HP 3Par Support after End of Life

Are you using HPE 3PAR storage systems and have been surprised by HPE’s announcement of the end of service life for the HPE 3PAR StoreServ series? Are you looking for alternatives to continue operating your storage or to gain enough time until you can replace your HPE 3PAR storage? We are happy to help you.

As a long-standing HPE partner with a strong focus on 3PAR StoreServ, we have expanded our portfolio to include end-of-life support for this hardware. With our strong engineering team and our own service centres and warehouses whole over the world, we have enough know-how and spare parts to maintain support for the end-of-life systems for at least another 10 years. After HPE’s EoL announcement, we bought up remaining stocks of spare parts from all over Europe and are able to offer HPE 3PAR support even without the support of the manufacturer.

The HWW Support Package is the equivalent of the HPE Care Pack with the difference that all services are provided by Hardwarenwartung 24. The following services are covered:

• 24/7 telephone support
• Working hours
• Travel and travel expenses
• Spare parts and replacement devices
• On-site replacement or repair of equipment under maintenance contract
• Access to our ticketing system on request
• On request, connection to our own monitoring with predictive maintenance, similar to HPE InfoSight

The 3PAR Spare Part Service is designed for customers who have sufficient know-how in handling the StoreServ storage systems themselves and only require spare parts for the continued operation of the hardware.

The following components are covered by the Spare Part Service:

• Storage Controller
• Fibre Channel Host Adapter
• SFP transceiver
• failing FC, NL, SSDs
• power supply
• I/O modules

The following components are not covered:

• PCM Battery
• Cache Battery

As the batteries are consumables, they are not covered by the 3PAR Spare Part Service. Nevertheless, they can be purchased from us at any time.

For systems that are not yet End of Life, our usual rules for firmware and software updates apply. You can find these in

• FAQs on software and firmware updates
• FAQs on handling firmware at HPE

If the hardware is already End of Support, there will unfortunately be no possibility to get newer versions, because HPE already stops the development with the End of Sale and only releases bug fixes until the End of Support.

Since the End of Sale has already been announced for almost all HPE 3PAR systems, we recommend downloading and saving the latest firmware and software versions before the Care Pack expires, even if you do not want to install them yet. If you want to update at a later date, you will at least already have the latest files.

In order to be able to create a correct and suitable offer, we need the configuration of the 3PAR storage. Unfortunately, the HPE Partsurfer does not always show the entire configuration because either the partner has not imported the data correctly or a system has been expanded and not reported to HPE. For this reason we need the following command line outputs:

• “Model/Serial & All outputs below:
• showinventory -svc (for 7k / 8k models)
• showinventory (for F / T / V-10k models)
• showversion
• showlicense
• showalert -n

If you are unable to retrieve this information, please send us all the information you have and we will check if we can provide a quote based on this data.

Yes, in principle it should not be a problem to upgrade End of Life 3PAR storage. Both we and other dealers will have sufficient refurbished components, such as disks, SSDs, shelves or I/O modules, that you can use for an upgrade. The only difficulty we see is the availability of licences for the components that require a licence. We do not currently see any bottlenecks for licences until 2022, as HPE is still offering them. However, should HPE no longer offer the licences, there could be bottlenecks.

It is not yet clear how HPE will implement licence validation after the EoL. We currently assume that HPE will discontinue licence sales, but that licences already sold can still be activated after the EoL.