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HP brings tech war chest to battle with flash array upgrades
theCUBE Live At HP Vertica14
Hewlett-Packard Co. is upping the ante in the battle for flash array dominance with new enhancements that the homegrown data services it has developed in recent years available to more customers. The move underscores the vendor’s emphasis on internal innovation, the result of financial challenges that have led CEO Meg Whitman to scale back on acquisitions even as storage rivals turned to the startup ecosystem for a solid-state memory edge.
The platform powering EMC Corp,’s flash arrays comes from a firm called XtremeIO Ltd it bought out in May 2012 for a reported $430 million, while IBM secured its place in the race for ultra-fast storage with the purchase of Texas Memory Systems Inc. shortly thereafter. HP, in contrast, opted to simply adapt its existing and field-proven 3PAR disk architecture to work with flash drives.
The new upgrade builds on that foundation with the addition of three more features to the company’s StoreServ 7000 and 10000 hybrid models. The first is Express Writes, an optimization that HP promises can deliver up to 30 percent extra IOPs and increase throughput while also cutting latency by 10 percent.
It’s joined by Adaptive Flash Cache, a technology first unveiled in September that makes it possible to supplement the on-board DRAM the arrays rely on for caching with SSDs. Both features are available at no charge along with the inline deduplication capability HP initially launched for its all-flash system in June, which an help users conserve storage capacity by eliminating redundant data.
The latter function comes integrated with 3PAR Flash Advisor, a brand new toolkit that has also been made available for free as part of the upgrade that HP says provides insights into application usage that can help admins optimize where and when they apply deduplication for maximum efficiency. Additionally, the suite makes it possible to identify the workloads that stand to benefit most from Adaptive Flash Cache and determine the precise amount of flash required to accommodate a particular dataset.
The new features and Flash Advisor are available with versions 3.2.1 and higher of the 3PAR Operating System. Customers with current support contracts running earlier releases can upgrade for no additional charge.
photo credit: fab34 via photopin cc
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