HP Helps Customers Accelerate the Move to All-Flash Data Centers

HP announced today a series of innovations for the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage family, including 25 percent lower cost flash capacity, a new class of massively scalable flash arrays, and flash-optimized data services to accelerate IT-as-a-Service consolidation and hybrid IT initiatives.

The ability to provide applications with predictable, high performance in less physical space has led IDC to forecast a 46 percent compound annual growth rate for all-flash arrays over the next five years.⁽¹⁾ According to Gartner, HP was the fastest growing flash vendor based on revenue from shipments of Solid-State Arrays in the market in 2014.⁽²⁾ Customers are now looking to extend the benefits of those all-flash arrays across their data centers that go beyond performance, including increased productivity and data center consolidation.

To accelerate transformation to the all-flash data center, HP is lowering the cost of all-flash storage to $1.50 per usable gigabyte⁽³⁾ and introducing ultra-dense and scalable flash systems. The new HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage 20000 enterprise flash family boosts performance with over 3.2 million IOPS at sub-millisecond latency⁽⁴⁾ and consumes 85% less space than traditional high-end arrays ⁽⁵⁾ for massive footprint reduction. To support mission-critical workloads and enable greater agility, HP is unveiling flash-optimized software for end-to-end availability and non-disruptive workload balancing across the data center. These capabilities build on an already strong set of tier-1 data services unmatched by competitive all-flash arrays.

“Early flash adopters are seeing added benefits such as extreme savings and productivity enhancements that are leading to an all-flash strategy for more applications” said Barun Lala, Director, Storage, HP India. “HP 3PAR StoreServ is in a class of its own, with the affordability, scale and resiliency required for datacenter-wide flash adoption.”

Bringing the cost of all-flash to $1.50 per gigabyte usable is just the beginning

Customers looking to deploy flash for more of their applications can now do so more affordably thanks to the industry’s largest capacity solid state drive in a tier-1 all-flash array. Combined with HP flash optimization and hardware-accelerated data compaction that increases usable capacity by 75 percent,⁽⁶⁾ these new 3.84 terabyte drives bring down the cost of all-flash storage to $1.50 per usable gigabyte, approaching that of 10K RPM SAS hard disk drives.⁽⁷⁾ When customers apply space efficient snapshot features like those in 3PAR StoreServ to the multiple full data copies used for developers and data warehouses, they can reduce capacity needs by 6 times, in effect reducing cost per gigabyte to $0.25.⁽⁸⁾

New class of enterprise flash revolutionizes speed, scale, and data center efficiency

The new HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 family scales-out to eight nodes and is ideal for customers consolidating multiple racks of legacy high-end storage while assuring application quality of service. The all-flash 3PAR StoreServ 20850 is capable of delivering greater than 3.2 million IOPS at sub-millisecond latency⁽⁴⁾ and over 75 GBps of sustained throughput for maximum application performance.⁽⁹⁾The new family also includes the 3PAR StoreServ 20800 converged flash array which scales up to 15 petabytes (PB) of usable capacity. These new models are built on the HP 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC, enabling higher levels of performance, scalability and efficiency including hardware-accelerated deduplication.

With industry-leading density that is over 8 times that of major flash array competitors,⁽¹⁰⁾ these new 3PAR StoreServ models consolidate 280 terabytes of usable capacity into a single 2U drive chassis and 5.5 PB usable onto a single floor tile. Both models support unified block and file workloads as well as object access for cloud-developed application consolidation. This density and workload flexibility assures that customers can prevent flash-array sprawl caused by introducing separate, capacity limited flash architectures into their datacenter.

Accelerated data integrity, availability, and protection for all-flash data centers

To support mission-critical applications, flash arrays and all-flash data centers must include built-in data availability and business continuity to reduce risk without performance penalty.

Powered by the new HP 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC, 3PAR Persistent Checksum ensures end-to-end data integrity from the application server through to the storage array for any workload while remaining completely transparent to those servers and applications. This data validation capability protects against flash media and transmission errors as data moves from HP ProLiant Servers through the fabric and to the 3PAR StoreServ storage array.

HP 3PAR Remote Copy support for asynchronous streaming replication enables replication where latency, distance and recovery are optimized. Especially suited for the all-flash data centers, asynchronous streaming eliminates the overhead of synchronous replication while providing a near-exact data copy with recovery point objectives (RPOs) measured in seconds.

HP also announced new 3PAR Remote Copy integration with HP StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central (RMC) software. StoreOnce RMC enables application-managed snapshots on HP 3PAR StoreServ systems and automatic movement of data to HP StoreOnce that is 17 times faster than traditional backup with almost 5 times faster restore.⁽¹¹⁾ With this integration, StoreOnce RMC now supports replication of application-managed snapshots between HP 3PAR arrays.

One-click workload rebalancing across arrays with zero added overhead

Enterprise datacenters running a mix of legacy high-end and all-flash arrays with limited scale have been forced to knit together these silos with added layers of cost, risk, and complexity in the form of dedicated external SAN virtualization appliances placed directly in the data path. To eliminate these compromises, HP announced enhancements to the native storage federation capabilities within HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage systems.

New HP 3PAR Peer Motion support for non-disruptive, bi-directional data movement allows enterprises to create a storage federation, or an elastic resource pool, across multiple storage arrays with up to 60 PB of aggregate usable capacity, capable of delivering over 10 million IOPS and 300 GBps bandwidth.⁽¹²⁾ With a single click, workloads can move between members of a federation to dynamically rebalance storage resources for cost and performance optimization, rapid response to new business opportunities, and simple technology refreshes.

To simplify consolidation onto modern all-flash storage, HP 3PAR Online Import now supports simple migration from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) TagmaStore Network Storage Controller (NSC), Universal Storage Platforms (USP), and Virtual Storage Platforms (VSP) Storage systems in addition to EMC VMAX, EMC VNX, and EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage systems.⁽¹³⁾