HP Lowers Cost of Flash for Data Center Storage

Pursuing an all-flash data center storage future, HP announced at its Discover conference in Las Vegas this week new innovations in its 3PAR StoreServ storage line, including a new class of massively scalable flash arrays and flash-optimized data services.

After a banner 2014 for HP in the solid-state arrays market the company is hoping to push more enterprises into flash and realize an all-flash data center by lowering the cost of the medium to $1.50 per gigabyte.

This week the company launched the 3PAR StoreServ Storage 20000 enterprise flash family of Tier I all-flash arrays for data center storage with increased speed and decreased footprint requirements. All of the StoreServ models are built on a single architecture with one operating system and interface, and offer a common set of enterprise data services.

Noting that $1.50/GB is just the beginning, HP says that new 3.84 terabyte SSDs are further enhanced with its flash optimization software and hardware-accelerated data compaction that increase usable capacity by 75 percent. The cost reduction is due in part to the cost of new cMLC SSDs coming down in price. HP says the new 20850 model boosts performance with over 3.2 million IOPS at sub-millisecond latency, and over 75 GBps of sustained throughput, and that the new 20800 converged flash array is able to scale up to 15 petabytes of usable capacity.

The new 3PAR line supports unified block and file workloads as well as object access, and is powered by the new Gen5 Thin Express ASIC for data validation. For environments that require extreme low-latency solutions, HP says it now provides the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Services Switch, which, combined with 3PAR remote copy, will deliver synchronous replication over fibre infrastructure up to 130 kilometers with in-flight encryption.

HP says it also enhanced native data center storage federation capabilities with new 3PAR Peer Motion support for non-disruptive, bi-directional data movement. This allows the creation of a storage federation across multiple storage arrays with up to 60 petabytes of aggregate usable capacity, according to HP. With 3PAR software exclusive to the StoreServ 20000 line, HP says that workloads can move between members of a federation to dynamically rebalance storage resources.

The systems will ship in August 2015, with retail prices starting at $75,000.