HPE With Lower Cost Hybrid Flash

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced enhancements to its entry storage portfolio to help customers with limited budgets harness content and accelerate applications.

StoreEasy 1000

Expanding market entry SAN ⁽¹⁾ and NAS ⁽²⁾ portfolio with lower cost hybrid flash and scalable file serving solutions

MSA Storage options enable the affordable dual-controller hybrid flash array from a major vendor ⁽³⁾ while the StoreEasy 1650 Expanded transforms the economics of storing large volumes of digital information.

For today’s SMBs and venture-backed companies, the opportunity to innovate is greater. However, as these companies look to bring ideas to value, challenges associated with data management are becoming increasingly more common. With unstructured data doubling every 18 to 24 months ⁽⁴⁾ and continual pressure to accelerate business decisions, the ability to quickly and efficiently harness the value of information is critical for success.

“In today’s economy, agility and speed are critical to stay competitive, regardless of business size,” said Manish Goel, SVP and GM, storage, HPE. “That’s why HPE is bringing enterprise storage scale and performance within reach of customers who have even the most constrained budgets.“

MSA 1040 SAN

Hybrid flash performance for 45% less with MSA 1040 ⁽⁵⁾
To accelerate business responsiveness and enable faster decision making, the company has enhanced its MSA Storage family to include SSD support for the MSA 1040. This expanded support for SSDs results in new hybrid flash configurations that deliver performance and latency-optimized storage starting at under $8,500 ⁽⁶⁾, which makes the hybrid flash-enabled MSA product family affordable for a wider range of customers.

MSA 2040

Application demands are driving the need for shared storage with efficiency and performance at a cost that can still fit into constrained IT budgets. With added support for SSDs and advance storage virtualization features previously available only with the MSA 2040, both the MSA 1040 and 2040 can take advantage of more cost-efficient flash media. These SSDs deliver hybrid flash acceleration at 30% lower price ⁽⁷⁾ for the same capacity point, putting higher performance and latency reduction within reach of more businesses.

MSA Storage boasts nearly two decades as the go-to, low-cost shared storage choice for ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. The enhancements to the MSA 1040 deliver the following benefits:

• Boosts storage efficiency with advanced storage virtualization capabilities such as thin provisioning, enhanced snapshot services, wide-striping, and flash-based acceleration.

• Reduces latency by as much as 70% for read cache and as much as 90% for Performance Tiering with as little as U.S. $1,599 incremental investment in SSD capacity. ⁽⁸⁾

• Up to 75% lower storage costs by taking advantage of MSA’s Archive Tiering capabilities, which increases the cost-effectiveness of nearline SAS HDD drives (HDDs) by automatically placing data in the appropriate storage tier. ⁽⁹⁾

• NAS with StoreEasy at 41% lower cost in 80% less space ⁽¹⁰⁾

For customers who need an affordable and sustainable capacity-optimized solution for bulk and secondary file storage, the StoreEasy 1650 Expanded is an ultra-dense and resilient NAS appliance designed to maximize value and scale without complexity. The system uniquely accommodates 28 accessible Large Form Factor (LFF) drives for up to 224TB of internal capacity in 2U, making it the most dense 2U NAS appliance on the market.⁽¹¹⁾ This scalable solution enables customers to store unstructured data at 41% lower cost in 80% less space with 82% fewer components than the equivalent NetApp FAS system.⁽¹²⁾

Sharing a common set of data services with the rest of the StoreEasy family, this addition provides rapid configuration tools, best-practice storage provisioning templates, and a centralized monitoring dashboard to simplify management for IT generalists. To assure data is protected, the system provides multi-dimensional security-including drive, file system, and data-in-flight encryption – as well as sophisticated data access policies based on automatic file classification. For customers supporting a mobile workforce, the StoreEasy solution provides secure anywhere sync-and-share support that includes Apple iOS and Windows devices.

The StoreEasy 1650 Expanded and the MSA 1040 are part of the company’s Just Right IT portfolio and are available through the Small Business Marketplace. With solutions that are simple, reliable and affordable, firm’ ‘Just Right IT’ enables small and midsize businesses to ramp up quickly, even on a limited budget.

Pricing and availability: ⁽¹³⁾

• Support for SSDs on the MSA 1040 is available via a firmware update GL220, which is posted on firm’s website and free of charge to customers on warranty or a current Service Contract.

• The MSA 1040 Advanced Virtualization upgrade license is available and as of February 15, 2016 is priced at $350.

• The MSA SSD drives are available at the following prices and capacity points: 400GB for $2,220; 800GB for $4,219; 1.6TB for $7,979; 3.2TB for $13,899.

• The StoreEasy 1650 Expanded is available and starts at $14,777 with 32TB of capacity.

⁽¹⁾ Based on IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q3 2015, external disk subsystems, entry storage category by Factory Revenue.
⁽²⁾ Based on IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker Q3 2015, product brand in units for price bands one to three for the last eleven quarters (Q1 2013 to Q3 2015). In statistical tie with Dell Storage NX family.
⁽³⁾ Based on published US list pricing from Dell, EMC, IBM, HPE and NetApp, January 2016.
⁽⁴⁾ Source
⁽⁵⁾ Cost reduction is based on US list price for MSA 2040 SAN SFF array with 4x1GbE iSCSI SFPs and 2x200GB SSDs ($14,768) as compared to US Smart Buy list price for 1GbE iSCSI MSA 1040 SFF array with 2x200GB SSDs and MSA 1040 Advanced Virtualization upgrade ($8,038).
⁽⁶⁾ Based on publicly available US list Smart Buy price for 1.4TB, 1GbE iSCSI MSA 1040 SFF array with one 200GB SSD, four 300GB 10k HDDs and MSA 1040 Advanced Virtualization upgrade, totaling $7,817.
⁽⁷⁾ Based on US list prices for 400GB SSD at $2,220 (previously $3,099), 800GB SSD at $4,219 (previously $5,999), 1.6TB SSD at $7,979 (previously $10,969).
⁽⁸⁾ Based on US list price for a single 200GB SSD and a series of workload tests performed by Demartek LLC in coordination with Read Cache and MSA Performance R/W Tiering functionality. Full reports can be found at Demartek website – Exchange, SQL, Mixed Virtualized Workloads.
⁽⁹⁾ Expressed as cost per gigabyte for storage moved to the Archive Tier and based on HPE internal testing using Archive Tiering capabilities to store infrequently accessed data from enterprise SAS (10,000/15,000rpm) drives to midline SAS (7.200rpm) drives.
⁽¹⁰⁾ Based on publicly available product information. As compared to NetApp FAS2520 with 216TB of raw capacity.
⁽¹¹⁾ Based on HPE internal analysis of publicly available information, February 2016
⁽¹²⁾ Based on publicly available product information. As compared to the NetApp FAS2520 with 216TB of raw capacity.
⁽¹³⁾ U.S. list prices or publicly available U.S. Smart Buy prices where indicated. Actual prices may vary.