We evaluated the Nimble all-flash array as a competitor of the HPE 3PAR. During the evaluation, not only did the unit under-perform to the 3PAR, but Nimble was also acquired by HPE. We feel Nimble is a great product, but the 3PAR 8200 is a better fit in relation to our …
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 …
By comparison, I would pick DataCore because it's far more flexible to work with and I think less costly. We only went with HP because we didn't know about DataCore and because other persons where we work wanted the HP name.
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.
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.
The 3PAR is faster, easier to use, takes up less space and is much easier to expand than a VMAX system. We compared the 3PAR head to head against XtremIO and Compellent and chose the 3PAR for its combination of performance, features and price (Compellent was cheaper, but did …
I think it is easy to choose between all of competitor. At that time, only Pure Storage FlashArray gave us warranty for right-sized, where they guarantee that if the capacity is less than we agreed then they provide additional storage at no cost.
Really the deduplication and compression ratio has been all over these guys. The speed on the flash storage seems more customized if I may say and our deployments were smooth. Nothing against these guys since we work with all at the same level, but there are very notable perks …
It was a very tight call before finalizing the solution. Since Pure Storage FlashArray was able to offer the best deal and the kind of relationship the pure engineer maintained with us during the entire POC journey made them unique compared with the other vendors and I strongly …
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
The Pure Storage FlashArray blows any other array I've used out of the water. We had an investment in EqualLogic and purchased an all-flash array. A couple of years later and with many performance issues, we purchased our first Pure Storage array and the difference was …
We tested against HPE Hybrid SANs, which were very nice as well. In the end, Pure Storage FlashArray was a better fit since we were going to be replicating to a DR location.
[They] seemed to have all the right things in place for our environment. A bit costly up front, but good return on less stress, better performance and good support whenever we do have issues.
Pure Storage stands head and shoulders above their competition. Not only is performance and usable capacity better and faster respectively, but the predictable support costs also make this a "no-brainer." Having used other storage arrays, from setup to support, Pure is by far …
Pure Storage had a much simpler interface and the dedupe and compression was better than all the other products we considered. Other vendors we looked at were Dell, Nimble, Tegile, and a few others I can't remember the names of.
We reviewed Dell EMC and said no because of spin drives, hard upgrades. NetApp was not easy enough to use. Pure Storage was easy of use, had reliability, evergreen, and we got much more in productivity than we could even imagine at the time.
NetApp has a lot of issues. Its software is clunky and complicated. It wastes much capacity in the storage operating system. It doesn't do deduplication and compression that well and takes a CPU hit when it does. And all-flash storage was never really an option. At just about …
I believe that Pure has set itself way ahead of its competition in the storage market, you could probably find something faster but it will lack in ease of use. You could pay less for something but it will lack a key feature that Pure offers. It is hard to find something like …
NetApp, which is/was the market leader. This is a good system in their own right, but there are two areas where Pure Storage FlashArray beats them all hands-down! First is management. The software interface for management and provisioning is cleaner and doesn't make one jump …
Fusion-IO is very expensive per TB and limited to host you can connect. Pure Storage might not be as fast but its ease of use, along with compression and dedupe make up for it.
It was easier to use but has fewer features. When the selection process was started, the NetApp was was still very difficult to use. The console for Pure won over the team. From a speed perspective, all of the FlashArrays are fast enough for our infrastructure and applications.
HPe 3PAR is a product that tries to emulate the R/W delays times but based on standard technology. The difference for a solution natively built in all-flash technology is way better.
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.
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
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.
Support - I've never had a call passed off to a different party that I then have to wait to get back to me. The person responding to my support ticket has been able to help me every time.
Non-disruptive upgrades. We were able to transition from a SAS based //m series array to a NVMe based //x series array with zero down time. This gave us greater performance and capacity with minimal disruption.
Simplicity - Pure Storage aims to automate the complicated steps of storage management with superior software. You know they are still happening under the surface, but the administrator does not have to deal with keeping the process just right with a given vendor's command set.
Licensing - All-in base licensing instead of expensive add-on licenses for additional features. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
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.
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.
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
From the day our first array was put in (2017) we have had very little issues using it the way we wanted to and none of the setup or processes we incorporate this into have ever been complex. All of the interfaces in the GUI are very intuitive and do not require any CLI experience to do what we need it to do.
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
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.
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
We run what seems to me to be a crazy number of hosts (800), backed by 2 pure arrays. Around 400 hosts per array, including database servers, render farm, application servers, etc.
HPE 3 PAR has quickly proved its value to our organization. I cannot speak to ROI, but feel that it has quickly met the expectations of our organization.
The 3PAR has allowed our organization to expand business due to its ability to be expanded with no downtime.
