HPE 3PAR: Features and Pricing

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Bottom Line:

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

Company Description:

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.

Product Description:

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.

Features:

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. 

• Built-in Replication: Synchronous, Asynchronous, Asynchronous Streaming, Multi-Site, 3-Way, Peer Persistence
• Built-in Data Protection: Applications can be automatically protected during volume creation with 3PAR to local StoreOnce appliances and local object or Cloud services
• Thin snapshots
• Encryption: FIPS 140-2 Validated Data-at-Rest Encryption (meeting NIST, Federal, & DoD requirements to secure data) with support for Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) which are FIPS 140-2 Level 2
• Stretch clustering between data centers
• 6 x 9s availability.

“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:

• Quality-of-Service: Configurable for minimum/max IOPs, bandwidth, and the industry’s only system that is configurable for latency. Single volume, group of volumes/consistency group
• Clones: Physical Copies can be created and managed in groups to reduce the number of management tasks     
• Built-in SAN Management: Automate end-to-end SAN zoning and FC diagnostics, thereby simplifying provisioning, management, and troubleshooting
• HPE 3PAR offers unified storage with block, file, and object access

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.

Delivery:

Delivered as a hardware storage system.

Pricing:

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