HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.7 out of 10

Score

7.7 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HPE 3PAR StoreServ are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

The HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage solution has been successfully utilized in various use cases, proving its versatility and effectiveness. One notable example is the implementation of a new ERP system for an academic client. Users were able to leverage the HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8200 as the storage layer, providing both file-based and block storage options to cater to different storage needs, such as applications and database volumes. With the dedupe feature, users have been able to significantly reduce their overall estimated storage footprint. In addition, the mix of SATA and SSD drives in the HPE 8200 unit has offered affordability and tiered storage options, ensuring smooth performance for PRD SQL databases without disk latency concerns.

Another valuable use case involved using two units of the HPE 3PAR StoreServ - the HPE 7200 and HPE 8200 - as the primary storage platform for an enterprise. This configuration allowed for efficient management of the organization's data while providing high-performance storage solutions. The replication feature of the HPE 3PAR ensured effective disaster recovery by replicating data within approximately 15 minutes of 'live'. Additionally, the all-flash array configuration of the HP 3PAR served as the primary storage for database servers within Central IT, supporting virtual machines and database files.

Overall, customers have found the HPE 3PAR StoreServ to be a reliable and versatile storage solution, meeting their diverse needs for data storage, application performance, and disaster recovery.

Reviews

8 Reviews

HPE 3PAR at a Glance

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 24, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage unit is our primary storage platform for our enterprise. We have two units, an HPE 7200, and an HPE 8200. The 8200 has a mix of Sata and SSD drives, which allows us the affordability of tiered storage. The SSD drives allow us to run our PRD SQL databases with no worries about disk latency.

Pros

Ease of Management. The Web Interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.
The acquisition of Nimble allowed HPE to leverage InfoSite. InfoSite has the ability to use predictive analytics to not only alert us on issues but help resolve issues prior to them hitting an enterprise.

Cons

At the present, I have not found any weaknesses in the 3PAR units we own. They fit the needs of our business.

Likelihood to Recommend

HPE 3PAR is a medium to high-end SAN, which makes it a little costly. It is a definite advantage if it can be leveraged in high IOP scenarios, and even in DR scenarios where storage replication can be used to assist with disaster recovery. The unit is less appropriate to smaller shops where costs are prohibitive to business needs.

Shawn Karr

IT Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at Advanced Pharmacy (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

HPE 3PAR Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was used for one of our business units to support applications with <20 k IOPS.

Pros

It has a very user friendly GUI.
Easy to manage (create volume/provision luns/adding host/host sets).

Cons

If they can add more features in reports tab, that would be very good.

Likelihood to Recommend

It has very friendly user interface. We used it to support applications which required <20 K iops and were not very intense.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Fast, easy to manage, and will make you look incredible!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 13, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use HPE 3PAR storage enclosures (with integrated controller) at two locations; The primary location is our corporate datacenter headquarters where the 3PAR acts as the primary data repository for the data produced by our most important, business-critical application, our ERP system, which is called Infor BaaN IV. The second 3PAR enclosure (with integrated controller) is located in a co-lo that is far enough away from our HQ datacenter that it provides for disaster recovery. So that 3PAR acts as the "failover" location. HPE's 3PAR replication is so effective that we keep our ERP data replicated to within about 15 minutes of "live". Therefore, we would be able to run our ERP directly from the co-lo, in a "live" failover capacity, if our HQ datacenter were destroyed or became otherwise unreachable.

Pros

Replication - HPE 3PAR offers exceptionally fast and well-managed replication with little latency and that's why we bought it to store and protect our most important ERP data. We wanted identical performance and connectivity for our primary storage and our failover (DR) storage and so we bought two of them.
Hybrid storage is right up HPE's alley. You can assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure, for instance, you can store your data that needs super high availability and fast IOPS on an all-flash volume but on the same shelf you can have a platter array for longer-term and less- time-critical data. This saves a lot of money on the front end because you don't have to buy all-flash. Why go all-flash for that data where you aren't going to need it?
3PARs can do both file-level and block-level replication which is nice.
The data compression/compaction is really very good.

Cons

HPE 3PAR enclosures are expensive, especially if you want to go all-flash.
I don't much care for the management tool, but I have to admit that provisioning is super easy, as is monitoring.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want all-flash or hybrid flash/platter enclosures that can be very fast, very easy to provision and at the same time be very versatile with regard to how you retain your data (i.e. for different data types and access needs) then this is the right product for you. The competition does just about as well with compaction/size reduction but the reporting is better and the IOPS are blazing. The thing runs like a scalded ape!

Jane Updegraff

Senior Systems Administrator in Information Technology at DRT Holdings, Inc. (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Hardware Top, Software Flop

Rating: 3 out of 10

May 16, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have two 3PAR StoreServ 7200c devices running all flash. This is our main storage for the entire company. We wanted to get rid of IBM's expensive disk licenses and in the same step moved from harddisks to solid state disks. We wanted a storage system that supported Veeam as a backup solution as well.

Pros

Great performance (I/O).
Support for Veeam backup.
Automated storage snapshots.
Inline Dedup.

Cons

No SNMP Support: You can monitor almost every device nowadays with SNMP, but 3PAR does not support it. You have to buy HP Openview, which costs extra and does not integrate well with your already existing monitoring solution.
No NFS Support: HP provides an ugly workaround by deploying a VM onto 3PAR that then provides the assigned storage as NFS storage.
Only expensive SSDs can be run.
Upgrading the storage with new firmware is a horrible process. They assist you with a support center based in India. Just picking an appointment is a hassle. They send you PDFs that look like they have been created by children, with red circles and yellow highlights. You have to go through the whole update routing every time. Even if you already did the routing last time and are now only upgrading a minor release.
Outdated management application: The application looks like it was developed 20 years ago. It is very unintuitive. They announced that you can manage 3PAR over the web, but it is all again just an ugly workaround. You have to install an application that runs on a web server locally, so you cannot access the management via web from everywhere. The web overview looks nice and is intuitive, but it does not provide all the features. You still have to go to the old application for lots of things.
The compaction value is just marketing. If you deploy a disk of 100GB and only have data of about 10GB, 3PAR calculates the unused 90GB into the compaction value. This is just for show and does not provide any "space savings." Dedup is where the real savings come in. Depending on the type of data, we have a dedup ration between 1.3:1 and 4.4:1 on our VVols.

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is aimed at performance, but not manageability. So if you wanna have a storage system that just delivers performance, but you don't want to have too much interaction with once it is set up, this is the perfect product. But if you emphasize integrability with existing products and a modern, easy to use interface, you should maybe look somewhere else,

Mario Jost

System Engineer in Information Technology at Mercedes Benz Automobil AG (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

It does its job but is lacking on many fronts

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using the HPE 3PAR for as our disk storage for our entire organization's data. Its good in that instead of having a large number of physical servers, we can utilize its function to allow for a number of virtual servers that are easier to manage.

Pros

It seems to integrate well with VMware.
We never seem to have slow I/O, which is good.
Its has HP monitoring it and they let us know when things go wrong.

Cons

It's very large and takes up a lot of room in the rack.
I hate that it's proprietary and that I have to buy "special HP Drives" that cost 3-4 times as much and are the same drives I could source from anywhere.
It has a very old management interface, and it's not very user-friendly.

Likelihood to Recommend

I guess it's well suited in an older environment, but really I don't think I would use it in any environment.

Andrew Bouwhuis

Network System Administrator in Legal at LANprofessionals (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

High IOPS. Amazing Compaction Ratio, and Minimal Administration Needs

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are transforming legacy systems for a big academic client. We are using HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8200 as the storage layer. Our Tier 1 HPE 3PAR StoreServ is all SSD and Tier 2 is a mix of SSD and Near Line (HDD). We are using it for both file and block level storages. File level storage is used by our applications while block level is used by our database volumes.

Pros

HPE 3PAR StoreServ provides an amazing compaction ratio. Some of our storage volumes have compaction ratio of 25:1. This is amazing If you choose to turn on the dedup feature as we did—you can easily see a reduced storage footprint of 80% or more.
This product comes with a lightweight yet powerful GUI interface called SSMC (StoreServ Management Console). The console is very handy to configure and monitor your storage volumes. It can be used by non-storage teams like DBA , Network and System Admins to monitor storage performance when a performance issue is reported to the technical team on the whole.

Cons

The SSD volumes are fast and we haven't seen much high disk activities in our Tier 1 storage. However, Tier 2 storage which also uses nearline HDD often sees high disk activity. We were told that replacing it with SSD will fix the issue since the high demand is coming from our system and HPE 3PAR StoreServ can't do anything about it.
You can't really set up many of the threshold alerts manually from SSMC such as CPU overheating, block disk corruptions. We were told that this is handled by the system processor automatically and sends alerts as minor and major alerts. But we wanted to configure it custom to our environment.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Amanda Decker

Development Coordinator, Advancement Services in Information Technology at University of Southern California (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were setting up a whole new ERP for an academic client. We required a storage that provides us both file based storage for less demanding storage needs and block storage for more demanding needs like database and virtual desktops. We have been able to achieve that along with reducing our overall estimated storage footprint by making use of dedupe feature of HP 3PAR.

Pros

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.

Cons

I was trying to look for what kind of threshold monitoring I can do using the web console for hour HP 3PAR. Though it covers most of the essential threshold alert settings, I was looking for things like CPU overheating, block corruptions. I was told these can not be monitored directly through SSMC but are thrown as minor and major alerts automatically by the system processor.
Native reporting features in 3PAR are just fine, but they can be more user friendly and can be made to be more representative.
We were facing high disk IOPS and increased service time, due to few overloaded disks. We had to dig this ourselves but it would have been nice if HP 3PAR could have provided some automated recommendations to improve performance.

Likelihood to Recommend

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a great solution where both file level and block level storage is required. It will be recommended to use all flash SSD storage although cheaper near line storage can also be used for light application with less IOPS.

I would not recommend HP 3PAR StoreServ if you are looking for a low budget storage solution.

Ravinder Gupta

Senior Oracle Database Administrator in Information Technology at CGI (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash storage - High performance storage that won't break the bank

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 11, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash storage as our primary Data Base server storage within Central IT. All Virtual machine and data base files associated with any of our data bases (production) our stored on the HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash storage. We have the array configured as an all-Flash array (no tiering is used).

Pros

It provides above the level of I/O that we need in order for our data bases to perform as needed. We have never hit a plateau as far as I/O is concerned.
The 3PAR is very easy to setup, use and manage. Both the GUI and the CLI are very intuitive and allow you to manage the storage your way.
The 3PAR packs a lot of storage space and performance into a much smaller footprint than our previous storage solution. The 3PAR uses aboout 1/3 of 1 Rack, while our old solution used 2 full rack spaces.

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

The 3PAR flash storage is perfect for use cases that need high I/O and low latency (like data bases or even VDI). The flexibility of the system allows you quickly to allocate or expand storage. I would not recommend it for use in archival storage (too expensive) or for systems that have very low I/O requirements.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Hardware Top, Software Flop

Rating: 3 out of 10

May 16, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Great performance (I/O).
Support for Veeam backup.
Automated storage snapshots.
Inline Dedup.

Cons

No SNMP Support: You can monitor almost every device nowadays with SNMP, but 3PAR does not support it. You have to buy HP Openview, which costs extra and does not integrate well with your already existing monitoring solution.
No NFS Support: HP provides an ugly workaround by deploying a VM onto 3PAR that then provides the assigned storage as NFS storage.
Only expensive SSDs can be run.
Upgrading the storage with new firmware is a horrible process. They assist you with a support center based in India. Just picking an appointment is a hassle. They send you PDFs that look like they have been created by children, with red circles and yellow highlights. You have to go through the whole update routing every time. Even if you already did the routing last time and are now only upgrading a minor release.
Outdated management application: The application looks like it was developed 20 years ago. It is very unintuitive. They announced that you can manage 3PAR over the web, but it is all again just an ugly workaround. You have to install an application that runs on a web server locally, so you cannot access the management via web from everywhere. The web overview looks nice and is intuitive, but it does not provide all the features. You still have to go to the old application for lots of things.
The compaction value is just marketing. If you deploy a disk of 100GB and only have data of about 10GB, 3PAR calculates the unused 90GB into the compaction value. This is just for show and does not provide any "space savings." Dedup is where the real savings come in. Depending on the type of data, we have a dedup ration between 1.3:1 and 4.4:1 on our VVols.

Likelihood to Recommend

Mario Jost

System Engineer in Information Technology at Mercedes Benz Automobil AG (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience