Flash storage prices are passing another milestone on the aggressive downward course Wikibon charted out earlier this year with the introduction of a new array from Hewlett-Packard Co. hailed as the most economic of its kind yet. For a starting price of a mere $19,000, the quad-node 3PAR StorServ 8000 provides three terabytes of usage solid-state memory in a compact 2U chassis.

That’s a fraction of the street price for the much larger entry-level flash systems from its two top rivals, Pure Storage Inc. and EMC Corp., which start at $47,000 and $150,000, respectively. HP hopes that presenting a lower entry barrier will make it easier for organizations to sample its value proposition, at which point it becomes a much simpler matter to upsell more capacity.

The StorServ 8000 is specifically geared towards that purpose with the ability to scale out to as many as four controllers for a massive 5.5 petabytes per rack. More demanding customers can increase that even further by swapping some of the units in the closet with their existing StorServ 2000 machines, interoperability made possible by the fact both models are running the latest version of HP’s 3PAR storage stack.

New in the release is a prioritization service that enables administrators to guarantee latencies as low as half a millisecond for mission-critical applications such as databases, which is essential in large environments where other, less important workloads share the underlying flash. And if something happens to break, those databases can now be restored to within a second from the time of the failure.

That’s a big deal seeing that what organizations are deploying on flash arrays nowadays are not NoSQL stores containing unstructured data but relational systems like Oracle handling upwards of thousands of transactions per hour. The narrower the time window in which activity is lost, the better.

The fact HP is making that functionality available for its new entry-level arrays makes the pitch all the more appealing, allowing prospective customers to run their proof-of-concept trials with the sensitive workloads they plan on moving to flash. That’s the same reason the company also included the updated version of the 3PAR stack in the new entry-level StorServe 2000 model introduced in conjunction, which is priced at $99,000.

Both systems are available for order immediately, while the prioritization service can be purchased as part of HP’s 3PAR Data Optimization Suite starting at $1,290. There’s also a new version of the Smart SAN software for customers deploying their flash arrays over Fibre Channel.

Photo via HP