Hewlett Packard Enterprise Disrupts the Economics of Flash Adoption

Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a new initiative to address demand for flexible storage consumption models, accelerate all-flash data center adoption, assure the right level of resiliency, and help customers transform to a hybrid IT infrastructure.

Over the past several years, the industry has seen flash storage rapidly evolve from niche application performance accelerator to the default media for critical workloads. During this time, HPE’s 3PAR StoreServ Storage platform has emerged as a leader in all-flash array market share growth, performance, and economics. The new HPE 3PAR Flash Now initiative gives customers a way to acquire this leading all-flash technology on-premises starting at $0.03 per usable Gigabyte per month, a fraction of the cost of public cloud solutions.

“Capitalizing on digital disruption requires that customers be able to flexibly consume new technologies,” said Vikram K, Director, Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India. “Helping customers benefit from both technology and consumption flexibility is at the heart of HPE’s innovation agenda.”

Enabling the all-flash data center at less than half the cost of public cloud

Many customers are in the process of weighing the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure against the perceived cost savings and flexibility gains of public cloud platforms. To eliminate the need to compromise, HPE announced today a comprehensive initiative that brings together the best of on-premises performance, application availability, and control with the convenience and agility of public cloud consumption models.

Starting at just $0.03/GB usable per month for all-flash HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and bringing together multiple complementary technology and support elements, HPE 3PAR Flash Now allows customers to benefit from all-flash storage performance, embedded data protection and application availability, as well as security and control for the data they need to keep on-premises.

More than just a financing program, HPE 3PAR Flash Now accelerates all-flash data center adoption, simplifies migration from legacy storage, reduces risk and provides a seamless growth path for customers to manage future technology transitions. In addition to delivering the performance of HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, the initiative brings together technology innovations, programs and services such as HPE Flexible Capacity and Pre-Provisioning. Together, these complementary elements give customers the flexibility to:

• Optimize cash flow by deferring payments until their new all-flash array is up and running or injecting cash via asset trade-in
• Accelerate service delivery by taking advantage of automated data migration tools at no cost or opt for tailored migration services
• Improve service levels through HPE’s 99.9999% availability guarantee, and by including flash-optimized networking and data protection
• Minimize refresh risk with built-in non-disruptive upgrade to next-gen technologies such as storage class memory and NVMe
• Maintain control over data locality, avoid long-term lock-in and eliminate the costs and complications of reclaiming data from the cloud

High-performance networking and automation to protect service levels

Protecting application service levels and maximizing return from investments in the all-flash data center requires the right networking bandwidth and ability to rapidly connect apps to infrastructure. To support this, HPE also announced a complete update to the latest StoreFabric 32Gb (Gen 6) Fibre Channel portfolio. A key part of the 3PAR Flash Now initiative, this portfolio features HPE Smart SAN technology for fully automated orchestration directly from HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash storage arrays. This capability reduces provisioning time by 90 percent — thus saving hours of manual effort while reducing risk due to human error or network changes.

New partnerships reduce business risk with enhanced data protection

For the last year, HPE has been federating its HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and StoreOnce data protection platforms in order to enable zero-impact application protection as customers move to the all-flash data center. HPE also announced a joint initiative across the HPE Technology Services Consulting division and a leading SAP integrator using HPE Recovery Manager Central technology to protect in-memory SAP HANA applications at scale without impacting application performance.

In addition, for flash-adjacent archiving and web-scale digital asset management, HPE announced that it has extended its high-end tape portfolio to drive down long-term storage costs to under $0.01 per GB via a new reseller relationship with Spectra Logic, the industry’s most scalable deep storage tape archive vendor.

Pricing and Availability

• HPE 3PAR Flash Now is available worldwide now.
• HPE StoreFabric 32Gb (Gen 6) Fibre Channel portfolio is available worldwide now.
• HPE currently offers a full line of tape libraries and tape media under the HPE StoreEver portfolio. The new Spectra Enterprise Libraries utilizing LTO, TS and T10000 tape technologies are available as of today starting at $112,000 list price for the zero drive library option.