On Friday, HP announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 All Flash array Starter Kit. HP is it off this week at VMworld in San Francisco.  The new package is the dual-controller 3PAR StoreServ 7200 equipped with eight 480GB solid state drives, sports 75,000 IOPS of performance and has a street price of just $35,000.
The array has 3.5TB of raw storage and HP estimates that customers will see at least a 2:1 dedupe and thin provisioning savings on the array, yielding 7TB of usable storage.  The Starter Kit uses the same 3PAR OS that is used across all of the HP 3PAR storage products.  The drives are the same drives that HP introduced with the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all flash array back in June at HP Discover, offering a price of $2 per GB for all flash.  From a software standpoint, the Starter Kit offers the Reporting Suite, Virtual Copy, and three-year Proactive Care Support.  Customers may optionally license additional software features including the Online Import feature which allows easy transition from HP EVA or from EMC VNX or CX arrays.
In its all-flash form, the array can scale up to 230TB of raw storage and HP estimates users will see around 690TB of usable storage out of the array.  At full scale, it offers over 250,000 IOPS of performance.
It seems to be yet another step in mainstreaming solid state for primary storage, with HP lowering the barrier to entry even further with this all-flash offering. Â [As a side note, I did notice the configuration being show in San Francisco has 12 drives and not 8, but I didn’t ask about that.]
