Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released a flash portfolio update with new products and data protection solutions. The new offerings include a more powerful midrange HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 all-flash array; availability of Nimble Storage primary and new secondary flash arrays; fifth generation HPE MSA Storage; and high-speed, cloud-connected StoreOnce data protection.
According to HPE, the adoption of flash storage continues to gain pace, with 51% of customers predicting that they will have an All-Flash Data Center within 5 years, while IT teams seek deeper integration across servers, storage, networks, and automation tools to maximize value from investments.
As flash gains ground it is becoming more important to move beyond the array – from predictive analytics to data protection to investment strategies, said Bill Philbin, senior vice president, Data Center Infrastructure Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The new solutions, he said, are targeted at helping more customers maximize the value of flash on-premises and enable flexible off-premises data mobility.
To address the demands posed by exponential data growth and app development in the data center, HPE is updating its overall flash portfolio including the addition of cloud-ready Nimble Storage flash arrays powered by predictive analytics for a new-style approach to storage support and monitoring.
For midrange customers hitting performance limits of aging systems, the new HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 is a scalable, multi-tenant, and performance rich all-flash platform that builds on the product family’s position in the midrange fibre channel. To enable the consolidation of more data in less space without compromising service levels, HPE is increasing performance 70%, doubling scale to 6PB, and enabling 3X the front-end connectivity with 80 host ports. For those considering long-term investment strategies, the 3PAR StoreServ 9450 also provides a path to next-generation Storage Class Memory and NVM Express (NVMe) using HPE 3PAR 3D Cache.
HPE is also unveiling the fifth generation of its entry SAN platform, HPE MSA, starting with the introduction of HPE MSA 2050 and 2052 models. MSA is an entry fibre channel array and now delivers 2x more performance than the previous generation starting under $10,000. With all-inclusive software and 1.6 terabytes of solid-state disk (SSD) capacity included, the new HPE MSA 2052 offers a 40% cost savings on hybrid flash models. Both MSA platforms are affordable starting points for application acceleration providing flexibility to mix any combination of SSD and SAS drives plus including resiliency features such as snapshots and remote replication.
And, with the scale and speed of flash storage becoming pervasive HPE contends that it’s critical that customers re-think data protection to avoid risk and eliminate bottlenecks, and as part of that shift, HPE has federated primary, secondary, and object storage to enable zero-impact data protection while putting backup data to work.
For customers exploring public-cloud tiers for secondary data, HPE announced StoreOnce CloudBank, a long-term data retention solution that provides significantly lower cost protection on multi-cloud destinations such as AWS, Azure or on premises object storage. Unlike many cloud backup solutions, StoreOnce CloudBank has been architected to reduce bandwidth requirements by over 99%, helping to lower costs of cloud-based storage to just $0.001 per gigabyte per month. The solution also supports the full set of on-premises StoreOnce features, including 3PAR integration, so customers can automatically transition data off-premises while assuring rapid and flexible disaster recovery. HPE StoreOnce CloudBank is available as part of an Early Access Program.
As HPE 3PAR flash customers seek to rapidly protect larger and larger data sets, HPE Recovery Manager Central(RMC) already provides protection of applications running on 3PAR by directly connecting to secondary StoreOnce data protection systems through patented block-level integration. RMC is part of 3PAR’s all-inclusive licensing model and has now been enhanced with a new Express Restore feature, which enables 15x faster data recovery from on-prem or off-prem StoreOnce repositories. RMC has also now been integrated with Veeam Explorer so customers can recover application items such as e-mails, documents and database schemas directly from RMC-V Express Protect backups. RMC 4.1 is included as part of the standard all-inclusive 3PAR StoreServ licensing package and will be available from September 2017.
The new Nimble Secondary Flash Array (SFA), currently available, allows customers to put their backup and copy data to work for secondary applications. The system brings together always-on deduplication and compression to lower capacity costs for backup with flash-optimized performance and zero-copy cloning to run production workloads like dev/test, QA and analytics.
For more information, go to www.hpe.com.