HP 3PAR shifts into higher gear

HP Discover is there again (December time frame for EMEA) and there are the new announcements.

An important message came from the HP Storage Division with a major update on its 3PAR portfolio. Find here the most important changes:

Hardware updates:

The current line-up in the 7000 range gets updated with new controllers. 7200 becomes 7200c (converged controller), 7400 becomes 7400c and there is a new “big” 7440c added with a huge 960 disks support.

The heart of the controller being the ASIC remains Gen4, the biggest difference is the expansion of the controller memory. This is off course needed for the second section of this post being the new file services added. There is separate cache foreseen (replicated across the controllers) for block and file access.

All controllers are now flash-optimized and can be used as AFA (All-Flash-Array) just like the 7450. The main difference however is that 7450 is AFA only, while the others can be configured with spinning media disks as well. Hot data gets cold after some amount of time, and so the 3PAR array can offload that not-so-hot data to cheaper spinning media…

Important message remains that, independent of the model you buy, you get the same features and functionality. Only the size is different. HP calls this Polymorphic Simplicity.

 File Services:

One reason I am not attending HP Discover this time is that I had the possibility to attend a HP Storage event at HP in Houston with a lot of hands-on labs including all the new features. Including the newly announced File Services on the new 7xx0c models. Easy to set up, easy to manage. Really looking good.

If you wanted File Services so far you needed to add a pair of HP StoreServ File Controllers which is mainly a Proliant DL server with Windows Storage Server running on top of it.

Now there is (finally) an on-controller option.

Let it be clear from the start: the StoreServ File Controller is not gone. Let’s take a look at the similarities and differences.

The File Persona (on-controller) is only supported on the new 7xx0c models. Any other 3PAR array still need the File Controller. This is because of the current models (without the ‘c’) due to the reduced amount of cache in the controllers.

Further the File Persona supports at launch up to 3.000 concurrent users (1500 users per controller pair), the File Controller is tested up to 40.000 users. It supports also more TBs per controller (352TB versus 128TB with the File Persona.

Besides that you can expect the typical features like SMB, NFS, LDAP, NDMP and Rest API support.

At launch there are 2 antivirus scan engines supported that can be integrated with the File Persona: Symantec Protection Engine and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise. There is in-flight and at-rest protection available.

New management interface

For those who are familiar with the current IMC management console they will confirm that it got a little dated compared to other tools like for instance HP OneView.

Well the 3PAR developers looked very good to their colleagues from the server team since they released now a complete new management stack which looks completely like the ‘doughnut’ view of OneView.

The new tool is called SSMC (StoreServ Management Console) and must be installed on a separate server and is running as a web service.

This tool is also the primary tool to manage block and file storage.

Also System Reporter functionality will be moved into this new console.

No separate license is needed, only requirement is 3PAR OS 3.1.3 and above.

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