HP extends Flash storage portfolio 

HP has revealed innovations for HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage to support the transformation to hybrid IT and all-flash data centers, including a new 8000 family featuring the industry’s most affordable all-flash array (AFA), twice the workload performance of previous generations and automated performance assurance with flash-optimized quality of service (QoS) controls.

The flash storage market is growing at over 46 percent compound annual growth as customers embrace flash to accelerate more applications across their data centers. Within this fast-paced segment, Gartner identified HP as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays and noted that HP was the fastest growing flash vendor based on revenue shipments in 2014. More recently HP moved up to the number two market share position in all-flash and announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 family, an eight-node enterprise flash family with leading density and costs as low as $1.50 per usable gigabyte.

Now HP is accelerating customer transition to all-flash data centers with the new quad-controller HP 3PAR StoreServ 8000 Storage family as well as a new eight-controller HP 3PAR StoreServ 20800 AFA Starter Kit and software updates for the full HP 3PAR StoreServ family. Only HP 3PAR StoreServ is able to span from a $19K entry price to multi-petabyte systems reaching 3.2 million IOPs, with scale-out capabilities from 2 to 8 controllers, and proven tier-1 resiliency giving businesses a simple approach to meet virtually any workload requirement.

“Regardless of your size, budget, growth rate, quality of service requirements, or even your storage network environment, HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage offers a best-in-class flash solution to power your public, private, or hybrid cloud with uncompromising adaptability from a single architecture,” said Manish Goel, senior vice president and general manager, HP Storage.

Tier-1 all-flash from $19K brings resilient flash within reach of even more customers
For customers looking for the most affordable way to accelerate applications and consolidate infrastructure, the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 8000 family is a scale-out, quad-node design that includes all-flash configurations starting at $19K as well as converged-flash arrays that support expansion via spinning media. Like the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage 20000 family, the 8000 family delivers up to 5.5 petabytes of usable flash capacity within a single floor tile without compromising data services or scalability.

Additionally, HP introduced new models in the eight-controller 20000 family, including a 20800 All-Flash Starter Kit starting at US $99K, placing the industry’s most scalable flash platform within reach of more enterprises and service providers. HP also announced the new 3PAR StoreServ 20450, an All-Flash Array which scales to 6 petabytes and 1.8 million IOPS. Built-in storage federation capabilities allow 8000 and 20000 models to be pooled together for up to 60 PB of aggregate usable capacity in a four-system federation with non-disruptive workload mobility across systems with just a single mouse click for unmatched agility.

Twice the bandwidth and next-gen hardware-acceleration to boost application performance
Sharing the same hardware acceleration as the eight-node enterprise-flash 20000 family, the new 8000 family features the HP 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC and double the bandwidth of competitive platforms, enabling the 8000 family to more effectively deal with mixed and highly unpredictable workloads. With over 20 gigabytes per second of read bandwidth, this new hardware lets customers double the workload performance of bandwidth-heavy database applications, assuring that end users get the response times required to make faster business decisions.

Additionally, both the 3PAR StoreServ 8000 and 20000 flash arrays are now certified for SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI), assuring that customers can accelerate these mission-critical applications with confidence. Lastly, the HP 3PAR File Persona software has been enhanced to support even larger unstructured data applications, meaning customers can expand consolidation of both file and block workloads on a single, Tier-1 flash platform.

Built-in automation of flash-optimized data services to boost agility and reduce risk
HP also announced enhancements to the HP 3PAR Operating System that deepen the portfolio’s rich set of autonomic, Tier-1 data services for greater return on flash investments and accelerated time to value. These software enhancements span the entire HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage family—across media types, data types, and connectivity protocols—even extending beyond the array to include storage area network (SAN) infrastructure.

HP 3PAR Priority Optimization software now allows users to specify latency goals as low as 0.5 milliseconds to ensure consistent service levels in multi-tenant environments where a large number of latency-sensitive applications are consolidated.  This level of hands-free, fine-grained QoS is unique in the industry and assures administrators can deliver consistent application performance through simple, policy-driven templates.

HP announced data protection enhancements to the 3PAR StoreServ powered by StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware (RMC-V). As the industry’s only flash-integrated, protection solution, RMC-V delivers 17x faster VM protection by taking application-consistent snapshots on the HP 3PAR StoreServ array, then automatically copying changed blocks directly to any HP StoreOnce appliance. RMC-V enhancements include support for VMware vSphere 6.0 with VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) as well as more granular recovery of individual VMs and files to simplify data recovery.

For customers who are deploying flash over Fibre Channel, new HP SmartSAN for HP 3PAR StoreServ uses Express Provisioning technology to orchestrate SAN fabric zoning autonomically, reducing the number of steps required to provision a SAN by 80 percent.
For service providers and midsize organizations looking to leverage Ethernet networking to reduce costs, HP 3PAR StoreServ enhancements reduce iSCSI latency and add support for iSCSI VLAN tagging. These new iSCSI features assure flash-optimized performance while lowering total storage networking infrastructure acquisition costs by $25K or more.