HP Lowers Prices of All-Flash Arrays With 3.84TB SSDs

Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. announced a series of innovations for the 3PAR StoreServ Storage family, including 25% 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.

3PAR StoreServ Storage systems

The ability to provide applications with predictable, high performance in less physical space has led IDC to forecast a 46% CAGR 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 SSDs in the market in 2014 ⁽²⁾. Customers are 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.

3PAR StoreServ Storage 20000

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 3PAR StoreServ Storage 20000 enterprise flash family boosts performance with over 3.2 million IO/s at sub-millisecond latency ⁽⁴⁾ and consumes 85% less space than traditional high-end arrays ⁽⁵⁾ for 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 Manish Goel, SVP and GM, HP storage. “HP 3PAR StoreServ is in a class of its own, with the affordability, scale and resiliency required for datacenter-wide flash adoption.“

Bringing cost of all-flash to $1.50 per gigabyte usable
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%, ⁽⁶⁾ these 3.84TB drives bring down the cost of all-flash storage to $1.50 per usable gigabyte, approaching that of 10,000rpm SAS HDDs. ⁽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 six times, in effect reducing cost per gigabyte to $0.25. ⁽⁸⁾

3PAR StoreServ 20800

Class of enterprise flash revolutionizes speed, scale, and data center efficiency
The 3PAR StoreServ 20000 family scales-out to eight nodes and is for customers consolidating multiple racks of legacy high-end storage while assuring application QoS. The all-flash 3PAR StoreServ 20850 is capable of delivering greater than 3.2 million IO/s at sub-millisecond latency ⁽⁴⁾ and over 75GB/s of sustained throughput for maximum application performance. ⁽⁹⁾ The  family includes the 3PAR StoreServ 20800 converged flash array which scales up to 15PB of usable capacity. These models are built on the 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC, enabling higher levels of performance, scalability and efficiency including hardware-accelerated deduplication.

With density that is over eight times that of major flash array competitors,⁽¹⁰⁾ these 3PAR StoreServ models consolidate 280TB 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 BC to reduce risk without performance penalty.

Powered by the 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 ProLiant Servers through the fabric and to the 3PAR StoreServ storage array.

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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 RPOs measured ins.

The low latency of flash also benefits customers requiring a zero-RPO solution. For these environments, HP provides the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Services Switch which when combined with 3PAR Remote Copy software, delivers synchronous replication over fibre infrastructure up to 130km with in-flight encryption to reduce business risk.

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HP also announced 3PAR Remote Copy integration with StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central (RMC) software. RMC enables application-managed snapshots on 3PAR StoreServ systems and automatic movement of data to StoreOnce that is 17 times faster than traditional backup with almost five times faster restore. ⁽¹¹⁾  With this integration, RMC supports replication of application-managed snapshots between 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 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage systems.

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 60PB of aggregate usable capacity, capable of delivering over 10 million IO/s and 300GB/s 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 business opportunities, and simple technology refreshes.

To simplify consolidation onto all-flash storage, 3PAR Online Import supports simple migration from Hitachi Data Systems 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⁾

Pricing and availability ⁽¹⁴⁾

• The 3.84TB cMLC SSDs are available worldwide, orderable and shipping immediately.

• 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage Systems are available worldwide, orderable immediately and shipping in August 2015 for a US street price starting at $75,000.

• All 3PAR StoreServ software features will only be available for 20000 systems.

• HP Financial Services’ IT investment solutions create the financial flexibility and control within the infrastructure to accelerate migration to new 3PAR StoreServ Storage technology, and acquire capacity in line with changing business needs. ⁽¹⁵⁾

• StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware (RMC-V) with 3PAR Remote Copy support will be available worldwide, June 2015 at no additional charge to customers who have an existing RMC-V or RM-V license and a valid support contract.

⁽¹⁾ IDC Analyst Connection: New Mixed Workload Consolidation Focus for AFAs Forces Customers to Look Beyond Just Performance,’  April 2015.
⁽²⁾ Gartner, Market Share Analysis: SSDs and Solid-State Arrays, Worldwide 2014, May 2015.
⁽³⁾ HP internal analysis; 3.84TB cMLC SSDs, when used in conjunction with 3PAR StoreServ compaction technologies, bring the cost of all-flash 3PAR StoreServ Storage to less than $1.50 per gigabyte of usable storage capacity.
⁽⁴⁾ 3.2 million IO/s based on HP internal testing using 100% random read workload with an 8k block size and node local volume layout using RAID1 protection. RAID-5 performance at 3 million IO/s.
⁽⁵⁾ HP internal analysis; as compared to EMC VMAX 400K with 12PB (representing a mix of 90% HDDs and 10% SSDs).
⁽⁶⁾ HP internal analysis; as compared to not using data compaction technologies and based on a 4:1 compaction ratio.
⁽⁷⁾ HP internal analysis; as compared to the 3PAR StoreServ 7400 with a 2-node configuration, 600GB of 10,000rpm disks and a total of 115TB usable with 3PAR Reporting Suite, Replication Suite, Data Optimization Suite, Recover Manager for VMware, and Proactive Care 24 support.
⁽⁸⁾ David Floyer, Wikibon CTO: Evolution-of-all-flash-array-architectures Table 2. Section: Eliminating copies of data by applications using the same data source.
⁽⁹⁾ Based on HP testing using a 256K sequential read workload, node local volume layout, and RAID-5 protection.
⁽¹⁰⁾ HP internal analysis based on the comparison of the 3PAR StoreServ 20850 Storage with 12BP usable capacity and EMC XtremIO storage, using 40TB flash bricks (a total of 8 systems) to achieve 12PB usable capacity.
⁽¹¹⁾ HP testing comparing StoreOnce RMC backup and restore performance with market leading backup software.
(¹²⁾ 3PAR Peer Motion software now supports up to four 3PAR StoreServ 20000 arrays. Assuming 4 x 20800 models that support 2.5 million IO/s and 15PB of usable capacity, customers can configure up to 60PB of usable capacity that supports an aggregate of 10 million IO/s and 300GB/s of bandwidth.
⁽¹³⁾ 3PAR Online Import software supports data migration from HP EVA, EMC VMAX, VNX, CLARiiON CX4 and HDS TagmaStore Network Storage (NSC), Universal Storage Platforms (USP), and Virtual Storage Platforms (VSP).
⁽¹⁴⁾ Estimated U.S. street prices. Actual prices may vary.
⁽¹⁵⁾ Financing and service offerings available through Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company and its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively HPFSC) in certain countries and are subject to credit approval and execution of standard HPFSC documentation. Rates and terms are based on customer’s credit rating, offering types, services and/or equipment type and options. Not all customers may qualify. Not all services or offers are available in all countries. Other restrictions may apply. HPFSC reserves the right to change or cancel this program at any time without notice.