HPE Storage Users Group

We are a new 3Par customer coming from the EVA platform. We spent a large amount of time comparing the VNX to the 3Par and decided that the 3Par was the better platform (have to say that VNX2 is a huge improvement however!), so we purchased a 7400 with SSD and 10k SAS drives about 100TB in size. Several weeks after we installed the unit we had just finished moving all our production storage to the array we had 3 drives fail all at once in one of the shelves. I don't really understand how we didn't lose any data (maybe because of cage level redundancy?), but we replaced the drives and then the problems started. The array never "released" the failed drives so when they were replaced the new drives reported as failed again. Support had us move around drives to empty slots and they came back online, however the system still reports failed drives in the empty slots. They decided that it must be a defective shelf, so we took a complete outage of all systems last weekend (mind you this is just after we coordinated downtime for everything to move the storage in the first place!) and shut down the SAN to replace the shelf. Powered it back up and the problem persists. Yesterday they had us replace the I/O module in the back of the shelf, but that still didn't help. As of now we have had ongoing issues for over a month with absolutely no resolution. Every support call to India takes hours, but nobody has any answers. Absolutely horrible support for a great product, I wish we had gone the EMC route now.

I feel your pain. If you read my thread about 3par support you will see this is a long time problem I have faced for 2 years. We even have their top level "Mission Critical" support and a team of account support people and we still have issues. I can tell you I have spoken with HP people far up the support food chain and they know the issue, the problem is I have been hearing for 18 months now that they are going to fix it. I am supposed to get a status Monday on where they are with that fix, I know they have been staffing up a US support center, just not sure when it goes live. My understanding is they are cross training some EVA support folks, which hopefully help. My concern is they are trying to bail out the Titanic with a 5 gallon pail. Honestly I have no confidence support will improve over the next 6 months. We are buckling up for the ride, but at least have a good local account team trying to buffer this pain. If you did not purchase Mission Critical support you should look at upgrading your support. There is a new level of support just under Mission Critical that gets you all the same things that Mission Critical gets you, just not a dedicated ASM. In my opinion ASM is not worth it as they only do proactive things and bring you quarterly reports. Where are you located?

Sorry to hear about your troubles. It's a shame that your first impression of the hardware is based on a bad experience. I've been running 3PAR for 5 years now, since before HP. I am a big fan of the technology, so much so that I started these forums.

A triple drive failure is a storage admin's nightmare. There is a bright side to this story in that the architecture deserves some props for surviving that.

Have you spoken with any engineers or techs stationed in Sunnyvale California yet? Those guys know their stuff. If your still stuck with level 1 support , leverage your sales team and/or the duty manager(s) "overseas" to get you escalated to Sunnyvale. This does not sound like a level 1 problem.

_________________
Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I will agree the underlying technology is what convinced us to go 3par. We came from NetApp which had several architectural issues. In the end every technology has its issues, there are trade offs with each strategy vendor, in my opinion as a block based storage device the 3 par is tops, as some have read my biggest concerns are around replication and support, if they can fix those 2 areas they can make a killing in the space.

I will add our experiences are just as bad. We have watched support degrade for some time. Seems they have 3 support centers, India, UK and US and they are listed in the order of horrible to acceptable to decent.

I can finally report that we have resolved the issue by replacing BOTH I/O modules in the recently replaced shelf. Total time to resolution was 44 days!

I just can not believe how bad support keeps getting. By far of any company I have dealt with in a long time 3par support as well as HP's support portal are the worst I have seen and dealt with. Support arbitrarily closes case, mentioning duplicate cases that we have no record of and they don't contact you to confirm. Honestly I really don't care how good this technology is I have no desire to do business with 3par in the future. HP has done a poor job of integrating them into the HP support structure and we keep hearing they are fixing it. How long can you hear the same story of false promises before you give up, well I will tell you I give up. The only reference I will be is for 3pars competitors on how bad 3par support is and why not to purchase a 3par array.


Also for anyone that is considering 3par and wants details on their support feel free to message me and I can provide in depth details on the poor support.

Here are some entertaining analogies of 3par support:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmpHvOzlxE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8jphxpi1ro

@cbuxton - I'd love to see if I can help figure out where this went south. If you can send me information about your support case (Case ID), who you work for or the S/N on your 3PAR, I have contacted our factory support team and they would like to understand what happened with your issue. My email is calvin.zito at hp dot com.

I think I figured out part of the reason why 3par support sucks so badly. In the last 18 months they have had 3 different executives over their support organization. How can any organization effect change in a positive way when the leadership changes ever few months. Hp has no clue on how to fix this and if they keep changing leaders ever few months they will never fix support. Every time we get assurances that support is being fixed by the top executive that person is gone shortly thereafter. Great way to run an organization HP. I guess the rotating door of CEOs at HP went further down the food chain.