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HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200
September 17, 2018

HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200

Ravinder Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The all flash HP 3PAR StoreServ provides great IOPS bandwidth. It depends on how many disks you have, for my environment of 8 disks with 6 TB each SSD, it allows upto 80,000 IOPS.
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ has native offsite replication capability and onsite snapshot copy features. These features allow faster recovery.
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ comes with inbuilt High Availability at controller nodes level and internal disk redundancy. This allows sustaining disk failures or controller node failure without immediately causing downtime.
  • The deduplication feature, when turned on, provides a compaction ratio up to 25:1 times and hence helps reducing overall storage footprint, as HP claims, up to 95 % times.
NetApp does not have RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols. Also, NetApp All Flash FAS has no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access.
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.

Using HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage

5000 - HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash Storage is Administered directly by a team of 12 people and is used by applications and monitoring infrastructure which has roughly 5000 end users. Although, most of these users never login to 3PAR directly but they are impacted directly if there is any performance impact on 3PAR StoreServ storage.
12 - We have 4 Storage experts who are responsible for configuring 3PAR StoreServ, Carving out virtual volumes, configure volume replication, export volumes to host sets, work with HP for firmware upgrades. Besides, we have another set of 8 people who provide tier 1 support and are responsible for monitoring 3PAR StoreServ performance and investigate any alerts before reaching out to Tier 2 support.
  • We use them for data stores for VMWare infrastructure containing 10 ESXi hosts.
  • We are using the 3PAR StoreServ Flash Virtual Volumes for Oracle ASM disks to host Oracle Databases.
  • We are also using 3PAR StoreServ production virtual volumes and replicating them to non-production virtual volumes for disaster recovery.
  • We use 3PAR StoreServ storage snapshots for quick recovery from volume failures.
  • We are using StoreServ for both file level and block level storage with no additional configuration required.
  • We are using local Storage Snapshots as BCV (Business Continuity Volumes).
  • We have a big existing Mainframes and PeopleSoft infrastructure. We are planning to upgrade the technology stack and 3PAR StoreServ Flash Storage would be our choice for storage layer.
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.

Evaluating HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
I believe Product Reputation was the most important factor why we chose 3PAR StoreServ Flash Storage. We didn't had any prior experience with this product. Besides the HP sales team, presentation was a key factor, we also heard of this product from our storage experts and based on those recommendations we decided to purchase HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash Storage (All SSDs).
The SSD volumes are little on the expensive side but we get amazing deduplication compaction which compensates for it. Hence, we would like to stick to the product until we come across something more exciting in future.