HPE has announced the first major series of enhancements to the SMB-focused StoreVirtual 3200, which bring it up to the same capabilities of StoreVirtual systems higher in the market, and will make it much more attractive to partners.
The HPE StoreVirtual 3200
Last summer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) introduced the HPE StoreVirtual 3200, which brought the StoreVirtual technology down to SMB price points through the use of a dual-controller scale-up system based on 64-bit ARM technology. Now it has announced a series of major enhancements to the 3200, which the company believes are even more significant than the initial launch.
“I think this is actually a bigger deal than the original announcement,” said Brad Parks, Director, GTM Strategy and Enablement, HPE Storage. “This is really the second act of a two act play. When we originally introduced the StoreVirtual 3200 last August, we brought the technology down quite a bit into the $6,000 price point. At that time, it was a rock solid dual controller scale-up storage array. It didn’t have that scale-out capability that StoreVirtual is known for.
That has now been addressed.
“Now we are announcing the rest of the story,” Parks said. “With these enhancements, the StoreVirtual 3200 is now a storage platform that provides customers and partners with the ability to start small and then either add incremental drives, as before. Or they can now add a second StoreVirtual and scale it out, grouping multiple controller pairs into a single cluster. Or they can scale across, federating multiple clusters of 3200s and moving data non-disruptively across then. If you decide to add a second cluster of nodes three years from now, you can stand up that second cluster and easily move data from cluster A to cluster B.” HPE Peer Motion software is what easily moves the workloads between StoreVirtual arrays.
The enhancements also add a new StoreVirtual 3000 File Controller, which expands the capabilities of the StoreVirtual 3200 system by allowing it to serve unstructured as well as structured data needs.
“The addition of the file capability assists partners by deepening the storage consolidation conversation,” Parks said. “With the addition of the file controller, the system can now also serve unstructured data needs. Partners can have that conversation about scale-out and scale-up, but can now also talk about unstructured data problems, and very seamlessly add that to the deal.”
Another enhancement is adding StoreVirtual 3200 support for 10GBase-T interconnects.
“Bottlenecks are a moving target, and as we do more scale-out, the network becomes a potential bottleneck,” Parks said. “10G has been around for a long time, but some SMBs still use 1G, even though there’s now only a 40 per cent price difference. Adding 10G support will let people get the most of their investment.”
Parks said this all adds up to a very big deal for HPE channel partners.
“The response to the StoreVirtual 3200 has been good since we introduced it,” he said. “But from a channel engagement perspective, this is really what the channel has been waiting for, because of the addition of the scale-out capability. When we introduced the original product, and did our early engagement with the channel, we let them know this was coming. When we got the original product out the door, it let the channel get familiar with it. But scale-out was what they really wanted to be able to push it hard.”
Down the road, and likely not too far down it, Parks said that all-flash will also be coming to this solution set.
“The adoption rates of all-flash in the enterprise have been phenomenal,” he said. “In the enterprise, it went from niche to normal very quickly. Usually, analysts overestimate the adoption rate of new technology, but with flash it has been the opposite. It has been adopted faster than expected. As prices continue to go down, we will hit the point where the entry point for all flash may be the same as spinning disk drive, although it’s not there yet. We will see all-flash here on the StoreVirtual 3200 in the not too distant future.”
HPE StoreVirtual 3200 storage systems are available now, with street pricing starting at $USD 6,055 for the 1GbE iSCSI configuration and $USD 6,475 for the 10G Base-T configuration.
HPE StoreVirtual 3000 File Controllers are also available now, with street pricing starting at $USD 2,975.
The latest software update for the StoreVirtual 3200 is available as a no-cost upgrade to existing customers, and will become available in the current calendar quarter.
