HPE Updates Flash Storage Portfolio for Hybrid IT

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) announced a flash portfolio update with products and data protection solutions designed to help customers continue their journey to an all-flash data center.

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Offerings include:

• Midrange 3PAR StoreServ 9450 all-flash array

• Availability of Nimble Storage, Inc. (a HPE company) primary and secondary flash arrays

• Fifth generation MSA Storage

• High-speed, cloud-connected StoreOnce data protection

The adoption of flash storage continues to gain pace, with 51% of customers ⁽¹⁾ predicting that they will have an all-flash data center within five years. It’s not just enterprises, smaller companies are also adopting flash as prices come down. At the same time, IT teams are seeking deeper integration across servers, storage, networks, and automation tools to maximize value from investments.

“As flash permeates the datacenter it has become critical to move beyond the array – from predictive analytics to data protection to investment strategies,” said Bill Philbin, SVP, data center infrastructure group, HPE. “These new solutions help more customers maximize the value of flash on-premises and enable flexible off-premises data mobility.“

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All-flash price-performance and density across multiple segments
Data growth and app development in the data center is expanding and putting pressure on IT to consolidate more data on less infrastructure while also evaluating the right mix of on-premises and off-premises investments. To address these demands, the company is updating its flash portfolio including the addition of cloud-ready Nimble Storage flash arrays powered by predictive analytics for a new-style approach to storage support and monitoring.

For midrange customers hitting performance limits of aging systems, 3PAR is redefining expectations with the 3PAR StoreServ 9450, a scalable, multi-tenant, and performance all-flash platform that builds on the product family’s number one position in the midrange FC. ⁽²⁾ To enable the consolidation of more data in less space without compromising service levels, the firm is increasing performance 70%, doubling scale to 6PB, and enabling 3X the front-end connectivity with 80 host ports.⁽³⁾ This member of the 3PAR family enables consistent and predictable performance at less than half the cost of EMC VMAX 250F ⁽⁴⁾ and supports consolidation of both block and file workloads. For those considering long-term investment strategies, the StoreServ 9450 provides a futureproof path to next generation storage class memory and NVMe using 3PAR 3D Cache.

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The company is also unveiling the fifth generation of its entry SAN platform, MSA, starting with he introduction of  MSA 2050 and 2052 models. MSA has been a leading entry FC array for eight years ⁽⁵⁾ and now delivers 2x more performance than the previous generation starting under $10,000 ⁽⁶⁾. With all-inclusive software and 1.6TB of SSD capacity, the MSA 2052 offers a 40% cost savings ⁽⁷⁾ on hybrid flash models. Both MSA platforms are starting points for application acceleration providing flexibility to mix any combination of SSD and SAS drives plus including resiliency features such as snapshots and remote replication.

MSA 2050

Flash-optimized protection now cloud-ready and 15x faster
With the scale and speed of flash storage becoming pervasive it’s critical that customers re-think data protection to avoid risk and eliminate bottlenecks – this includes taking advantage of public cloud to achieve the right mix of Hybrid IT. As part of that shift, the firm has federated primary, secondary, and object storage to enable zero-impact data protection while putting backup data to work.

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For customers exploring public-cloud tiers for secondary data, the company announced StoreOnce CloudBank, a long-term data retention solution that provides lower cost protection on multi-cloud destinations such as AWS, Azure or on premises object storage. Unlike many cloud backup solutions, it has been architected to reduce bandwidth requirements by over 99%, helping to lower costs of cloud-based storage to just $0.001 per gigabyte per month. The solution supports the full set of on-premises StoreOnce features, including 3PAR integration, so customers can automatically transition data off-premises while assuring rapid and flexible DR.

As 3PAR flash customers seek to protect larger and larger data sets, Recovery Manager Central (RMC) already provides the fastest possible protection of applications running on 3PAR by directly connecting to secondary StoreOnce data protection systems through patented block-level integration. RMC is part of 3PAR’s all-inclusive licensing model and has now been enhanced with a ‘Express Restore’ feature, which enables 15x faster data recovery (8) from on-prem or off-prem StoreOnce repositories. RMC has also now been integrated with Veeam Explorer so customers can recover application items such as e-mails, documents and database schemas directly from RMC-V Express Protect backups.

Many customers moving to an all-flash datacenter are looking for ways to maximize return on those investments. For some that includes changing how they utilize data stored as backup copies. The Nimble Secondary Flash Array (SFA) allows customers to put their backup and copy data to work for secondary applications. The system brings together always-on deduplication and compression to lower capacity costs for backup with flash-optimized performance and zero-copy cloning to run production workloads like dev/test, QA and analytics.

Pricing and availability:

• 3PAR StoreServ 9450 will be available June 2017 with US street pricing starting at $74,840.

• MSA 2050 will be available June 2017 with US street pricing starting at $7,750.

• MSA 2052 will be available June 2017 with US street pricing starting at $9,600.

• RMC 4.1 is included as part of the standard all-inclusive 3PAR StoreServ licensing package and will be available from September 2017.

• StoreOnce CloudBank is available as part of an Early Access Program. Contact the company to see if you qualify.

• Nimble Secondary Flash Array available with US street pricing starting under $40,000.

(1) TechTarget, Inc.‘ Storage Market Landscape Study 2H16.
(2) IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 4Q16, based on midrange FC product revenues.
(3) Based on HPE comparisons with 3PAR 8450.
(4) Based on HPE price-performance ($/IOP) analysis of comparable systems using available pricing information.
(5) IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 4Q16, based on vendor revenues.
(6) Based on HPE performance testing comparisons.
(7) HPE pricing comparison of MSA2050 with SSDs and Advanced Data Services suite vs MSA2052 after standard discounting.
(8) Based on HPE restore performance testing comparisons.