HPE Storage Users Group

Is it just me or does 3par technical support really suck the big one? 21 months of ownership and we struggle to find a support organization that is as bad as HP's is for 3par. Every call is like pulling teeth. A really good product with really bad support makes it tough for me to recommend to people.

Please tell me it's not so. I've worked with HP for over 25 years and yes, their support has degraded drastically over the years. We've been using Compellent for the last 6 years and have found their support to be hands down the best I've encountered in the storage space. Having said this, we just purchased 2 7200 arrays to replace 2 of our older Compellent arrays. My hesitation with going back to HP was the support. I was assured by our reseller that because we purchased the Proactive Care Service we would be dealing with knowledgeable engineers based in the US. I guess I'll find out when we have an issue.

What was your support call about?

For hardware events, like drives failing etc, we don't call HP, HP calls us. Unit phones home, they schedule a tech to come onsite with our control room. Part is replaced. Case closed. Clockwork and I don't need to talk to anyone.

I'm not a fan of using the HP website. its quite the a digital maze.

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

There is no one scenario as we have had mixed to poor support in the 21 months we have had our 2 arrays installed. We also have uplifted Mission Critical support that gives us higher response level and a ASM. First the ASM (and we have had 2) are useless they are supposed to be engaged for proactive activities and provide reports on your service, well that is a joke. The report they provide are basically just some mash of internal data that never makes any relevant sense. But it makes HP happy to show they are providing some level of service monitoring. If they were serious they would survey support calls like MS and vmware do.

There are many times where I feel like I know more about the array than the person I am talking to in support. Also since they mostly over seas they have cultural and language issues that impact support. I hear this is being resolved in November when a US support center will be opening.

When we open cases via phone it is often a 3 hop call to get to a technician, even when the call is routed correctly and then even in critical situation we have found you may sit on hold 10-45 minutes. And while on hold you get no indication of your potential hold time either in minutes of people in front of you.

Ironically when we purchased the arrays 2 years ago we baked off all the major player and came down to Compellent and 3par. We heard rave reviews about Compellent support, but had concerns about their scalability and the "logical drives owned by a controller" architecture. We felt (and still do) that 3par technology is far superior. Hp has 2 huge Achilles heels with 3par, the first is support., it just plans sucks for anything other than a bad HDD. Also their back end engineers that pan upgrades and conversions are clueless and do not know how to re balance an array. The second issue is 3par replication, it is sad and does not scale well. I have been told changes are coming in 3.1.3, but even those are weak and if replication is important to you then EMC Recovery Point is a better (although very pricey) alternative wither with native EMC arrays or it can be used with 3par.

Personally I love the 3par tech, but hate dealing with HP on support and upgrades. If I had to purchase the array again I am beginning to question if I would as the replication issues are hurting our DR plans and strategy and the support nightmare is an on going mess. My concern with Compellent is I look at them liek a step behind 3par in the technology. Both Compellent and 3par had a great niche they filled, but both have struggled under their new ownership to scale, 3par from the support and backend planning and Compellent from the technology side.

I hear their server support has improved, but 3par support is as bad as it gets most of the time. Ironically we moved from HP to Dell servers 5 years ago because HP support was so bad. It was a major concern when we bought the 3par, and seems to have proven true at least on the 3par support side. Par to fthe problem was when HP bought 3par they made it their premier storage platform and starting marketing it and selling it like crazy, but they never beefed up the backend support in tandem and are now trying to catch up.

I am right there with you Kluken on many points. I also believe the technology behind 3PAR is superior to most other alternatives out there, and the platform is held back by some HP staff positioned between the customers and the pure genius that develop the code and hardware that makes a 3PAR superior.

One specific example I have is when we added SSD to our frames, we wanted to redistribute some existing FC magazines to new shelves to make room in existing shelves for a SSD mag, you know, to distribute the SSD across as many fibre loops as possible... The official support method was to completely tunevv ALL of my FC cpgs off the FC mags to be moved, remove them, then reinstall them into the new location... then tunevv all that data back to a new CPG that re-includes those magazines.

When I specifically asked support about the move commands (movepdtospare, and moverelocpd) I got stonewalled with "thats not our recommendation", "that not what our procedure says to use", "I've done this a bunch of times and we always have the customer do it with Dynamic Optimizer", and my personal favorite "Those commands are not supported".

Running tunevv on 250 TB of data, one vv at a time, then moving it all back was a hardship to say the least.

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

We just went through the same thing with re-balancing some FC drives. We proved tunessy would be a problem since it resurrected more data from NL than would fit on FC so they finally came up with a way to move the data without doing a tunesys and should be incorporating that as an official method int he future.

I believe alot of issues evolve around support moving overseas, this is not only hurting HP but other companies as well. I always ask specifically to speak with someone State side and I always got a much more efficient response.

I wanted to post a follow up. First yes some of this is over seas support, but most of it is that 3par organization in HP is a mess. Their processes are lacking and they are overwhelmed . Their support model where the field tech is a puppet for the back end support people is a huge mistake as the back end people are getting worse every day. Even simple disk replacement calls now are being fumbled with back end support not properly communicating with the field person and running commands prematurely. A simple failed HDD is now going on 4 days and while they say the drive is replaced the array is still showing degraded. They have no follow through to make sure the tasks they are doing work or finish without issue.

I have been told now for 18 months that improvements in support are coming, but I would argue support is degrading and for at least us worse that it has ever been. While no technology is perfect, the amount of simple bugs in code that make it through are making it harder to support these arrays. Latest is no local alerts for various failures, so I have to either manually check or rely on support to catch them and contact us, and BTW there is a bug where the SP will fail to cal home and 3par back end will never get your alerts. HP has a huge mountain to climb to make 3par a true Enterprise solution, both form a support perspective and also from a product perspective. And don;t even get me going on how bad Remote Copy (replication) is.

It would be understandable if HP just bought 3par, but it has been over 3 years. My account team is trying there are 3-4 people working my issues, which is sad that it takes that much resources to manage a handful of issues.

On a scale of 1-10; I give 3par technology a 7, support get a 3. Beginning to really second guess our decision to go with these guys. My confidence level l that support will improve in the next 12 months ZERO!

And just when you think it can't get worse, they double dispatch a tech to replace a drive they already replaced last week and in the process of blindly not knowing what they are doing too 4 drives (magazine) offline by failing a drive that was not even there. Their support has gotten so pathetic it is no longer funny. And I am in a major metro area where they have "better skilled" resources. We dealt with there support in a rural area for our smaller 3 pars and what a complete joke that was. HP needs to gut the 3par organization in install people that know how to do Enterprise support and then put legacy HP engineers over the product to design product that does not have all these "niche product" short comings. I don't care how good the tech is, if they can't support it I would rather go elsewhere!