HPE Storage Users Group

I will join the club of "3Par Horrid Support". My tale - we've been trying since last November to use our new 7400 with our BL460 G7 blades (running SLES11 SP1 Linux, Oracle DB) thru Flexfabric, and Nexus FC switch. With even a moderate I/O load to the 3par luns, server would start puking with lpfc errors, lost paths, and eventual crash. HP L2 support then produced a long list of our "unsupported" components. Note that all our server infrastructure has been working fine with a VNX for 2 years.

The SPOCK documents will list a CNA firmware version of 1.2.3.4 as supported. If you have version 1.2.3.3 then you're not supported. And version 1.2.3.4 must be used with the OS driver version 5.6.7.8. If your OS vendor supplies version 5.6.7.7 then you're not supported.

The part that really burned my biscuits is their OS support matrices. All the documentation for the BL460, the Flexfabric, the 7400 say that SLES is 'supported' from version 10.3 up thru 11.3. SPOCK has a 4 page pdf for VC support that only lists 11.2 and 11.3. No one at HP can recognize this as a discrepancy. I've asked them how I'm supposed to connect without using the VC firmware - no answer. Note too that their server support folks don't have anything to do with SPOCK - that's for storage only.

HP/3par support has managed to do something I considered totally impossible - they make EMC support look good .....

Don M.

I am so done with 3par support. Not sure how HP can take a great product and provide essentially the worst support I have ever seen. I have a critical case and after 2 days it is still with L1 support. I call in and L1 is confused, they can't even seem to figure out how to get an escalation manager. Seems 3par is only really designed to handle average calls and then if you need more help better hope your array fails during business hours because outside of that you are screwed. And then better hope you need engineering only during West Coast US business hours because that is about the only time they are available. And Mission Critical Support? What a joke, the local "Misison Critical District Manager" and their team is the most useless people I have dealt with. I get better support from my Sales Rep than I do from my Mission critical team. The funny thing is they all has "Proactive" in their job titles, seems HP is focused on Proactive rather than reactive. At this point I don't care how good the underlying technology is, if HP can't support Enterprise Storage with Enterprise support then I need to look elsewhere. No way I can ever recommend this product to anyone else.