Inserv Corporation

Products of the Year Storage Systems: All-Flash Systems category Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) goes against common wisdom that an all-flash array has to be built from the ground up for flash to unlock the complete value. HPE uses its 3PAR StoreServ flagship storage platform for all-flash and hybrid storage, claiming the original 3PAR design required only tweaks to take full advantage of flash. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 is the vendor‘s highest capacity all-flash system, holding 1,024 solid-state drives (SSDs), and HPE claims it can deliver more than three million IOPS with sub-millisecond latency. The commercial MLC SSDs range from 480 GB to 3.84 TB. The 3PAR Gen5 ASIC for silicon-based hardware acceleration handles inline deduplication with little drag on performance. The ASIC also enables thin provisioning. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 includes eight controllers that form a Mesh-Active cluster for load balancing. Adaptive Sparing technology, a feature of the HP 3PAR operating system, extends flash-based media endurance by adjusting the system’s sparing approach to help minimize impact on SSDs. Persistent Checksum offers data protection from host to array to guard against silent corruption. Pricing for the 20850 begins at around $110,000 for two drive enclosures, 3.84 TB of capacity and the 3PAR OS. HPE said the system can cost as low as $1.50 per usable GB, factoring in data reduction. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 won the highest overall scores from judges for performance and functionality of any all-flash array finalist. "The breadth of products using one architecture approach is impressive," one judge commented. "The 20850 leverages both scale-up and scale-out architecture." HPE 3PAR has had a strong history winning Products of the Year, dating to before HPE acquired the company in 2010. The 3PAR Utility Storage System won a bronze in the disk system category in 2002, the first year of the awards. The 3Par InServ F400 Storage array also won a gold medal in 2009, and the HPE...