Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the latest generation of its HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA), HPE MSA Gen 6. This new generation is an entry-level hybrid-flash storage solution for small to medium businesses that leans toward performance and automation with a friendlier SMB budget. The new MSA can also be used to easily backup to the cloud with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup.
Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the latest generation of its HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA), HPE MSA Gen 6. This new generation is an entry-level hybrid-flash storage solution for small to medium businesses that leans toward performance and automation with a friendlier SMB budget. The new MSA can also be used to easily backup to the cloud with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup.
SMBs are going through their digital transformation the same as the big guys. However, they have a much more limited budget. The needs are the same, but the money isn’t. So, HPE is releasing its new HPE MSA Gen 6 new data services and modern architecture but at a lower price. The latest MSA is also geared for on-demand businesses (with online education being a big thing at the moment). MSA is said to enable customers to better manage distributed applications and workloads more easily, as well.
HPE MSA Gen 6 features include:
- Hands-free tiering that delivers workload efficiency with improved performance and lower latencies. This feature boosts delivered performance by 2 – 4x compared to hard disk drive (HDD)-only configurations and allows the array to respond to changing workloads utilizing a small number of solid state drives (SSDs). This feature moves the hottest data to the fastest media in real-time, allowing customers to more effectively maximize SSD performance and HDD capacity based on workload needs.
- A new level of in-array data protection with the new MSA Data Protection Plus (MSA DP+). This protection capability spans all drives and eliminates idle HDD spares to improve overall system efficiency and performance. In the event of a drive failure, MSA DP+ would speed rebuild times by 25×2, dramatically minimizing the time the array was in a degraded or vulnerable state.
- Improved MSA Health Check tool that eliminates common causes of downtime. With this tool, data shows that 76% of HPE MSA support calls will be eliminated for customers who utilize the MSA Health Check functionality proactively. This cloud-based tool reduces local administration overhead by searching sensor data for known issues, and adherence to best practices, improving the user experience and maximizing availability.
- Integration with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup to provide customers a simple and inexpensive route to cloud-based data protection, while saving money on a separate backup appliance. SMBs can instantly start backing up to the cloud with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, a built-in enterprise cloud backup service using HPE Recovery Manager Central, without changing any existing backup workloads. HPE Cloud Volumes Backup cloud services are also now available through HPE GreenLake.
The HPE MSA Gen 6 comes in three models; 1060, 2060, and 2062. The MSA 1060 comes with two controllers per array, two hosts per controller, either 16 Gb FC, 1/10GbE iSCSI (10GBase-T), or 12 Gb SAS connectivity, performance is quoted at 254K IOPS with 6.6GB/s throughput and up to 668TB of capacity in either SFF or LFF disks.
The MSA 2060 also has two controllers per array with hour host ports per controller, the same connectivity options as the MSA 1060 but with bigger performance numbers of 325K IOPS and 13.1GB/s and up to 192TB of raw capacity.
The HPE MSA 2062 is a flash-ready 2060 bundle with 2×1.92 TB RI SSDs preinstalled and an advanced data services license included.
We have previously reviewed the MSA 2052 and eagerly await seeing this refreshed version in our lab.
Pricing and Availability
The HPE MSA Gen 6 is now available starting under $7,000.
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