HPE Announces Flash Price Buster Initiative; Demos “The Machine”
Coming in at less than half the price that it says public clouds charge for flash storage, HPE today announced a new initiative that delivers all-flash HPE 3PAR StoreServ starting at $0.03 per usable GB per month.
HPE also gave the first public demonstration of its much-anticipated “The Machine,” a “memory-driven computing” proof-of-concept prototype under development for several years that the company says will have major impact on advanced-scale and HPC systems architectures. The demonstration was held at Discover London, the company’s annual technology showcase.
HPE said the flash offering, called HPE 3PAR Flash Now, will accelerate all-flash data center adoption, address demand for flexible storage consumption models and help customers move to hybrid IT infrastructures. It combines multiple technologies and support services aimed at providing a migration path from legacy storage. Taken together, HPE said the initiative optimizes cash flow by deferring payments until customers’ all-flash arrays are operational or injecting cash via asset trade-in.
"Capitalizing on digital disruption requires that customers be able to flexibly consume new technologies," said Bill Philbin, vice president and general manager, storage, HPE. "Helping customers benefit from both technology and consumption flexibility is at the heart of HPE’s innovation agenda."
HPE 3PAR Flash Now is designed to overcome compromises between the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure against the cost savings and flexibility of public cloud platforms, according to HPE. The initiative “brings together the best of on-premises performance, application availability, and control with the convenience and agility of public cloud consumption models.”
To support high-volume application service requirements of all-flash data centers, HPE said it has upgraded networking bandwidth and capabilities for connecting apps to infrastructure. This includes an update to the StoreFabric 32Gb (Gen 6) Fibre Channel portfolio, which features HPE Smart SAN technology for automated orchestration directly from HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash storage arrays. HPE said this capability reduces provisioning time by 90 percent and cuts risk due to human error or network changes.
For the last year, HPE said, it has been federating its HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and StoreOnce data protection platforms as customers move to all-flash. Building on that foundation, the company expanded its HPE Complete program with a new resale and go-to-market relationship with Veeam, a provider of backup, disaster recovery and virtualization management software for VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments. HPE also announced a joint initiative using HPE Recovery Manager Central technology to protect in-memory SAP HANA applications at scale without impacting application performance, according to HPE.
In addition, for flash-adjacent archiving and web-scale digital asset management, HPE announced that it has extended its high-end tape portfolio to lower long-term storage costs to under $0.01 per GB via a new reseller relationship with Spectra Logic, a deep storage tape archive vendor.
