HP Continues Product Announcement Blitz

New servers and software aim to extend flash to enterprises.

June 1, 2015

3 Min Read
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By Art Wittmann

Art Wittmann**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services that partners can sell.**

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.

  • Persistent Checksum provides data integrity for data in motion and at rest. For very large data stores, data errors are statistically unavoidable; Persistent Checksum offers a way to ensure that data can always be verified for accuracy.

  • Asynchronous Streaming provides a data-replication method that approaches a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero seconds, but does so without the performance impact of synchronous copy methods. HP says the nature of the flash system allows it to achieve near-synchronous RPOs with far less overhead.

  • Peer Motion is a data-migration system that works at the block level and without disrupting running applications. HP uses a storage federation model, which can extend across metropolitan area networks. 3Par’s thin-copy technology allows for the uninterrupted movement of storage systems. For complex service environments, the ability to shuffle blocks is critical.

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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