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High IOPS. Amazing Compaction Ratio, and Minimal Administration Needs
February 10, 2019

High IOPS. Amazing Compaction Ratio, and Minimal Administration Needs

Amanda Decker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • HPE 3PAR StoreServ was easy to configure. We contracted storage experts for initial setup and our in house technical team was able to take over the work with little training. This requires minimal day to day monitoring and hence reduces maintenance cost.
  • The time to Go Live was fast and hence that as well helped us save time and money.
We also considered NetApp All-Flash FAS since it works on similar technology and provides comparable throughput. However, we were offered better deal from HPE as we are existing customers for HPE, hence we chose HPE 3PAR StoreServ.
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.

Evaluating HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Product Features were definitely the key but we chose HPE 3PAR StoreServ over NetApp All FAS because of our existing relationship with the vendor which got us good discount and hence reduced overall cost.
We are quite happy with the product, so I wouldn't really change anything in the evaluation process but I would like to get all my technical team members who will be using the product in future included in all the meetings and sessions. They asked us specific questions about the product later which we would have preferred HPE to answer :)