3PAR

I’ve been using 3par for production storage for a long time (I’m on the 3d generation now, so that’s 7+ years). Like most marriages, the relationship has had its ups and downs.

The courting phase

My longtime infrastructure provider (and employer of most of the consultants that has worked with us) is an HPE premium (or something, I don’t care) reseller. They had previously set me up with HP (this was before they split into HP and HPE) LeftHand (this was before they rebranded it to StoreVirtual) and I had been very vocal about my perception of that system (I fucking hated it). However, my journey begins back when HP had just bought the “NextGen” storage company 3PAR, and my infrastructure provider had put loads of resources into training of consultants and sales people. Stung from the hurt of having been exposed to LeftHand, I was a little hesitant to say the least. But they were persistent, and I really didn’t have any better alternative at hand (having also endured the horrors of Dell EqualLogic and EMC “don’t-even-remember-the-name-of-their-crappy-fc-solution-Maybe-something-like-cx30”, provided by another reseller). So I felt forced to listen. The pitch for 3PAR was:

• “They have just released an array aimed at medium size companies, so you’ll be able to afford enterprise technology!”
• “You can have an SSD tier to help the cache. The data blocks are automagically moved between different storage tiers, based on whether they are “hot” or not. Since SSD is new and extremely expensive, you’ll be able to have the full SSD experience without having to pay for X TB of SSD. You’ll just stuff the other tiers with cheap SATA and SAS!”
• “This system is modern! Current iSCSI arrays sport 10-year-old technology!”

They had me convinced. Well not really convinced, but more like without any better option. So I decided to settle and commit.

The honeymoon phase

It was all bells and whistles. I was swept away on introduction classes on HP HQ in Stockholm, I was given merch and education. The HP 3PAR crew was a very tender lover, and they gave me all the attention I could ever need to make me feel confident in my purchase. At the time, I didn’t know what to think, but in hindsight I kind of realize it was a quite pleasant experience. You usually just get the wham-bam-thankyou-mam when the order has been placed.

The installation was weird. I had my consultant present, and as far I as I understand, he was certified with 3PAR to the highest level. Despite having this certified professional to hold my hand, there was one part of the setup the consultant was not allowed to do; it had to be done by a 3PAR employee! I can’t remember what part of the installations it was, but it felt really weird, me and the consultant just standing there with our hands in our pockets while “the professional did his thing”. Also, I found the demands from 3PAR somewhat strange. They wanted a physical server for monitoring and configuration. I flat out refused, and I don’t know if they allowed it or if I and the consultant just made it a VM anyways, but at least there was no physical server in the installation. Though there were some weirdness, I started to fall in love.

The you-complete-me phase

The honeymoon feeling actually lasted for quite some time. The more I learnt about the system, the more I liked it. Support was very good (I think HP was able to keep most of the original 3PAR crew on staff after the buy, probably through some sort of death deal retainer, but the team seemed genuinely interested in the success of their customers implementations). After having had a couple of sessions with a storage consultant, I felt I finally dared to push the buttons and turn the knobs enough to tune the system for my needs. And I got it working beautifully! At this point, I saw no reason to even consider another system. And when Veeam released it’s first version of direct storage integration, and 3PAR was the first system to get support, I was actually proud to be a 3PAR owner!

The comfortable-and-boring phase

When we bought the latest iteration of production storage, I just went with 3PAR again. I considered to dig into all the new-and-shiny out there (HCI for example), but just felt I was not ready to even start to probe the market and looking for a stable reseller to provide us with equipment and consultants. I did however sneak-peek in the direction of others but decided to stay in the safe (but somewhat boring) embrace of 3PAR. After all, it had been a happy marriage so far.

The break-up?

We have so far had few reasons to interact with HPE support directly. That’s good, because usually it makes you want to kill yourself (LeftHand team, I’m looking at you). But with 3PAR, based on the few historical interactions I’ve had, the experience has been pleasant! However, during the last year or so, the experienced has gone down-hill. I guess no one on the 3PAR OG crew is still with HPE. The people we have interacted with lately has frankly been clueless. Sad. Since I’m considering going full cloud, and the issues we’ve had with the latest (last?) array has been non-critical, I have not cared too much about it. Yet. But if I was to buy a new storage system anytime soon, I would seriously consider other options.

P.S.

One thing that has bothered me during this whole relationship, is the lack of public APIs. Actually, that goes for most HPE products. Either they are non-existent (3PAR, MSM), or you actually have to pay a license to use all the features of them (iLO, IMC etc.). And the few “free” APIs available are so crappy in their design and documentation, your eyes actually tear up when starting to dig into them. Trying to navigate HPE documentation and gaining access to its myriad of loosely connected portals, is just a horrendous user experience. Sure keeps HPE partner consultants fat and happy though. On the topic of licenses, the 3PAR AFAs seem really cheap nowadays, but if you want to have basic features such as snapshots, clustering, replication, dedup, compression etc. you have to buy a license for each of these features. And also support and maintenance on these goddamned licenses! And you actually have to buy a license for adding more disks to the array! And all feature licenses are per disk so if you expand you have to cough up for all feature licenses. Again. Plus support and maintenance on the licenses. Again. Suddenly it’s not cheap any more. To be fair, i really don’t know how the competition stack up nowadays. Maybe they’re worse than 3PAR. But TCO, APIs and support are definitely something I’ll look closely at when comparing vendors next time. If there’s a next time. Let’s hope not. End rant.

P.S.2

I don’t want to end this post with a rant. I want to end it by reminiscing the good times. For example, there’s remote monitoring. People actually call you when there’s something wrong with the system. There has been no downtime. I repeat no downtime in 7+ years on 3 different boxes! Sure, a couple disks have died, but usually within a couple of hours, I have a new one sent to me for replacement. And thanks to the remote monitoring, I have had a new disk waiting for me before I even knew one had failed. Who knows, maybe this is not the end our relationship, but just a new beginning?

The personal experiences, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this blog post are my own and in no way represent those of the company.