New HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Announced
June 11, 2013
HP officially announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 today to some oohs and ahhs at HP Discover.
The new 3PAR is an all flash array that can be utilized for small, medium or large business needs. HP is touting that some of their competitors are having difficulty with the flash hurdle because their systems were optimized for spinning disks. And other competitors who designed their arrays specifically with flash in mind from the ground up are not proven arrays from a reliability standpoint.
HP’s 3PAR ASICs give them a unique opportunity to use what they’re already built to then add on solid state drives to add performance. The 3PAR ASIC will allocate the writes to disk evenly to eliminate wear on these SSDs which tend to wear out much more quickly than the traditional spinning-disks.
If you’re looking for some specs on the new device, you can expect around 554,000 IOPS at under .7 ms latency. (I usually don’t pay too much attention to the IOPS count because it’s usually inflated due to it not being under a typical production workload. )
To me this announcement doesn’t come as too much of a shock since every major array vendor wants to have a flash array in their arsenal these days. The bigger announcement was the updated 3PAR software capabilities that went with this.
3PAR Priority Optimization is a new feature that creates a QOS type setup with the array so that specific workloads will have priority access to the array if necessary. This comes in handy with their 3PAR units especially since they are multi-tenant.
3PAR StoreServe data at rest encryption is another new feature that was announced and will likely help HP with the financial and medical customers who have compliance regulations about making sure the data is encrypted at all times.
Full Disclosure: HP sponsored a trip for me to come to Discover this year to cover the event but did not pay for any blog articles or have any say in the editorial process. The thoughts on this site are my own.