HP 3PAR for midrange business

HP Enterprise class storage has just entered the mid range market.  Today HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 class which includes two devices;  the HP 3PAR 7200 and the HP 3PAR 7400.   The 7200 starts at $25k for the 2U device and the 7400 (seen below) is less than $40K for a 4U device.

I’m very excited about this announcement because now HP has a storage device with the features that everybody wants and it’s now affordable for a smaller sized organization.  HP has seemingly targeted one of it’s own devices with this announcement (the HP EVA) since it has been very popular with the mid-range business.  They’ve even included some tools to migrate data from the EVA to the new 3PAR.  I seriously doubt that the EVA will entirely go away, but the new big brother is going to steal some of their thunder.

If you’re unfamiliar with some of the 3PAR features, it does thin provisioning via hardware enabled ASICs, which HP is touting can save 10X is storage space (I assume over non-thinned provisioned data.  If you switch from an array that already thin provisions, I doubt this type of space savings will still be achievable.)

The coolest feature to me is the ability to “autonomically” move data around between disk types based on the data most utilized.  It’s nice to have a storage system that performance tune all by itself.  Now you can still setup your storage tiers, but don’t have to worry about watching utilization and moving it around all the time.  HP 3PAR will do this for you.

If you’re in the market for some new storage, the HP 3PAR 7000 is certainly worth a look.

To get more information about the new devices please check out HP’s annoucement page, Calvin Zito’s blog or on twiter: @HPStorageGuy.