Hello P4900
HP Storage also has new products out this week. One that I want to highlight today is the new HP P4900 SSD Storage System – an all-solid state addition to the HP LeftHand P4000 SAN portfolio.
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
When it comes to SSDs in general, they are great for increasing IOPS and benefiting a business with lower power/cooling requirements. But the bad comes with unknown wear lifespan of the drive. And then it turns downright ugly when traditional dual-controller systems bottleneck the performance that was supposed to be the good part.
A New Day
HP has taken all these sub-optimal characteristics of SAN storage into consideration and has developed a unique SSD platform. The P4900 SSD Storage System is built upon SAN/iQ 9.5 software that released last fall with the addition of new drive monitoring capabilities specific to SSDs. HP has developed its own firmware that monitors the 
You can now see how much life is left on any SSD drive in the P4900 system and it will alert you at several points as it gets closer to death. No more worrying about losing data due to unpredictable drive wear-out and data-loss, like with other vendors in the marketplace today. Additionally, HP uses enterprise flash drives with extremely long life from day one.
Now to battle the ugly – the LeftHand SAN, by nature, is a scale-out architecture and that allows for the cluster of storage to scale both capacity and performance linearly. That means, with each storage node that is added to the cluster the performance (IOPS) increases along with the growth in the storage pool. Other vendors must build towers of storage behind one or two controllers – LeftHand
scales on and on! No bottlenecks – if you spend the money for an SSD solution you should be able to fully benefit from their power.
Viva Las VSA
Now this isn’t the first support for SSDs from LeftHand – you may or may not know that the LeftHand VSA software has supported SSDs in systems for a few years now. VSA is a great solution for small deployments of SSD drives such as within a virtualized server or for addressing VDI boot storms. With the addition of the P4900 to the lineup, the HP LeftHand portfolio has increased its flexibility. As
always, your environment can consist of a variety of P4000 models all managed by a single console. Now you can set up 4 types of P4000 SAN in your environment – VSA (virtual SAN), MDL SAS (capacity), SAS (performance), SSD (high performance) – All models support the Peer Motion capability so that data can easily move across these SANs while remaining online the entire time.
The P4900 is offered in 2 configurations:
2-node bundle: P4900 6.4TB SSD Storage System (16x400GB)
1-node expansion: P4900 3.2TB SSD Storage System (8x400GB)
Learn more about the P4900
>> Check out the latest P4000 family QuickSpec that includes the P4900
>> P4000 family page on hp.com
>> P4900 product page on hp.com