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HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VNX [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
NAS (7th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (2nd), All-Flash Storage (10th)
VNX [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Community Director at PeerSpot
Jul 31, 2018
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Hybrid Tech
Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support
I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.
AZ
Works at AIT
The Nimble CS-Series has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime
When we started the process of looking for a SAN vendor I had four primary criteria: reliability, performance, cost, and simplicity. We were really looking for a unicorn and were fully expected to have to make compromises in one of those areas. The Nimble CS-Series was recommended by our solutions provider, and we were blown away. Not only was it the most affordable option, but it was the easiest to deploy, had the best performance, and has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It's very fast, easy to use, and the cloud-based management is good."
"The stability is perfect, the reliability is 100%, and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"For me, right now, it is the best storage solution in the market, by far."
"In Pure Storage FlashArray, the dedupe and compression are excellent, and performance is good too."
"I would highly recommend this solution; it has all the features we need and tests all the software solutions that are currently available and that will be available in the future."
"With Pure Storage FlashArray we have been able to deploy several thousand VDI servers, virtual machines, very quickly and efficiently."
"Service and support is phenomenal."
"Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput."
"Compared to before, if you look at the performance, some of the applications are 30 to 40 percent improved, some of the batches are almost 70% better, and if you look at the back-end side, your export logical backups and your disaster recovery, there is a tremendous increase."
"Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface."
"Scalability is incredible. We have a single server cabinet today, but we can grow it to as many cabinets as we need."
"I am impressed with the product's online upgrades."
"I think the storage is very good, the way it stores, the thin provisioning it provides, and the data protection. And it's easy to deploy in any environment. We are using VMware. So for me, it's a right click and it's deployed. We can configure and create LUNS very easily with 3PAR management, and the interface is very user-friendly. Easily understandable."
"It has given us higher performance over our servers/applications, which work better now than with our previous storage system."
"It has really improved how we can streamline our storage purchases, as well as performance."
"Since it's being used to support a virtual infrastructure, that gives us access to all of the benefits of a virtual infrastructure. So, instead of spending hours trying to rebuild or to fix a broken server, we can instead wipe it out and throw up a new one and we're up and running again."
"In a banking environment, on which we required a very high throughput for our database, we have used this product and our desired response was received."
"I have worked on CLARiiON and all series of VNX."
"It is a good product with a simple setup and easy administration."
"It would be a good choice for midrange businesses due to the performance/features and cost."
"The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud."
"The VNX 5700 provides a large number of features including the ability to work for both file and block as a unified array."
"It’s very stable in all the years I've worked with it, I know it’s stable and the support is there."
"EMC storage has the best performance and functions."
 

Cons

"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high."
"In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyperconverged."
"I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries."
"We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us."
"We've started to see an issue with the older models that we have. We've had issues where facilities would have unscheduled power outages or scheduled power outages and the 3PARs weren't able to come up successfully. We actually had an incident recently where it wiped data that we didn't anticipate would be wiped."
"In the next release, I would like them to make it a little easier to find where everything is in the new console. It now has the OneView look and sometimes I don't think the OneView look is enough. It's too different from the original console that was a separate system."
"The only area I would say that could use improvement is communication on what upgrades should be applied."
"In the next release, I think I would like to see lower-cost SSD features."
"The initial setup was complex in that requirements were not communicated well through the VAR and some parts needed to be sent back (PDU’s were of the wrong type) and the VAR assumed a Virtual Storage manager would be used, but a physical manager was both requested and required, which created an installation delay while the correct equipment was shipped."
"Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."
"Due to very complex structure and sophisticated architecture, it needs experts for trivial troubleshooting also."
"Oracle is never the cheaper solution. Compared to others, it is always among the most expensive."
"Yes, we have had issues. The system is limited by the number of enclosures."
"As an entry level array, this is just right, but adding support for FAST-VP would be beneficial although that feature is available on the higher end VNXe3200."
"EMC pricing is too expensive, like the Apple brand iPhone in the cellphone market."
"So far we haven't had many issues with the VNX. However, the Data Mover (that manages CIFS/NFS) part needs some improvements."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When I last looked, the prices were reasonable, and we could get an excellent array for about $60,000."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"The price is reasonable."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying."
"The licensing fee is not cheap."
"It makes for less administrative overhead."
"I would like it to be cheaper."
"The licensing cost for HPE 3PAR StoreServ is expensive."
"Take advantage of what HPE offers as far as professional services, and this will help you make the right decision."
"It has greatly reduced my management overhead time."
"Our licensing cost are $32,000 annually."
"​Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages​ (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead.​"
"Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive"
"Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume."
"While EMC tends to be on the expensive side, the stability and support of their products are top-notch and I feel are worth the cost."
"Make sure you understand how the licensing works and that you are getting the right set of licenses if you need array-to-array replication."
"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable. Yearly EMC is more expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
May 1, 2015
Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR
Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…
 

Answers from the Community

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Community Director at PeerSpot
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018
Pros EMC VNX Multi-tiering positively affects the efficiency of the storage space. The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data. The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages. From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is ha...
2 out of 19 answers
reviewer325866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and General Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
May 29, 2018
As far as I know, VNX line is no longer available, therefore I think that the real comparison has to be with the Dell EMC Unity family systems
it_user551106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Solution Architect - HPE MASE - Storage with 5,001-10,000 employees
May 29, 2018
One user says about HPE 3PAR, "The optimization features move chunklets or hot spots to faster drives." The moving of Chunklets is to maintain performance. What kind of CPG or level of protection you choose for 3PAR volumes will determine your availability and protection level? Although Chunklets can be moved to higher levels of protection, that is not the stated purpose above. Another user says about EMC VNX, "The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data." The replication feature mentioned is for protection and not performance. VNX performance can be enhanced by FAST Cache. Availability is determined by the Virtual Provisioning of the VNX and by choosing a Storage Pool in which the proper RAID level is chosen.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise74
Large Enterprise170
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
As a customer, I always prefer to have a lower price. Any customer will always ask for the cheaper price.
What needs improvement with HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
I have no specific ideas for improvement at present. We just need to verify whether our current virtual server setup ...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
VNX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Samsonite, Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Kindred Healthcare
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