Ecologic, was very bad and was down a lot.

9/10.

We used an EMC solution before. The price, performance and features swayed us to HP 3PAR.

We switched mainly because of the end users, the customers, the guys that use the systems and the applications. They're the ones who start screaming when things are slow. We used to have that problem, where things were slow due to the storage bottleneck. But now we're finding other bottlenecks, so it's good.

We were running on some technologies which were going off the market, and we wanted to upgrade them. So we looked to put 3PAR in place, and we are moving into 3PAR now.

We knew that we needed a new solution. We had to move from some old EMC equipment. We had looked at what they had, their price offering versus what we could get at HPE for the same dollar, and this solution was exponentially better.

We knew that we needed a new solution because we couldn't do what was needed for the business, so we needed a new and better solution. Beforehand, we were using the HPE EVA solution.

We switched because HP is stable and reliable.

We didn’t have a solution in place, so we went through an integrator and got a recommendation.

We used to use the EVA 8000 series but they have just two nodes in that series and it is unsupported for active clustering, HA for controllers and nodes. 3PAR is also more cost effective on hardware, and has less performance issues and more scalability.

Funny you ask - let's just say a "no named" array that had redundant controllers completely torched nearly every ESX datastore where it "gutted" the data inside of it, but left the shell. Yet, the support person on the phone called the update "successful on my end". Sure, the nodes made have updated, but the data was gone - you be the judge! I have used solutions from many, many storage vendors.

I am also using HPE Nimble.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

Our previous solution was between five to six years old, so we were looking for something newer, like all-flash.

The decision to find a solution is based on internal requirements. We need storage capacity. Currently, we have, let's say, two petabytes. When we needed more storage then we'll think about expanding the existing storage or buying a brand new system.

The important criterion for us when looking at vendors is performance. We recently evaluated all-flash-based arrays and the hybrid model, and how they handle I/O throughput. Those are the key areas.

We went with 3PAR because it is easy to use and we are very familiar with firmware which is easy to manage. Creating the internal groups and other areas is very easy for us.

The switch was based on that fact that we're on a lease-refresh cycle. That is what really drives this kind of change, for our business.

Our main criteria in selecting a vendor include stability, that is a big one. What really drove us towards 3PAR was having just one vendor; having HPE as both our server and our storage versus HPE for server alone.

We used Nimble previously, before it was an HPE product.

We had a big issue with the performance. Last year, we spoke with HPE's people, and they recommended this solution and we are now certified.

We were using an end-of-life, old product before. It couldn’t keep up with new technologies.

We were using a different solution previously, we were using EMC. Since we were hitting the ceiling of the hardware, we decided to switch over to HPE. Cost was the main reason why we moved over to HPE.

Our SAN was outdated, so we needed to get something new. We evaluated some different vendors instead of sticking with our typical one. We ended up switching over to 3PAR. We were using EMC VNX. This decision took place before I came on-board, but I believe the short list was HPE was EMC.

When selecting a vendor I look for support. That is ironic, given my previous answer that indicated otherwise. Support is a big deal. If you need help, you want to be able to get it.

We had the HPE EVA solution. We had performance issues with it. We needed another BI solution. Now, we are very happy with the performance. Also, when we needed to upgrade our storage system, we had downtime with EVA. Now with the 3PAR solution, there is no downtime. It goes very smoothly.

We have many different types of solutions. Since HPE is one of our partners, it was natural to evaluate their products and buy from them.

We did not have a previous solution. We had a service provider, which had IBM solutions. I needed a solution for a particular application, and HPE 3PAR was one part of the solution.

We previously used an older HP model and switches, and we upgraded as it was a storage refresh.

I've also dealt with Dell EMC. We have Huawei OceanStore Dorado, PowerMax, and PowerStore as well. We have all the kind of storage. I can confirm that 3PAR is not a high-end solution. It can be classified as the mid-range, not high-end. PowerStore is likely the best out of all of these. The controller is really high-end.

It was the first solution that we defined, at the beginning of the data center, so it has always been there. Since I joined the team after the data center was already implemented, I don't have a previous scenario to compare it to, what it has improved or not.

Previously, we had another solution where we have some problems. The application would be waiting for the IO. With 3PAR, everything was solved.

The solution, stability, and the performance work well for us.

I used Dell. When I changed to 3PAR, it was easier. Dell has delays and didn’t always have equipment. HPE has better service.

When selecting a vendor, I look for support and price.

We had aging equipment with capacity limitations.

We are a large EMC shop and have a lot of EMC products.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the cost and support.

We have three EVAs that we were using before we took 3PAR.

Yes. The cost of scaling up was far too high. When compared with the 3PAR, there has been huge cost savings which resulted in the ROI being achieved.

We are using IBM Flash Storage. In Turkey, IBM has more support and more products for the flash systems, which is an advantage. Performance of the storage is also better. 

We are also using FUSE Storage, which is also All-Flash Storage. Their performance is also better than HPE 3PAR. HPE 3PAR doesn't support any images.

We knew we needed a new solution because of our growth.

When I arrived two and a half years ago, they were using multiple Windows solutions. They were using NetApp for all of the file services and we decided to separate. We decided to keep NetApp for all these file services, but I suggested that we use FlexArray in order to virtualize our NetApp tool with a disk from HPE 3PAR.

They also had a lot of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). They were customers of Hitachi for 10-15 years. They had multiple systems. My goal was to consolidate everything on those boxes. Currently, we have one storage box per site. There are almost 2 PBs for each site and we have storage arrays to perform the deduplications and backups.

Since I already had experience with storage solutions for almost 15 years with IBM and Hitachi solutions, I did an RFP to find our next provider of a storage solution. I made a request for features. As a public institution, we are primarily focused on price, and the competitive price was one of things I really appreciated about HPE.

No previous solution was in place be 3PAR.

We previously used EVA, but as we are an HP house, we migrated to the latest HP offering due to the benefits.

We needed the capacity and faster processing.

It's much better than two other platforms we have, one of them is EVA4400. EVA is less affordable and not as powerful. It works, but it's very much less powerful. For example, six months ago during a restore, the production environment was completely blocked, it worked slowly. This doesn't happen on full-flash 3PAR.

No

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of lifecycle management. It was time to lifecycle the product.

At my prior employer, we used EMC and NetApp, which were stable platforms and environments. A lot of it comes down to how you deploy. 3PAR is also a great product, but you can still deploy it incorrectly.

An EMR upgrade forced us to do a hardware refresh and HP was chosen for several reasons including cost, performance, and ease of use.

We switched because of the performance and cost of 3PAR was better than our previous solution.

I have used IBM FlashSystems.

We had EVAs before, then switched to an earlier generation of 3PAR.