If you use a 3PAR SAN, I’d like to hear what you think about it, particularly compared to the HP EVA. What do you see as its advantages over other SANs like the EVA? What’s so special about the ASIC? We had HP quote us an EVA P6500 and 3PAR V400 with equivalent storage and the 3PAR was nearly twice the cost.

My site has two EVA SANs with a combined capacity of ~80 TB. We want to replace the older and larger of the two. We’ve been looking at the EVA and the 3PAR to see which would be a better fit for us. I’m struggling to understand how the 3PAR differs from the EVA from a practical technical standpoint.

When I read the sales literature and speak with the HP sales engineers, they spend a lot of time talking about how the 3PAR is better because of its ASIC. It’s ASIC this and ASIC that, but when I press them on how a 3PAR with thin provisioning is better than an EVA with thin provisioning, I can’t get a straight answer. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues, who has more say regarding which SAN we get, is enamored by the 3PAR, and he can’t explain clearly to me why he wants it over the EVA.

Our needs are pretty simple. We have 10 servers running VMware and ~100 VMs. We use VMware’s thin provisioning currently, but we would like to start using thin provisioning on the new SAN. We don’t have a need for SSDs or migration between storage tiers. We plan on having FC or SAS drives for our most used data and SATA/FATA drives for the lesser used data which is how we have the EVAs configured. We also do not need any SAN-level snapshotting or replication.