The storage marketplace is hot with revolutionary technologies that promise to totally disrupt the marketplace. Flash storage startups like Violin and Fusion-io are challenging the established big system vendors, while simultaneously software-led storage is sweeping storage into the virtualized infrastructure future.

Since the start of the new century, HP has been making dramatic moves to regain its once strong presence in storage, mainly through integrating a series of strategic purchases of leading storage startups, and in particular 3PAR, which has provided HP with a mesh software storage controller that is a true advance over the controllers of the disk era. Now, with its announcements at HP Discover 2013 today in Las Vegas, HP is challenging both the other big vendors and the startups with two bold leaps into the brave new world of software-led, order-of-magnitude faster flash-based storage arrays.

The first of these is StoreOnce VSA, which is a pure software-designed storage solution that, says HP VP of Storage Craig Nunes, customers can run on any server they have available and use with their existing storage arrays or, of course, new HP servers and arrays. The point, however, is that customers can use this to move to software-led storage that will move in lock-step with server and network virtualization and take advantage of the hardware savings that SDS provides, without having to make a major hardware investment. Users have their choice of hypervisors or can run StoreOnce VSA on bare metal, and Nunes said HP will package some software in that configuration.

The second major announcement is the 3PAR StoreServ All-Flash Array. This array is designed as a free-standing, direct read and write Tier 1 storage system that can provide .6 millisecond response speeds for users’ hottest data. Nunes says it has tested at 550,000 IOPS with an average of .6 milliseconds response. It works with their existing servers on the front end and disk arrays on the back end and can work in either virtualized or unvirtualized environments, including the new StoreOnce VSA. And it uses the same 3PAR storage controller as the rest of HP storage, allowing it to integrate natively into an HP environment.

HP is also announcing a new tape storage appliance intended for data backup and archiving and for inexpensive permanent storage of the huge amounts of Big Data that will be generated for instance by the Internet of Things.

The 3PAR Controller

All of this is unified by the 3PAR storage controller, a unique architecture designed by the founders of 3PAR that was the prize HP won when it purchased the startup. This controller, Nunes says, was designed out of frustration with the controllers that dominated storage in the spinning rust era. To maximize IO speed, they designed the controller to stripe data across large numbers of disks.

“When you replace 1,000 backend drives with 50 ultra-hot solid state drives guess what?  The performance workload is very similar.  The controllers are going, Hey, this feels pretty natural to me,” Nunes says. The only change HP had to make was to reoptimize the controller software for the high speed reads of SSD rather than the high latency of disk. This highly flexible design is what allows the new flash array to achieve a half-million IOPS with .6 millisecond response while on the back end also supporting data transfer through tier 2 and 3 disk arrays to tier 4 tape, including the new tape appliance in a unified storage architecture that allows users to access data wherever it is stored seamlessly, while storing that data on the most cost- and performance-efficient tier based on the amount and kind of read/write access, for instance decision support versus transactional, that it receives.

The Fusion-ios and Violins of the market cannot do that because their controllers are designed to work in all flash environments with no compatibility with lower tier storage systems. And unlike their controllers, the HP 3PAR software has proven dependability and extensibility based on years of problem-free use in numerous large scale implementations.

Software-led Storage

Adding storage virtualization extends that capability across multi-vendor storage environments, allowing users to bridge the gaps in their fragmented storage array infrastructures, maximizing use of their existing storage, and allowing them to purchase new storage based on price rather than features and compatibility. “The big deal about storage virtualization is cutting costs, right?” Nunes says. “It’s all about lowering storage cost, reducing  space, power, cooling.  We’ve seen with the StoreVirtual VSA more than 60% lower storage costs, 70% to 80% space and power saving.”

The new StoreOnce VSA, of course, is not HP’s first entry into software led storage. StoreVirtual VSA has been on the market for several years, making HP a leader in storage virtualization. “We’ve got upwards of 170,000 distributions out there of the StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance, and it has been largely successful in what I would call enterprise remote office deployments, edge deployments, SMB scenarios. Think of this as the ultimate convergence for an SMB, server,storage & networking all really in one enclosure, in one server.”

What StoreOnce VSA adds is an emphasis on data backup and recovery. It allows users to make backups onto their existing disk or tape arrays rather than requiring purchase of expensive hardware backup systems. “This becomes a very attractive approach for large cloud providers who are wanting to deliver backup services with their clients but don’t want to invest in a big hardware infrastructure to do that. What StoreOnce VSA would do for a cloud services provider is you spin up a StoreOnce VSA for each of your backup customers,” Nunes says. “You spin them up for a new customer, you tear them down when you lose a customer, and it’s very much aligned with what a service provider would be looking for in that kind of approach.  By the way, to enable their client what do you do?  You give them another StoreOnce VSA and they’re up and running.  It’s a great model for them and that’s for sure a focus for us going forward. “

For cloud providers that means they can use their white-box hyperscale arrays that cost a fraction of traditional arrays come for. And it means large HP customers can begin using its new Moonshot hyperscale hardware for data backup and archiving that is integrated with their existing HP storage, virtualized or not. And it gives SMBs both on site backup for fast data recovery with off-site archiving to protect vital business data against disasters raging from fire in their headquarters to a major flood or other regional disaster using an IaaS service.

HP is undoubtedly eating its own children with StoreOnce VSA. In the short term it will sell fewer hardware arrays, including the new tape system, as users instead take advantage of cloud services as room in underutilized existing storage systems for data backup. And it will facilitate the move from traditional backup systems to cheap hyperscale storage, including HP’s Moonshot,  among its enterprise customers. But clearly Nunes and the HP storage team have seen the future and have the courage to embrace it rather than clinging to the past. In the long run that should pay off in terms of keeping customers in a highly competitive market. And given the number of SMBs that go out of business every year after a fire in their HQ destroys their business data, it could literally save clients. HP’s channel partners and their customers should pay close attention to this new software-led data backup & recover solution.