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HP pings out a super souped-up all-flash StoreServ system

Hybrid flash/disk system, fatter SSDs, federated systems and replication

Comment

The 20K StoreServ family is a major announcement for HP and brings the day when it may no longer need to OEM the VSP G1000 from Hitachi closer. Indeed, the 20K, with its federation capability, probably competes effectively with all-flash VSP G1000 configurations.

HP says the XP7 is for for mainframe and NonStop environments, as well as the XP installed base. The StoreServ 7000, 10000 and 20000 products are for the all-flash data centre, IT-as-a-service from private and hybrid clouds, and for on-premises enterprise and cloud service provider use.

We think HP, with a federation of four 20000s – up to 36 controllers in total – can out-scale Pure Storage but not scale out as far as Solidfire. There should be, with these systems, a strong barrier against incursion into HP accounts of competing all-flash array systems.

We think that the major development work for the 20K was complete when David Scott, Mr 3PAR, decided to retire from running HP storage in March. With the product range extension upwards more-or-less finished, this was possibly a more important factor in his decision than HP deciding to split into two separate businesses.

We can expect the Gen 5 ASIC to be used over time to provide refreshes for the existing StoreServ products, giving them more performance. The 3.84TB SSD should also become available for the existing arrays.

Our expectation is that bulk data storage on flash will come to StoreServ when HP can be assured of reliable-enough supplies of 3D MLC and/or 3D TLC (triple level cell) flash.

Pricing and availability

The 3.84TB SSDs are orderable worldwide and shipping immediately. StoreServ 20000 arrays are orderable worldwide, and shipping in August 2015 for a US street price under $100,000. A minimum configuration is 2 controller nodes, one drive enclosure and four SSDs. The new StoreServ software is only available for StoreServ 20000 systems.

StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware (RMC-V) with 3PAR Remote Copy support will be available worldwide, June 2015 at no charge to customers who have an existing RMC-V or RM-V license and valid support contract. ®

* Based on the comparison of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 20850 Storage with 12 PB usable capacity and EMC XtremIO storage, using 40TB flash bricks (a total of 8 systems) to achieve 12 PB usable capacity.

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