HPE Discover: What’s new in Storage at a Glance

Notes of interest from the HPE Storage keynote and announcements:

Massive new drives – 7.68TB and 15.36TB drives for the 3PAR StoreServ arrays.  The new drives are enabled by the 3D SSD technology pioneered by Samsung.  The drives also benefit from Adaptive Sparing in the 3PAR OS that allows for additional spare capacity to be tapped for sparing by the array, rather than being reserved.

The massive new drives allow amazing density in the 3PAR arrays.  Each disk shelf can accommodate 368 TB of RAW capacity and HP is saying with the magic of thin provisioning and thin dedupe, the density is 563TB of usable capacity per rack unit.

StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central 3.0 – The new release will allow application consistent protection for Oracle and for 3PAR File Personal.  Recovery Manager Central leverages snapshots on the 3PAR array and then protects the snapshot data onto StoreOnce arrays.  Once the initial snapshot/backup is protected, future backups only need to move difference blocks in between snapshots.  All of this occurs directly between 3PAR and StoreOnce without third party software.  A simple virtual appliance is deployed to drive this integration and can be tapped into by third party (or HPE) backup solutions.

3PAR File Persona Enhancements – HPE has added features like File Lock and NTFS Security mode to address specific needs of customers with file services.  The File Provisioning Group limits have been increased to 64TB in size to accommodate much larger file space on a 3PAR array.

Native Container Integration – HPE has announced storage drivers for Docker to be able to natively talk to 3PAR and StoreVirtual over iSCSI.  This will allow Docker to tap directly into storage and present it to containers and persist the storage over time.