Flash storage has passed another milestone on Wikibon’s downward cost reduction curve thanks to the introduction of new arrays from HP packing what are described as the biggest solid-state memory drives on the market with 3.84 terabytes of usable enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) capacity each. The increased density is claimed to have helped bring the price tag under $1.50 per gigabyte.

That’s a major improvement over the previous-generation 3PAR all-flash arrays from last year, which hovered around the $2 mark per gigabyte, but that is not to say cost efficiency is the only improvement that HP is promising with the improved StorServe 20000 series. The two new appliances in the lineup also pack the latest iteration of its homegrown storage processor to provide a significant speed boost.

The 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC enables the scale-out StoreServ 20850, the first model in the series, to support a maximum of 3.2 million random reads per second while taking up as little as 15 percent of the space needed to accommodate traditional disk-based hardware. The system can host to 5.5 petabytes of usable capacity on a single standard floor tile in a data center.

That breaks down to 280 terabytes per U2 chassis, up to eight of which can be clustered in a single logical pool to power large workloads. HP envisions customers using the StoreServe 20850 mainly to consolidate existing applications that required much more than that – potentially even entire racks – to support in the original disk-based environment.

Moreover, the system promises to not only shrink the hardware footprint but also simplify the process of spreading out data across the reduced number of nodes using an improved replication capability that introduces support for asynchronous transfer. That allows administrators to copy files one system at a time rather than all of the nodes simultaneously  synchronous setups, which cuts both latency and bandwidth consumption.

The combination of the two makes asynchronous replication the preferred option for environments spread out over multiple data centers in different geographic regions, but the approach also presents its unique own challenges. Standing out in particular is the fact that committing files to only one array introduces the risk of data loss in the event that system fails, an issue HP hopes to mitigate with the inclusion of a new checksum function for ensuring everything arrives where it’s supposed to properly.

Top to it off, administrators can now handle all that data movement without having to bring the affected applications offline, which is a fairly big deal in large environments where migrating a workload can take upwards of hours. The StoreServe 20850 shares the new functionality with the converged StoreServe 20800, the second model in the new series, which can in turn scale up to 60 petabytes.