This week HP announced the next generation of 3PAR storage arrays at HP Discover in Las Vegas.
In the current line-up we have the 7000 series midrange and 10000 high-end series. The 7000 series got an update/upgrade last year with the release of the 7×00 systems, which was a hardware upgrade of the controllers (more memory and bigger SSD) for the enablement of the File Persona file services.
This time it is the top model 10×00 series that got an upgrade. Call it a major upgrade. Almost everything is new or changed and faster.
What’s new
This is the new 3PAR portfolio:
The most obvious part is the update of the ASIC. The current version of the ASIC was 4, it got changed to the new generation 5. Obvious! But numbers say more than a version right?
Faster communication across the cluster
- 0 GB/s ASIC-to-ASIC bandwidth in each direction
- 224 GB/s total backplane bandwidth
Higher memory bandwidth
- 2 memory channels per ASIC (2 ASICs per node)
- 42GB/s peak data cache bandwidth per node -> 5x Gen 4 ASIC
Modular, balanced scalability
- Optimized scaling of Node-to-node links, PCI-e links and memory channels with number of Gen5 ASICs (on a node)
- PCIe Gen 2 Link at 5Gbps
More parallel XOR Raid calculations
- 14 DMA engines total per Node (7 per ASIC) – 16% more than Gen 4 ASIC
Product specifications
Let’s take a look at the feeds and speeds:
Comparing to the current 7×00 series 3PAR’s based on Gen4 ASIC’s they have between 40 and 192GB of on-node cache, the new series start at 450 up to 3600GB… OK this is where the performance comes from…
Differences between 10×00 and 208×0
Further the 20000 series has now 10Gb RCIP ports (1Gb in 10000) and native 16Gb FC cards…
Scalability
The new 208×0 platform seems also very scalable. You can start with 2 controllers and 1 drive enclosure with 24 SFF drives which delivers 280 TB of capacity by using the new 3,84TB cMLC SSD drives.
After that you grow to a rack (5,5PB) and even further to the current maximums of 1920 SFF drives giving you 15PB of AFA storage in only 3 racks. If we take a look at the competitors, they need an entire datacenter, not even mentioning the power and cooling needs.
Software Suites
On software and license side we see the usual stuff we saw before already
In an upcoming post I will talk more about all the separate components in the solution like controllers and disk shelfs, and software updates like the new Async Streaming replication…
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