TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Score8.3 out of 10

29 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is a flash storage option, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about HPE 3PAR StoreServ.
View all reviews

HPE 3PAR at a Glance

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

HPE Nimble Storage

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi, Veeam Backup & Replication, Exagrid EX Series

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

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • Thanks to 3PAR enclosures, we now have a disaster recovery solution that is both more affordable than the hyper-converged solution we had considered for our HQ and DR col-lo and with a whole lot better replication speed and less latency overall. I can't quantify a saved expense for Disaster recovery because it hasn't happened yet, but I would guess that just having a good solid DR solution powered by HPE 3PAR could easily save us millions per day in the event of a disaster. We would be able to keep working even if we lost our primary datacenter.
  • The 3PARS have eliminated the need for more overly complicated NetApp enclosures with their clunky GUI and requirements for what can only be described as arcane knowledge. We've saved hours and hours of engineer's time by using the easy-to-provision and easy-to-manage 3PARS, and pulling storage reports is a total snap. I'd guess we save about 10 hours per month in engineering time.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp FAS series, NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp SnapMirror and NetApp ONTAP System Manager (formerly OnCommand)

Other Software Used

NetApp SnapMirror, NetApp ONTAP System Manager (formerly OnCommand), Autodesk Inventor

High IOPS. Amazing Compaction Ratio, and Minimal Administration Needs

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp All Flash FAS

Other Software Used

Skype for Business (formerly Lync), TeamViewer

Hardware Top, Software Flop

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • We grew unexpectedly, which forced us to buy a lot of expensive HP SSD's.
  • We have never had any performance issues with this storage.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Other Software Used

PRTG Network Monitor, VMware ESXi, Veeam Backup & Replication

HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp All Flash FAS

Other Software Used

Oracle Enterprise Manager, Asana, JIRA Software, HP StoreOnce, Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vCenter Server