HPE Updates Its Flash Portfolio For A Broader Range Of Customers

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a major update to its flash portfolio adding new products and data protection solutions. These new solutions will aid customers as they transition to an all-flash data center. The new products and solutions include a midrange HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 all-flash array, primary and secondary all-flash Nimble arrays, fifth generation HPE MSA Storage, and high-speed, cloud-connected StoreOnce data protection.

Flash adoption has really been taking off over the last two years, especially as more and more data centers go all-flash. The price dropping has been one of the driving factors but the performance benefits that flash provides over disk have gone from being nice to have, to being demanded by customers. As companies moved toward all-flash, IT is seeking ways to maximize on their new investments. HPE intends to tackle these concerns but updating its flash portfolio for both the large enterprise as well as the midrange crowd.

For midrange customers, HPE is introducing what it is referring to as a highly scalable, multi-tenant, and performance rich all-flash platform, the HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450. From a performance perspective, the new HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 hits almost 2 million IOPS at less than 1ms latency. On top of that, the new 3PAR can scale up to 6PB and has three times the connectivity of previous models, with 80 host ports. The latest addition to the 3PAR family is also futureproofed to a degree, with a path to next generation Storage Class Memory and NVM Express (NVMe) using HPE 3PAR 3D Cache.

HPE has unveiled two new MSA entry-level SAN platforms, the 2050 and the 2052. These new models can deliver twice the performance of the previous generation and they start under $10,000. The HPE MSA 2052 can offer up to 40% cost savings, and has all-inclusive software and 1.6TB of SSD capacity. Both of these SAN platforms offer any combination of SSD and SAS HDD drives.

HPE MSA 2052

Drive description: Up to 192 SFF SSD/SAS/MDL SAS or 96 LFF SSD/SAS/MDL SAS maximum including base array and expansion, depending on model
Max. drive type:
- 10 TB 12G 7.2K LFF dual-port MDL SAS HDD
- 1.8 TB 12G 10K SFF dual-port SAS HDD
- 2 TB 12G 7.2K SFF dual-port MDL SAS HDD
- 3.2 TB SFF SSD
Max. raw capacity:
- Supported 614 TB SFF/960 TB LFF maximum raw capacity
- Including expansion, depending on model
Storage expansion options:
- HPE MSA 2050 LFF Disk Enclosure
- HPE MSA 2050 SFF Disk Enclosure
Host interface options:
- 8 Gb/16 Gb FC 8 ports per system or
- 1GbE/10GbE iSCSI 8 ports per system
Storage controllers: 2 controllers per system supported included
SAN backup support
RAID levels: 1, 5, 6, 10
HPE Systems Insight Manager support
Compatible operating systems
- Microsoft Windows Server 2016
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- VMware
- HP-UX
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- SUSE Linux
Clustering support: Windows, Linux, HP-UX
Form factor: 2U base array, 2U LFF or SFF disk enclosures

HPE MSA 2050

Drive description: Up to 192 SFF SSD/SAS/MDL SAS or 96 LFF SSD/SAS/MDL SAS maximum including base array and expansion, depending on model
Max. drive type:
- 10 TB 12G 7.2K LFF dual-port MDL SAS HDD
- 1.8 TB 12G 10K SFF dual-port SAS HDD
- 2 TB 12G 7.2K SFF dual-port MDL SAS HDD
- 3.2 TB SFF SSD
Max. raw capacity:
- 614 TB SFF/960 TB LFF
- Including expansion, depending on model
Storage expansion options:
- HPE MSA 2050 LFF Disk Enclosure
- HPE MSA 2050 SFF Disk Enclosure
- HPE MSA 2050 SAS DC Power Carrier Grade SFF Disk Enclosure
Host interface options:
- 8 Gb/16 Gb FC 8 ports per system or
- 1GbE/10GbE iSCSI 8 ports per system
Storage controllers:
- 2 controllers per system included
- SAN backup support
- RAID levels: 1, 5, 6, 10
HPE Systems Insight Manager support
Compatible operating systems:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2016
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- VMware
- HP-UX
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- SUSE Linux
Clustering support: Windows, Linux, HP-UX
Form factor: 2U base array, 2U LFF or SFF disk enclosures

Also announced is StoreOnce CloudBank, which gives customers a long-term data retention solution with much lower cost protection on multi-cloud destinations such as AWS, Azure or on-premises object storage. The new software is also designed to reduce bandwidth requirements by more than 99%, indicating that it lower costs of cloud-based storage to an impressive $0.001/GB per month. Moreover, StoreOnce CloudBank supports the full set of on-premises StoreOnce features (e.g. 3PAR integration), allowing customers to automatically transition data off-premises all the while guaranteeing rapid and flexible disaster recovery.

HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC) has added a new Express Restore feature that allows for 15x faster data recovery from both on- and off-premises StoreOnce repositories. HPE has also integrated RMC with Veeam Explorer, which gives customers the ability recover application items such as e-mails, documents and database schemas directly from RMC-V Express Protect backups.

HPE announced their intent to acquire Nimble back in March, and it has now been made official. With this recent acquisition comes HPE's new Nimble Secondary Flash Array (SFA), allowing users’ backup and copy data to support secondary applications. The system combines always-on deduplication and compression for lower capacity costs when backing up with flash-optimized performance. Built seamlessly and efficiently carry out tasks like Veeam backups and disaster recovery, HPE’s new flash arrays offers “zero-copy cloning” to run production workloads such as dev/test, QA and analytics.

Availability and Pricing

HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 is expected to be available June 2017 starting at $74,840.
HPE MSA 2050 is expected to be available June 2017 starting at $7,750.
HPE MSA 2052 is expected to be available June 2017 starting at $9,600.
RMC 4.1 is included as part of the standard all-inclusive 3PAR StoreServ licensing package and is expected to be available from September 2017.
HPE StoreOnce CloudBank is available as part of an Early Access Program. Contact HPE to see if you qualify.
Nimble Secondary Flash Array currently available starting under $40,000.

HPE Storage

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