Introducing the Newest All-Flash Storage System
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Advanced storage solutions
If you're not familiar with our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), think of it as a global innovation ecosystem. The ATC is a physical campus of buildings and labs, consisting of three data centers, that has been virtualized and made accessible to our customers, partners and employees around the world via our proprietary cloud portal.
The services we offer through the ATC include product demonstrations, proofs of concept (POCs), lab as a service (LaaS), workshops, training and more. We're excited to begin the conversation around one of our newest additions to the ATC, the HPE 3PAR 9450 storage system.
The ATC Flash Lab
Housed within our unique ATC ecosystem, WWT's Flash Lab is a multi-vendor environment that allows us to independently benchmark, demo features and functionality, test system integration and showcase several different all-flash storage offerings.
Our current Flash Lab has 10 different types of OEM all-flash arrays, using both blade and rack mount systems to drive workloads. We have a variety of methodologies and testing resources, but our primary testing tool for performance is Vdbench, with a Grafana front-end for showing latency, IOPS and other storage performance metrics.
HPE 3PAR 9450 is the newest HPE mid-range all flash storage system. Architecturally, it's very similar to the high-end HPE enterprise 3PAR 20K systems, but with the cost of a mid-range system. In terms of capacity, the 3PAR 20K system can scale to eight nodes versus the four nodes for 9450; even per node, the 20K has more cache.
The 3PAR systems have an industry unique full-mesh backplane architecture that connects the nodes in a low-latency, high speed and highly reliable interconnect that results in market leading performance and reliability. In the storage industry, most architectures are either high-end monolithic (i.e., HDS or EMC VMAX) or mid-range dual controller systems that are either active/active or active/passive.
The full mesh architecture has the benefits of the monolithic systems in terms of scalability, but also the less expensive point of entry of a dual controller system. This enables the customers to easily start with a dual node 3PAR system and scale up to eight nodes, depending on their requirements. Additional information about 3PAR architecture can be found here.
Benchmarking the 9450
Product benchmarking is a common use case in the ATC. Our customers count on us to validate that technologies perform as advertised. In the case of the 9450, preliminary benchmark results are impressive, especially compared to the older four-node 7450 system. The 9450 performed at more than twice the speed as the 7450.
9450 benchmarking results
Demonstrating 9450 integrations
To showcase the capabilities of the 9450 system in our lab environment, we offer the following demonstrations in the ATC:
Synergy and 9450 Integration: Synergy is HPE's next-generation composable infrastructure, which enables quick, easy and secure provisioning of compute, storage and network technologies. The 3PAR system can seamlessly integrate with the Synergy platform and become a pool of storage that can easily provision from the Synergy platform. With Synergy, the 3PAR system can connect in what HPE calls flat SAN configuration, which does not require SAN switch infrastructure and reduces the cost of storage for customers.
RMC Integration: RMC (Recovery Manager Central) is a data protection tool that comes with every 3PAR all-flash system. It allows management of the array snapshots on the 3PAR systems and backs up those snapshots to the HPE StoreOnce system. It also supports some application consistency protection.
VEEAM Integration: VEEAM is an industry-leading data protection platform for a virtualized environment. With the latest version, it supports the 3PAR snapshot management and Catalyst protocol to backup to StoreOnce appliances in a very bandwidth-efficient manner.
VMware Integration: The 3PAR system has one of the most updated integrations with VMware, including the plugin for vCenter. It also features integration with the latest VVOL 2.0 specifications.
HPE InfoSight Demo for Nimble and 3PAR Systems: The HPE InfoSight is a proactive preventive tool for HPE Nimble storage systems. HPE recently added support for the 3PAR systems, and we are excited to be able to demonstrate this latest feature.
For more information about the HPE 3PAR 9450 or any of WWT's storage capabilities, please contact your WWT account manager or request a workshop.