HPE Expands Flash Portfolio for Hybrid IT

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced a number of new flash storage products and a data protection solution for the data center, including the availability of products from Nimble Storage, which it acquired earlier this year. 

The new products include: a midrange HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 all-flash array; Nimble Storage primary and new secondary flash arrays; fifth-generation HPE MSA Storage; and StoreOnce CloudBank data protection.

“As flash permeates the data center it has become critical to move beyond the array — from predictive analytics to data protection to investment strategies,” said Bill Philbin, senior vice president, Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE. “These new solutions help more customers maximize the value of flash on-premises and enable flexible off-premises data mobility.”

Both HPE and Dell EMC partners continue to watch the two vendors battle it out in the storage space, flash, in particular. At Dell EMC World 2017, held earlier this month, the company announced new all-flash systems, in addition to other products.

“Across both companies we continue to see a strong focus on flash and also driving down the price of flash,” Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at ESG told us.

Partners are also watching the results of two sets of acquisitions — Dell’s acquisition of EMC, on a larger scale, and HPE’s more recent acquisition of Nimble Storage — and how the vendors will opt to integrate their respective storage portfolios, Sinclair noted.

HPE’s 3PAR StoreServe 9450 targets midrange customers looking for increased performance and the ability to consolidate more data in less space without compromising service levels. The new HPE 3PAR product increases performance by 80 percent, is scalable and supports multitenancy, according to the vendor.

The expansion of its flash portfolio also includes the addition of cloud-ready Nimble Storage flash arrays powered by predictive analytics for storage support and monitoring.

HPE is rolling out two new models of its HPE MSA Storage — the MSA 2050 and 2052 — the fifth generation of HPE’s SAN product. Product pricing starts at under $10,000 and delivers two times the performance of the previous generation of MSA storage, the company noted.

For customers exploring public-cloud tiers for secondary data, StoreOnce CloudBank is a long-term data retention solution for protection on multicloud destinations such as AWS, Azure or on-premises object storage. The solution also supports the full set of on-premises StoreOnce features including 3PAR integration so customers can automatically transition data off-premises while assuring rapid and flexible disaster recovery, HPE stated.

The new line up of products are will be available over the next few months beginning with Nimble Secondary Flash Array, available now, followed by the HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450, the HPE MSA 2050 and 2052, all available in June.

RMC 4.1 is included as part of the standard all-inclusive 3PAR StoreServ licensing package and will be available beginning September 2017. And, HPE StoreOnce CloudBank is available, based on qualification, as part of an Early Access Program.