VXN vs 3PAR

[jimbliss]

I know this is a question that involves a product that's not available (Veeam 9), but I'm about to purchase a new storage array. I'm looking at an HP 3PAR 7200 or an EMC VNX5400. I'm currently using a VNX, but I'm familure with the 3PAR. So here is the Chevy vs Ford, Coke vs Pepsi question, what would you choose now that Veeam will be supported by both systems and why?

Thanks,
Jim

[harleyd]

We just ordered a 3PAR. The products we compared it with were VNX and Nimble.

With reference specifically to Veeam, HP has a mature integration already. I don’t know about you but I don’t like being the Guinea pig when it comes to storage. I also don’t install first release copies of Veeam B&R. If you are of the same mentality then it’s a long way off before you can use the EMC integration with any confidence.

[HPEStorageGuy]

Biased HP Storage Guy here but I think there are a LOT of reasons to go 3PAR:
•One platform for entry midrange, through tier-1, all-flash, hybrid, all HDD, block, file, and object - I don't know of any other vendor that can do what we do with a single architecture.
•Fastest growing all-flash in the industry over the last year from number 10 to number 5 and growing at 1069% year over year. This is important because the move to all-flash is inevitable. You can be confident when you need flash that 3PAR will be a great choice. Most of the other storage vendors had to go acquire an all-flash array because their existing arrays are not optimized for flash.
•VVOLs support - not sure how important that is to you but HP 3PAR was not only first but was the dev platform that VMware used. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but last time I checked VNX still doesn't support VVOLs. You'd think with EMC owning VMware they'd be first. Not sure why that is but it is.
•An entry HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 starts at around $20K; an all-flash starter kit is around $35K and that will drop dramatically when we get the 3.84TB SSDs into that solution. And all of these are built on the same 3PAR architecture with enterprise-class data services.
•HP 3PAR has some major architecture advantages over VNX (and other traditional arrays). I did a video a couple of years ago that I need to update but it still has good information. The big thing that was added since then is ASIC enabled deduplication. https://youtu.be/TDuYiH4TnD0
•The ASIC is a big part of the special sauce. It offloads the CPU by managing: wide striping, RAID calculations, fast rebuilds, reservationless snapshots, reservationless thin provisioning without performance caveats, inline dedup and zero reclaim. In an all HDD 3PAR, we almost never saw the CPU as a bottleneck.
•And with regards to Veeam, I think HP was the first storage vendor to integrate with Veeam. I have a demo that I did at VeeamON last fall that shows it. https://youtu.be/FHOTcQ-3iTA There's more coming too but can't talk about that publicly.

I'll also point out that the migration to HP 3PAR is pretty easy. We have HP 3PAR Online Import for EMC Storage. Here's a demo I have showing that. https://youtu.be/FmXmD9U4h74

Happy to answer any questions. Feel free to email me at calvin dot zito at hp.com.

[Gostev]

By the way, All-Flash 3PAR beast (courtesy of HP) has just arrived to our R&D data center in Finland, to be used as the next gen integration testing platform. So, I will be able to share some hands on impressions quite soon

[AndyR]

We purchased a 3PAR 7200 4 months ago to replace an aging P4300 array. We are a software Dev shop so have a lot of small VMs running (150 at the moment) and we brought the 7200 with 8x 1.92TB SSDs and 8x 1.2TB FC drives for differing tiering options. We also went direct fiber channel connection to 4x DL360g9 servers as we didnt need switching for this.

I have to say the 3PAR is an impressive piece of kit. Our P4300 suffered badly from poor I/O and disk latency due to it being overused for its spec, but the 3PAR is another animal. We've put nearly all our VMs on the SSD tier and they are crazy fast now, we even had one Developer think his app was broken because a task he normally ran took 15mins, but on the 3PAR it took 2mins LOL. Great system.

Only downsides I've seen are 1) the dedupe isn't as good as we were expecting/promised and 2) cost for disk licensing if you want to increase. The dedupe is a concern as the sales guys were confident of 4:1 as a minimum, but we only get 2:1 at the moment (but increasing as we replacing VMs).

Overall, great system. We dont use it for Veeam backups though, thats our HP StoreEasy 1630

[emachabert]

Calvin has spoken...

I work with both, and I would suggest to try them to make you own opinion

My thoughts:

3par arrays are true active/active arrays with no "path trashing" or "LUN trespass", dudes we are in 2015
Every spindle is giving space and performance to the array, no "hot spare"
3par are not CPU bounded, I mean you should not be worried about the cpu usage because "the magic resides in the asic (c)". Try not to monitor the Intel CPU of a Vnx
3par is flexible and agile, forget about the raid level or number of spindle in the raid group, you can change everything at anytime.
3par peer persistence, replication and automatic array failover/failback built in. No need of external hardware and software to build a VMSC.
3par is using a single software platform (inform OS) for all the models, you don't have to manage 2 or 3 products to get a working cluster
3par vvols and priority optimization, just think of putting QoS at the VM level in the array! Juste awesome
3par and Veeam are working together like a charm, I have customers using the snapshot integration for nearly 2 years in replication scenarios with dozen of snap per day per volume and it still stable and within the same timeframe.

Regarding the VNX, I like the blue light on the shelves, it pimps the datacenter at night.

[jimbliss]

Thanks for the replays. I like the blue lights too.

[NaomiGoldberg]

There is a comparison chart over on IT Central Station which is based on user reviews for EMC VNX and HPE 3PAR and which you might find helpful:
https://www.itcentralstation.com/produc ... c444-st-38