HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a great storage device for both file and block-level storage needs. You can use it in place of SAN devices required by database servers. It provides an amazing compaction ratio and, hence, reduces overall storage footprint and cost. This is, however, slightly costly if your environment doesn't really see high transactions most of the time.
For a large, robust, well-secured, and stable storage system, TrueNAS is very well suited. Virtual Machine support is great. Shared filesystems (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, WebDav, AFP) are very well implemented. Time machine support is fantastic; security is very granular. Do not try to use it as a replacement for VMWare... (no migration, etc.)
We are using HP 3PAR storeServ 8200 for both our file level and block level storage.
I really love the amazing compaction ratio provided by HP 3PAR. Some of our disks have compaction ratio above 25:1, which is super amazing. You can definitely look for around 75% reduction of storage footprints.
It has a great user friendly web console "SSMC"(StoreServ Management Console). This is an additional bonus and can be used by even non-storage people like DBA and Network to take a look at storage performance.
The system requires a physical or virtual system to manage upgrades and patches and for call home features. Most other systems have this integrated into the array. Just another piece of infrastructure to manage.
There are some system jobs that come pre-scheduled in the initial setup, but there is at least 1 job that should be added to this by default. When you delete storage, you also need to run a job to compact the CPG (a group where the luns all reside) to reclaim the previously used storage as free. This should be done by default at least monthly in the background.
There are 2 different GUI front ends that can still be used. The older version (3 PAR management console) is being phased out (has been for 3 years).
We are very satisfied with 3PAR performance and especially the IOPS (Input Output Per Second) is pretty amazing. It is easy to configure and doesn't require much knowledge of storage for Tier 1 support team.
The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?
The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login
With their phone home technology, we usually have a replacement part on its way by the time we wake up in the morning, or if the event occurs overnight. We have had great support when we had questions or events that required a call.
The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.
The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.
We still use NetApp storage enclosures at each plant for our routine file shares (CIFS) but I would love to swap them out for the HPE 3PARs as we use for our ERP app data. The 3PARS are simply faster and much better at near-instant replication. But even more importantly we can get the reporting that we need from the 3PAR within a few minutes, even custom reports. 3PARs are much easier to manage than NetApps in general and I think that the only place that they compete is in compaction.
Having a better, trusted filesystem to build upon makes a huge difference. I want to know that if something I've written is read, it was the thing I wrote. And if it can't be read, I want to know that soon and know how to repair it.
Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.
