HPE 3PAR

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For customers with demanding storage loads, HPE 3PAR StoreServ offers plenty of high-end performance and storage capacity. The product appears to be strong in the financial services industry, as well as with companies already invested in an HPE-based infrastructure. Non-HPE customers, though, may struggle to integrate this array into their existing platforms.

Jump to: HPE 3PAR Features Table

Established in 2015, by the split of HP into consumer and enterprise segments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has 63,000 employees. The company is a leader in the majority of the market segments it serves: #1 in servers, #2 in networking and #2 in total storage. The company’s servers power 100% of the top 10 global manufacturers.

The company acquired 3PAR several years ago and has since continued to invest in the technology. It has also more recently acquired another flash vendor (Nimble). It remains to be seen whether it combines 3PAR and Nimble technologies or maintains separate product lines. Customers include Pittsburgh Supercomputing, National Instruments and Burson Auto Parts.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ was built to meet the extreme requirements of massively consolidated cloud service providers. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ family of flash-optimized data storage systems can handle unpredictable workloads with guaranteed 99.9999% data availability. Automated provisioning, multi-tenant design, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and sub-1ms latency are included in a storage architecture that starts small and scales well.

Gartner placed HPE in its Leaders quadrant. The analyst firm complemented HPE on a flexible architecture capable of utilizing NVMe and storage-class memory without a disruptive upgrade. In addition, it supports detailed analytics. Cautions include the fact that acquired flash array products from the likes of 3PAR and Nimble may not interoperate easily.

Implementation:

Very good for those already running HPE, but perhaps not so fast for others. Users have the option of self-installing HPE 3PAR storage. Its architecture has three levels of storage virtualization of lower-level components to make it easier to install, own and upgrade.

“The array was amazingly fast to rack, stack, configure, update and begin migrating data,” said a Manager of Infrastructure Technologies in the Retail Industry.

Technical support:

Good. HPE offers a wide range of support options. This includes integration services to bring StoreServ into an existing environment. HPE InfoSight predicts and automates resolution to problems.

“Support from 3PAR has been outstanding and we continue to have a long-lasting partnership that has benefited both companies,” said a Director of Infrastructure Operations in the services industry.

Capacity:

20 PB

Performance:

3M IOPS

Less than 1 ms latency

RAID/Data Protection:

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage is designed to deliver mission critical tier1 enterprise reliability. Full hardware redundancy is built into the system, reinforced by proactive error checking, and autonomic software features that deliver transparent failover/failback to ensure uninterrupted access to data.

“Being a bank, the availability of our applications is crucial to the financial success of our clients and our organization. Achieving 100% uptime over five years across three arrays has delivered unprecedented reliability,” said a bank CIO.

Storage Saving Features:

Deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. HPE 3PAR Storage comes standard with HPE 3PAR Adaptive Data Reduction software, a collection of technologies including Zero Detect, deduplication, compression, and Data Packing that make flash more affordable.

Data Management:

HPE 3PAR offers a broad set of data services including:

NVMe features:

HPE 3PAR does not provide an end-to-end NVMe design but its system is capable of utilizing NVMe Peripheral Component Interface Express (PCIe) SSDs or NVMe drives.

Delivered as a hardware storage system.

A HPE 3PAR 8400 system has a starting price of $45,000.

Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServe

Scale-up

No

Scale-out

Yes

Capacity

Raw capacity (no deduplication)

8 PB

Effective capacity

26 PB

Networking (Max speed in Gbps)

Fibre Channel

16 Gbs

Ethernet/iSCSI

10GbE

Infiniband

No

FCoE

Yes

Performance

IOPs

3M

Throughput

20 GB/s

Latency

1 ms

Storage Saving Features

Deduplication

Yes

Compression

Yes

Thin provisioning

Yes

Management

Data encryption

Yes

Snapshots

Yes

Replication (synch or asynch?)

Both

Availability

Percentage uptime (ex.: 99.999)

6 x 9

Non-disruptive software upgrades

Yes

Non-disruptive hardware upgrades

Yes

Warranty/Support

Base warranty: array

Yes

Base warranty: flash

Yes

Flash replacement if drive/module wears out before warranty expires?

Yes

Gartner Magic Quadrant Rating

Leader

Price

Starting price of $45,000