This week at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, HPE announced a new storage platform, HPE Primera, built on the technologies of both its Nimble and 3PAR storage lines. The new platform is targeted for mission critical workloads and offers a 100% uptime guarantee for customers.
The new array draws a lot of from the 3PAR line of storage arrays, with scale and speed in the new all-flash Primera. There is shared heritage and data services between the two platforms and HPE is committed to 3PAR in the mid-market for the future – meaning these two lines will co-exist for some amount of time. The portability of data using Peer Copy as well as the ability to protect data with Peer Persistence (aka Metro Storage Clustering for VMware folks) mean that these arrays can protect your data to provide the 100% uptime guaranteed by the company.
In terms of the Nimble heritage for the array, two key features made their way into Primera – Infosight and Simplicity. Gone are the legacy 3PAR constructs of CPG creation and other base setup — the Nimble simplicity is front and center in Primera. While the introduction of 3PAR SSMC (StoreServ Management Console) went a long way to simplifying the complexity under the covers of 3PAR, Primera is said to go even further in simplification towards the startup and administration model of Nimble.
Infosight plays a primary role in the Primera arrays. While HPE has worked to bring 3PAR and Infosight together, the company has native support in the Primera platform – taking advantage of building a brand-new array and platform. In fact, Infosight is large component of how HPE is delivering the 100% uptime guarantee.
In terms of guarantees, the 100% uptime is a bit disappointing. While it sounds great in terms of guaranteed uptime, the penalty of a miss is not substantial for the company. The 100% uptime offers customers up to 20% of the cost of the array back for use with upgrades and future purchases. So essentially, the company if offering store credit for your money spent. I get that it is value, but its not a pure guarantee like most other SLA guarantees.
HPE says the Primera storage arrays will be available for ordering in August, 2019, but no pricing was announced. For more information, see https://hpe.com/storage/Primera.
Disclaimer: HPE paid for my trip to attend HPE Discover. All thoughts and writing in this post are my own views and opinions and not reviewed or dictated by HPE.
