Are there any experiences with 3Par storage ?

[christianZ]

Hi guys,

I'm interresting in your experiences with 3Par.

Which system have you ?

How many disks ?

Which interfaces are you using (fc, iscsi or mix) ?

Was the first installation made by yourself or by 3Par guys - was it very complex ?

What performance can you reach, how many vms there ?

Is the management of that system really simple ?

Are you using any features, e.g. snapshots, sync mirror, volume copy ?

Any problems, support need ?

Every info will be appreciated.

Regards

Christian

[christianZ]

Nobody ??

[MR-T]

I'm using a 3PAR S400 system at the moment, but the system was configured by 3PAR so I can't say how simple it was to setup.

The 'Thin provisioned' LUNS works perfectly with VMFS3 and all our LUNS are built this way.

Within the next few weeks I'll be setting up replication between a couple of S400's for offsite DR, so ask me the question again via PM and I'll be glad to shed more light.

[meistermn]

3 par looks very interesting.

There is partner ship between netapp and 3par coming.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/06/netapp_and_3par_connect/

Is it easy to use and fast to configure?

[christianZ]

Thanks Stuart,

I will pm you in a few weeks again.

Regards

Christian

[kla]

Short our experience:

From ESX-View all things works like other SAN-devices, not more and not less problems.

What we have is

\- 3-Par s400x with 96 disks

\- We use only FC

\- We use only Brocade-Swithches

\- Our topology is Fabric

\- First installation of the storagesystem was made by 3-Par

\- All ESX-related things we do by ourself

\- Performance we have only tested with AIX: 180MByte/sec read and write

\- Actually no performancedata for ESX

\- Our SAN-Admin says: The management of the box is very simple

\- At the moment we use snapshots of thin provisioning volumes but only AIX / Oracle with very good experience

\- Until today with no Problems, response from 3-Par is fast and reliable

\- For ESX: Thin provisioning works with a little overhead:

45 GByte virtual Disk, filled with approximately 30 GByte data takes 33 GByte of space (Copysize on 3-Par) so we have an advantage.

[dlm1975]

Can you give more info on how you configured the 3Par. We just purchased an S400, and I'm not getting a clear answer from 3Par on how to best export volumes for ESX. I found one whitepaper that stated if we were not using 3par MPIO; it is not recommended to export the volume to all paths on the ESX server. But I've gotten other answers that state I can create my host object, add all the WWNs for that host into it; and export to the host object. Still I have also heard that I can create one "ESX Cluster" object; attach all the WWNs from all the ESX servers and then export to the cluster object. Do you or does anyone know which is the recommended method?