HPE Breaks Price of All-Flash Subsystem

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) announced a initiative to address demand for flexible storage consumption models, accelerate all-flash data center adoption, assure the right level of resiliency, and help customers transform to a hybrid IT infrastructure.

3PAR StoreServ Storage systems

Over the past several years, the industry has seen flash storage rapidly evolve from niche application performance accelerator to the default media for critical workloads. During this time, company’s 3PAR StoreServ Storage platform has emerged as a leader in all-flash array market share growth, performance, and economics. The 3PAR Flash Now initiative gives customers a way to acquire this all-flash technology on-premises starting at $0.03 per usable gigabyte per month, a fraction of the cost of public cloud solutions. ⁽¹⁾

“Capitalizing on digital disruption requires that customers be able to flexibly consume new technologies,” said Bill Philbin, VP and GM, storage, HPE. “Helping customers benefit from both technology and consumption flexibility is at the heart of HPE’s innovation agenda.“

Enabling all-flash data center at less than half cost of public cloud
Many customers are in the process of weighing the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure against the perceived cost savings and flexibility gains of public cloud platforms. To eliminate the need to compromise, the company announced a initiative that brings together on-premises performance, application availability, and control with the convenience and agility of public cloud consumption models.

Starting at just $0.03/GB usable per month for all-flash 3PAR StoreServ Storage and bringing together multiple complementary technology and support elements, It allows customers to benefit from all-flash storage performance, embedded data protection and application availability, as well as security and control for the data they need to keep on-premises.

More than just a financing program, 3PAR Flash Now accelerates all-flash data center adoption, simplifies migration from legacy storage, reduces risk and provides a seamless growth path for customers to manage future technology transitions. In addition to delivering the performance of 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, the initiative brings together technology innovations, programs and services such as company’s Flexible Capacity and Pre-Provisioning.

Together, these complementary elements give customers flexibility to:

• Optimize cash flow by deferring payments until their new all-flash array is up and running or injecting cash via asset trade-in

• Accelerate service delivery by taking advantage of automated data migration tools at no cost or opt for tailored migration services

• Improve service levels through the company’s 99.9999% availability guarantee ⁽²⁾, and by including flash-optimized networking and data protection

• Minimize refresh risk with built-in non-disruptive upgrade to next-gen technologies such as storage class memory and NVMe

• Maintain control over data locality, avoid long-term lock-in and eliminate the costs and complications of reclaiming data from the cloud

Smart SAN
Click to enlarge

Performance networking and automation to protect service levels
Protecting application service levels and maximizing return from investments in the all-flash data center requires the right networking bandwidth and ability to rapidly connect apps to infrastructure. To support this, the firm also announced an update to the latest StoreFabric 32Gb (Gen 6) FC portfolio. A key part of the 3PAR Flash Now initiative, this portfolio features Smart SAN technology for automated orchestration directly from 3PAR StoreServ flash storage arrays. This capability reduces provisioning time by 90% ⁽³⁾ – thus saving hours of manual effort while reducing risk due to human error or network changes.

StoreOnce data protection systems

Partnerships reduce business risk with enhanced data protection
For the last year, the company has been federating its 3PAR StoreServ Storage and StoreOnce data protection platforms in order to enable zero-impact application protection as customers move to the all-flash data center. The company also announced a joint initiative across the firm’s Technology Services Consulting division and a SAP integrator using Recovery Manager Central technology to protect in-memory SAP HANA applications at scale without impacting application performance.

In addition, for flash-adjacent archiving and web-scale digital asset management, the company announced that it has extended its high-end tape portfolio to drive down long-term storage costs to under $0.01/GB via a reseller relationship with Spectra Logic Corporation, a scalable deep storage tape archive vendor.

Pricing and availability:

• 3PAR Flash Now is available worldwide.

• StoreFabric 32Gb (Gen 6) FC portfolio is available worldwide.

• The company currently offers a full line of tape libraries and tape media under the StoreEver portfolio. The Spectra enterprise libraries utilizing LTO, TS and T10000 tape technologies are available as of today starting at $112,000 list price for the zero drive library option.

⁽¹⁾ Based on the firm’s internal analysis of publicly available information provided by major cloud solution providers via their company web sites.
⁽²⁾ Subject to qualification and compliance with the availability guarantee program terms and conditions, which will be provided to customers by company’s sales or channel partner representative.
⁽³⁾ Based on tests performed by Demartek LLC on Gen 6 FC.