HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. IBM Storage FlashSystem

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.

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem is very well suited for a small or medium business that does not want to compromise storage performance. Pricing is excellent and transparent on the website. The option to have 8 16Gb FC connectors allows you to forgo expensive and complicated SAN switches if your host count is low enough. Fewer components make the infrastructure more reliable.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Data Replication over long distances using Policy-Based Replication and maintaining the RPO.
• We use snapshot technology heavily and these snaps are easy to create/automate and instantly available.
• Upgrades/Updates are deployed to the system without loss of data or services.
• Sub-millisecond latency is maintained and spikes are handled and absorbed by the system during peaks.
• When connected to the internet via Storage Insights and Cloud Call Home it makes for proactive problem alerting, monitoring and resolution.
• The fact that Replication and snapshot stuff are hidden under the covers and we no longer have to create mirror pairs or flashcopy pairs ourselves. It does it within the cluster or partnership.

Incentivized

• 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 don't really like how the compression software works, especially when we configure the pools with data reduction, you need to have enough free space available to handle the delete operations, if you don't have that free space in the pool, the storage performance decreases in a very notorious way that directly affects the performance of access to information from the servers

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We’re unlikely to renew our use of IBM Storage FlashSystem, not because of any shortcomings with the product itself, but simply because it serves a very specific role in our environment, supporting our SAP landscape. For other workloads and broader storage needs, we rely on different platforms that are a better fit for those use cases.
The FlashSystem has performed reliably in its role, but since our future storage strategy involves consolidating platforms and aligning with solutions that cover a wider range of requirements, we don’t plan to renew it as part of that transition.

Incentivized

I think Flashsystem has excellent usability. It is compatible with almost every platform we have at our enterprise. It is compatible with Power HA and VMware SRM. It has very well-suited interfaces, and spectrum virtualization is very easy to use. GUI and CLI are very well done.

Incentivized

IBM Flashsystems is always available for me, it is fiberchannel storage without the fuzz of what iscsi brings. It is a very reliable storage system, I have almost never issues with this system. The only things which go wrong are the updates because the old updates which have been staged on the disks are not properly cleaned in my opinion.

Incentivized

From an integrative view, IBM Storage FlashSystem provided currently the required performance to support our use cases above and beyond. As one of the most performant solutions, we are pleased to have the IBM Storage FlashSystem supporting our needs of performance as well as scalability within the infrastructure. Not surprisingly, we certainly look forward to scale performance further in the future.

Incentivized

HPE customer support is very good. We always found them very supportive and their response time was always within our SLA.

Incentivized

Sometimes the knowledge of the support agent is quite limited and the support always has to route through the level 1 agent to screen all the informtion provided. Then its esclated to the next level support with the all collected data . The logs are always uploaded along wiht the case but still its reviewed at the lower level and then escalated / handed over to the next level if its complex issue to solve.

Incentivized

THe training is often selfpaced and easy to follow if you have worked previously with other storage products. The content is clear and contains all the information needed for an admin to learn. However the troubleshooting part is not always included and this is dependent on forums or other sources where the information is not accessible very easily.

Incentivized

I was amazed by the way IBM Flash storage provides a huge amount of storage within the limited footprint, it helped us to replace big fat storage arrays, which aided in the process of moving towards lower hardware, carbon, and energy consumption footprint. We can comfortably say that Flash helped us to host applications fast with a blazing speed and user transactions are quite quick.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem is MUCH faster than the options listed above. We were able to remove 12U of Dell equipment and relaced it with a 2U IBM Storage FlashSystem that was faster and had more storage available. The setup was extremely easier than our initial deployment of our Dell systems. Previous to deploying IBM Storage FlashSystem in our environment, we had quite a bit of lag in our user's VDIs leading to a lot of negative feedback on our systems. Since implementing IBM Storage FlashSystem, we've had tons of positive remarks and the number of helpdesk tickets our internal team has received have dropped considerably. We're spending more time on other initiatives with all the extra time we're saving.

Incentivized

We have been able to scale this storage system whenever there has been requirement for additional capacity and performance. with the help of deduplication we have been able to build quite a robust environment.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy of use is a key aspect, as we do not have dedicated storage staff.
• Our RPO has lowered near to Zero, using PBR as replication and this is key for us.
• DR plan testing has become easier and less time-consuming, allowing us to conduct tests more frequently.

Incentivized