HPE Beefs Up Flash In 3Par Storage For Performance, Lower Cost

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Monday unveiled new high-performance and lower-cost all-flash versions of its 3Par storage array line.

The company also unveiled new software capabilities for the HPE 3Par StoreServ storage line, as well as enhancements to its tape automation solutions, data protection appliance line and data protection software, said Patrick Osborne, senior director of product management and marketing for HPE storage.

We're helping our customers along the path to modernization of the all-flash data center," Osborne told CRN.

[Related: HDS Unveils Its First All-Flash Array Family, With Focus On Performance And Cost]

HPE, the enterprise half of the company known until Nov. 1 as Hewlett-Packard, used its first storage line refresh since the split to unveil the HPE 3Par Flash Acceleration for Oracle, a flash storage-based appliance targeting the acceleration of Oracle DB applications.

Osborne said the HPE 3Par Flash Acceleration for Oracle is targeted for deployment alongside competing storage solutions in Oracle environments including EMC VMAX.

"It's a 3Par all-flash array running in parallel with VMAX," he said. "It's a validated solution with Oracle that mirrors the database between 3Par and VMAX. Oracle ASM [Automatic Storage Management] looks at the data and finds the fastest path for reads and writes."

Also new is support for online import of data to 3Par from IBM XIV storage arrays, Osborne said. The HPE 3Par line previously supported direct data import from EMC VMAX and VNX solutions and from Hitachi Data Systems arrays, he said.

HPE also added new 3-D NAND flash technology as an option for 3Par as a way to meet lower price points for certain applications, he said.

The timing of the new 3Par capabilities combined with the lower price points promised by 3-D NAND SSDs is perfect for PCPC Direct, said Joe Vaught, executive vice president and COO for the Houston-based solution provider and longtime HP partner.

PCPC Direct is introducing customers to a new high-performance WAN technology that needs the performance offered by HPE 3Par storage, Vaught told CRN. "We can now move data at speeds that outrun everything," he said. "So the bottleneck is moving back from the network to storage."

The ability to work alongside and eventually replace competitive arrays is important for account control, Vaught said.

"I can take this to accounts with competitive solutions," he said. "The 3Par can run at half the cost of many solutions. This is a major spear for HP. I don't like competitors in my accounts. This lets me keep them out."

Also new is the HPE 3Par StoreServ 8200 starter kit for unified file and block storage. Osborne said the kit includes a pair of 3Par 8200 controllers with four 16-Gbit Fibre Channel and four 10-Gbit Ethernet ports, along with storage capacity and software for managing file and block storage on a single solution.

The 8200 can be configured as a hybrid array or an all-flash array, and competes with solutions like EMC's VNX, Osborne said. "It includes a number of reference architectures to deploy in virtual desktop, SharePoint, and SAP HANA environments, along with surveillance and other solutions which use both file and block storage protocols," he said.

HPE also introduced LTO-7 tape drives to its StoreEver line of tape automation to double the capacity and performance compared to LTO-6, Osborne said. "We're seeing customers use tape for active archiving," he said. "They're using tape as NAS, or combining flash with tape as FLAPE."

Also new are four new models in HPE's StoreOnce data protection appliances, which now come integrated with flash storage, Osborne said. Combined with HPE's StoreOnce deduplication capabilities, customers can get high-performance data protection hardware as low as less than 5 cents per GB of logical capacity, he said.

HPE's Recovery Manager Central data protection software, which allows direct backups of data from primary to secondary storage over iSCSI or Fibre Channel networks, now supports consistent snapshots of Microsoft SQL data, he said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 16, 2015