HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We are using it for the installation as part of our customer solutions. We are not end user, we are integrator, and we are using it in big IT infrastructure projects for our different customers, mainly for NATO.

They are reliable. They are fulfilling their requirements. They have the right features for our customers. It's the overall combination, together with the complete architecture of the servers from HPE.

There's nothing at the moment. Everyone is pretty happy.

From our perspective, and from our experience with the customer, it's a really stable solution. We have no problems with the customer, no negative feedback from them, and we have been relying for years on close cooperation with HPE in this area.

I think our customers will use it for the long term, even though they are now on the way to change. I think the special environment we are working in, they will use it for some years, and it is scalable.

The support from HPE in our projects is always very good. We have been working together for 15 years in this customer environment, and one of the main reasons to stay with HPE is the very good support we have had from all the HPE people over these years. That's one of our main success factors.

I give it a nine out of 10 because it fulfills what we need and, as I said before, it's reliable and it satisfies our customers. That's the most important point for us; to have satisfied customers.

The performance and the support are pretty good.

Performance. We used to be with NetApp. The overall performance is much better with this solution.

Maybe they could have better alerting. We've had an issue where we had a flapping network link, and it didn't tell us that was happening. We only saw symptoms of the issue. I'd like to see better reporting for those types of issues. Even though the support is better than NetApp was, there are still some improvements they could make in their support.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is good.

I have used technical support and it usually is good. Their support is very hands-on compared to NetApp. Sometimes we have issues where they, just like any other vendor, point fingers at either networking or the hardware. We've encountered that with them, as well. Overall, support was good.

The old system was outdated.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.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward.

Our shortlist included Nimble and 3PAR. One reason we changed was because we have local support.

I still think it is the best solution out there. HPE will help support issues or even upgrades.

• The ease of scaling.
• It's ability to provide different endpoints with different amounts of scalable storage.
• The way that it integrates with different HPE systems, such as the CLX, which is a cluster extensions package.
• The ability to migrate workloads from one data center to another.

The greatest benefit is its uptime. Also, performance and flexibility are very good. It runs both virtual workloads, as well as, native presentation workloads for both Windows and Unix environments. That's the main benefit. One of the other benefits is the way that it does consolidation and deduplication inline with the flash arrays.

We rely on WORM, so some sort of WORM feature would be good. We have to use other platforms for that. It would be nice to have that on the table right here.

We've had no issues with stability. All failures have been handled seamlessly within the platform. We've had controllers fail and they haven't impacted performance or stability at all. All very good.

Scaling is really easy. We can do online scale-ups adding more capacity and adding controllers without impact to the serviceability of the system. It’s all very good.

Technical support's been very good. The dedicated help desk for the 3PAR platform has always been very good. We’ve used them for troubleshooting where certain things don't happen the way that you'd expect them to. Sometimes this is our perception of what we feel we should do and not necessarily a shortcoming of the platform. It's just something we'd expect them to do.

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.

I was involved in the scoping of the solution. We were able to consolidate down from some of the old arrays very easily. In terms of implementation, I can only defer to the amount of time that it took, because it only took a couple days after the issue.

We were looking at NetApp and EMC.

When picking a vendor, the ability to execute on time and deliver on time is most important.

I think it's the direction in which they're moving in terms of flash storage and being able to take your legacy systems, integrate the old hard drives with flash storage and perform the migrations. Especially when including virtualization and trying to shrink your data center and improve performance.

HPE has been our de facto standard, and the benefits are the integration with the rest of our system, including solutions for system administration of having one interface with OneView and being able to use 3PAR with your storage and manage everything. The integration with virtualization as all that just brings down cost with administration, and to me that's one of the biggest things it brings.

Stability has always been there. Going back to my reliability comment that it's always been very reliable, we've never had any major issues. When there has been issues, it's always been preventative maintenance kind of things that are addressed pretty quickly. With the redundancy that you get in the system, we've never had an outage, per say. Something that you have to maybe go fix, but not a complete downtime.

We never buy just for what we need at the time, we always try to make sure we get the full lifecycle use of the product, and so with 3PAR, it might include having the expandability to add more shelves, or looking at the drives that are denser and things like that, so being able to mix and match parts and stuff.

The scalability has always been there as well, and like I said, in the old version of the BladeSystem, the c7000, that was around for like 10 years, so it's scaled very well. I've never had a problem with scaling.

We have technical account managers, and we call them to handle any kind of maintenance agreement or things like that, and have had very good support from them. If there's something that they can't answer, they're always willing to reach back and get the right point of contact. We've had very good dealings with our technical account manager and technical support.

There's been some cases where we have migrated systems from one data center into our data center, and done consolidations. Some of that requires backing up older platforms, older systems, and bringing them in. We had one scenario where we migrated a customer, and they were using old LTO tape drives, coming into a new system which didn't support that. In those kind of cases, we had to reach out to HPE for support. Those were things we could handle. Again, during those migrations, I can't say that there was anything that we missed our window. Everything worked out very well.

We did a trade study between 3PAR and some of the other ones like Pure Storage. I would just say one thing we saw that I think could be helpful is maybe looking at dedupe and how their competitors are doing it, and making sure that they stay aware of what those other competitors are doing as well.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an enterprise storage that is mainly deployed in enterprise scenarios like banking and insurance.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ an eight out of ten for stability.

Around 20 customers use the solution extensively in their companies.

I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten for scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward if it is a single server. If there are multiple servers, the initial setup becomes complex.

A single server takes an hour to be deployed.

The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features.

One admin is enough to maintain the solution if it is single storage. A complex environment with a heavy workload will need more people to maintain the solution.

I would recommend HPE 3PAR StoreServ to users based on their use cases.

Overall, I rate HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven out of ten.

We use the product for virtualization environment. 

I am impressed with the product's online upgrades. 

The engagement of the tool's vendor is costly. 

I have been using the tool for five years. 

The product's support is both good and bad. 

Neutral

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

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

We've only used this solution for two instances. Most of the time we are using HP MSA fiber channel storage, the 1060 or 2060. We primarily use the solution for virtualization. We're hosting virtual machines on the 3PAR storage.

We're hosting virtual infrastructure on the 3PAR storage and it's been very good for that.

The product is stable.

The product is quite expensive. The costs involved are high.

We would like the product to make it more of a straightforward procedure when we need to configure storage. There were quite a lot of options and parameters that we don't have knowledge of. We used some external company to make the configuration for us, for the 3PAR storage.

We've been using the solution for a few years at this point. 

The stability of the product is good. They offer good performance. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We haven't attempted to scale the solution yet. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy it would be to expand it. 

That said, from what I've seen, it does appear to be simple to scale. 

We have 100 users on the product right now.

At this point, we do not have plans to increase usage.

We've contacted technical support from HP for 3PAR in the past. We needed to upgrade the firmware of the storage. We needed some support from HP, which was excellent. We are satisfied so far. There have been no issues.

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.

I didn't handle the initial setup or the configuration. I can't speak to how the setup went, however, it was my understanding that it was a bit complex.

There was two or three technical personnel that were used to handle the initial setup. They were admins and engineers.

It is my understanding that we had an external company configure the storage. It is not so straightforward, as far as I remember.

It's a very expensive product. Companies need to be aware of that going in.

I cannot recommend 3PAR. Most of the cases can be covered with entry-level storage, which is the HP MSA. 3PAR is needed for some quite big platforms or environments. Most of the time, the entry-level MSA storage is more than enough.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use 3PAR for data storage in a factory setting. We currently have about 200 users working with it across multiple departments, including production and finance. 

We choose 3PAR for its speed. It's so fast and reliable. I don't know what else to say about it. 

I've been using 3PAR for about six months. 

3PAR is stable. 

3PAR is highly scalable. 

One of 3PAR's advantages is that it's easy to find a qualified technician. It's such a common device. We are using it in Turkey. France, Spain, and other locations.

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

Setting up 3PAR is somewhat complicated, and it took about a week. We need about two or three people for maintenance. 

HPE does the installation themselves. They were on time and fast.

We've seen a return on our investment, but it's hard to calculate it precisely. We plan to use it for the project for a minimum of five years, maybe more. 

We pay a yearly license. It's affordable.