HPE 3PAR StoreServ

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

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.

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.

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Outdated management application: The application looks like it was developed 20 years ago.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.

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.