HPE Enhances Entire Storage Portfolio For Flash, Intro's New 3Par 9000 Family

HPE on Wednesday expanded its entire portfolio of all-flash storage arrays and added new data protection capabilities and cloud connections to its midrange and enterprise 3Par family.

The enhancements mean significant opportunities for HPE's channel partners through whom the majority of its storage sales flow, said Brad Parks, HPE's director of products and solutions for storage and big data.

"We're bringing out a complete end-to-end flash lineup for SMBs to the enterprise to MSPs to generate new business opportunities for our partners," Parks told CRN. "And we're adding new data protection that will help partners tackle the rearchitected of storage for customers' flash-centered data centers."

[Related: 9 Things Partners Need To Know About HPE's $1B Acquisition Of Nimble Storage]

The biggest change to HPE's storage line-up is the addition of a new 3Par 9000-series. Unlike last year's introduction of the 3Par 8000 series, which was focused on basic capacity consolidation, the new 9000 series is aimed at bridging midsized and higher-end storage requirements for customers hitting performance and scale limits, Parks said.

New to HPE is the 3Par StoreServ 9450 which provides all-flash performance to scalable and multi-tenant environments. Parks said the 3Par 9450 offers an 80-percent boost in performance over the previous 3Par midrange systems, with close to 2 million IOPs at less than 1 millisecond of latency. It scales to up to 6 petabytes of capacity.

"It competes with the Dell EMC VMAX 250F midrange array," he said. It delivers the same performance and scalability at half the cost per IOP."

HPE also updated the 3Par 20000 enterprise arrays with new hardware and cache. Parks said the new 20000 series competes well against the new Dell EMC VMAX 950F.

The introduction of the HPE 3Par 9000 series fills a huge gap between the 8000 and 20000 series, said Dhruv Gulati, executive vice president of business development and sales at Inpixon, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and HPE channel partner.

"There's a big gap between them from a cost point-of-view," Gulati told CRN. "It can be 50 percent or more. Customers get the controllers they need with the 8000, but want more direct-attach capability. And customers are really asking for more all-flash capacity."

For customers looking to the cloud for data protection, HPE introduced StoreOnce CloudBank as a way to add low-cost protection via AWS or Azure public clouds or on-premises object storage. Parks said StoreOnce CloudBank, when integrated with 3Par storage, brings the cost of cloud-based storage to about $0.001 per gigabyte per month.

Data protection on the HPE 3Par all-flash storage systems was further enhanced with a new Express Restore feature for the HPE Recovery Manager Central, or RMC, data protection application. With Express Restore, RMC can provide up to 15 times faster data recovery from on-premises or off-premises StoreOnce repositories, Parks said. RMC also can now be integrated with Veeam Explorer as well, he said.

HPE is also celebrating its acquisition last month of Nimble Storage by integrating the line into the HPE price list and offering HPE training and certification, Parks said.

"We're starting with the entry-level SKUs, and will bring in the rest of the line over time," he said. "We want to help channel partners take advantage of the comprehensive portfolio of Nimble Storage and 3Par systems."

HPE is also working to integrate Nimble Storage's Infosight analytics platform into the HPE storage line, although there is no date for this to be complete, Parks said. "We're not announcing anything at this time, but it's one of the next things on the roadmap," he said.

HPE also introduced two new models of its HPE MSA entry-level hybrid flash and disk storage platform.