The enterprise storage market appears to be witnessing yet another round of vendor one-upmanship, this time on the performance front. Less than two weeks after EMC Corp. pulled back the curtains on an all-flash system described as the fastest of its kind on the market, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is introducing a platform that claims the same distinction over in the converged array category.

The 3PAR StoreServ 20840 combines features from several types of traditional storage systems to remove the need for applications with differing requirements to be run on separate hardware. Much of the appeal comes from the management software included in the array, which provides the ability to expose data either in the form of blocks or files depending on the application. HPE also offers a choice of network connectivity options and storage media to let customers align the platform even more closely with their operational demands.

A deployment can be configured to provide as many as 21 petabytes of usable capacity to support storage-intensive use cases, or fitted with speedy flash drives and perform millions of read/write operations per second. HPE hopes that the versatility of the StoreServ 20840 will be able to win over organizations that currently use older disk-based arrays from EMC’s flagship VMAX series. However, the system will likely encounter tough competition from the two new models that were added to the line a few weeks ago, which also employs solid-state memory.

Both vendors are targeting important applications like databases that require a combination of fast data access, large amounts of storage space and, perhaps  above all, reliability. To that end, the StoreServ 20840 comes with spare components and failover software that HPE claims can reduce downtime to less than a minute per year. The company says that customers are able to reduce the risk of data loss even further with the help of the new backup appliances that it’s rolling out in conjunction.

The StoreOnce series has been specifically designed to protect flash-based storage environments, according to HPE, particularly those running its own gear. The fastest model in the line is able to copy up to 184 terabytes of data per an hour from a StoreServ 20840 deployment thanks to a built-in connector and hold as much as 1.7 petabytes on a permanent basis.  That’s about twice as much as the maximum capacity of a comparable EMC DataDomain appliance, according to the company.

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