At the HP Discover event in Las Vegas, the company announced its 3PAR StoreServ 20000 Storage series offering 25 percent lower cost-per-GB, along with a new class of massively scalable flash arrays and flash optimized data services. Enough to lower HP’s $18 cost-per-GB from two and a half years ago to $1.50 per useable GB today.

A converged Flash Array to meet emerging business needs
Although the 3PAR StoreServ 20800 is a “flash-first design”, hp also offers to its customers an hybrid alternative with the 20850 model which uses an adjustable mix of flash storage and conventional 15 krpm spinning disks.

The 20850 model can be deployed with as few as two controllers, but it easily scales out to eight controllers with up to 3.6 TB of cache and 1,024 SSDs. This provides between 1.92 TB and 3,932 TB of raw capacity (12 PB total useable) and a rack density of 5.5 PB. HP offers a range of individual SSDs from 480 GB up to 3.84 TB to propel the top speed up to 3.2 million IOPS and 75 GBps of throughput. The addition of deduplication services expands the useable capacity of the storage pool, and thus lowers the cost per addressable GB. The 20800 can be deployed with as few as two controllers, and can scale up to eight controllers. The architecture offers from 1.8 TB of on-node cache up to 33.8 TB. The system supports up to 1,920 total drives with any mixture of SSDs and HDDs.

Mixed system for tiering application
This mixed SSD and HDD system is useful for tiering applications, such as storing snapshots and bulk data on the HDD tier and keeping high-performance workloads on the flash tier. A small 20800 configuration begins at 1.92 TB of raw capacity and scales up to an impressive 6 petabytes of raw storage. The system supports the same range of SSDs as the 20850, but it also adds a slew of HDD options that include 600 GB 15K, 1.2 TB 10K and the capacity-heavy 6 TB 7,200 RPM HDDs.

HP also added several new features to address flash-specific challenges. Asynchronous replication supports the demanding RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) brought on by the speed of flash systems by lowering them to one-second intervals.

High-end features and lower costs to grab marketshare
The StoreServ 20800 features new end-to-end high-availability features, including the Persistent Checksum product for HP ProLiant Servers. This system leverages the new T10 PI (Protection Information) standard to run checksums on all data from the host down to the end storage.

IDC forecasted a 46 percent compound annual growth rate for all-flash arrays over the next five years, and HP is looking to grab a portion of the lucrative market with pricing under $100,000 for the 20800 and 20850 platforms. 15K HDDs have already taken a bludgeoning at the hands of flash, and with flash-based systems coming in at $1.50 per GB, it appears that 10K HDDs are now under duress as well. With new all-flash arrays that provide lower overall TCO and competitive CAPEX with disk-based systems, the trend is sure to accelerate.