By Art Wittmann

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Last month HP rolled out a pile of new servers, ranging from an iteration of its high-end Superdome systems to low-priced, high-value scale-out Apollo 2000-series devices. Today, HP’s 3Par division continues the trend, announcing the StoreServ 20800 and 20850. The 20000-series devices are all flash, or flash-first, and bring a new level of performance and affordability to 3Par flash designs.

For cloud builders, the performance and price of the 3Par offerings will be tempting. 3Par is also announcing important software enhancements that will be critical to those managing very large data repositories.

The server announcements, which came in May, helped fill out the extreme ends of HP’s scale-up line — the familiar ProLiant DL servers. The company also brought more options to the Apollo systems, which were announced last year at this time. The Apollos are rack-based chassis that can take server modules emphasizing either compute power, storage capacity or a balance of both. Whether HP can compete with the white-label manufacturers whose systems are currently the choice of scale-out architects remains to be seen, but the Apollo line offers the sort of compact form factors that builders of large Web and storage farms and big data analysis systems are looking for.

The DL servers have been upgraded with the latest Intel chips, bumping total memory up to 6 TB on the DL580 with as many as nine PCIe-3 card slots for I/O. The Superdome X server provides up to 12 TB in a single memory pool, and HP has been working with SAP to bring HANA to the system as well as working with Microsoft on its software products.

The StoreServ products are by no means the first all-flash systems on the market, but they represent an important step in terms of scalability and affordability. HP says that all-flash systems using 4 TB drives will dress out at $1.50/GB, making upgrades to the all-flash or flash-first systems something of a no-brainer. On the scale side, the new StoreServ systems can hold up to eight controllers. The controllers will undoubtedly still be a bottleneck for dozens to hundreds of SSDs, but the ability to provide eight data channels will provide significant bandwidth between storage farms and server farms.

On the software side, HP 3Par has four new offerings: …

… Persistent Checksum, Remote Copy Asynchronous Streaming, Peer Motion and StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central.

Though HP intends all of these systems for its enterprise audience, it recognizes that service providers will be some of the more aggressive customers in using these software features as they adopt 3Par’s newest flash-based storage systems.

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