Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a new all-flash array and announced it was doubling the maximum capacity of its solid state drives at the HP Discover event in Las Vegas.

The 3Par StoreServ family now has a new flagship - model 20850, capable of delivering up to 3.2 million IOPS at sub-millisecond latency. It relies on the larger 3.84TB drives - some of the densest SSDs on the market.

HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 in a rack
HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 – HP

Big chunks

Squeezing more flash into a standard 3.5” drive frame always makes the storage array cheaper. In case of HP, more capacity helps lower the flash price to $1.50 per ‘usable’ GB - meaning after deduplication and compression. This brings the cost of flash to the realm of high performance hard drives, and clears the way towards all-flash infrastructure.

Just like many of its competitors, HP also makes its arrays more affordable by using consumer-grade MLC flash. A company spokesman told DatacenterDynamics that HP cooperates with its flash suppliers on firmware development, so as to prevent the memory cells from wearing out. The 3PAR software also takes into account the nature of cMLC flash to make the NAND chips go further.

The ASICs responsible for deduplication have also been updated. HP says its fifth generation Thin Express silicon has enabled higher levels of performance, scalability and efficiency. It also offers persistent checksum, helping protect data against flash media and transmission errors as it moves.

Both the new drives and the ASICs have been used in the making of StoreServ 20850 and 20800. The first is a high-density juggernaut, cramming 280 terabytes of ‘usable’ capacity into a single 2U chassis to deliver 3.2 million IOPS and over 75 GBps of sustained throughput. That’s up to 5.5 PB of storage in a single floor tile.

The second is a converged hybrid array which scales up to 15 PB of ‘usable’ capacity, be it on flash or disk.

Both support block and file workloads as well as object access for cloud-developed application consolidation. They also support asynchronous streaming replication with 3PAR Remote Copy, and can be combined into elastic 60PB resource pools with 3PAR Peer Motion.

StoreServ 20000 series storage systems are available worldwide, orderable immediately and shipping in August 2015 for a US street price starting at $75,000.