HP boasts of 3PAR benchmark boost

Awful article - 11 million IOPS ?

No disrespect to Violin, but Chris's article is pretty poor, enterprise is not just about performance or even capacity, take a look at many of the flash only arrays and it's pretty easy to pull their architectures apart. Does just buying the one really give you the availability and serviceability features of a more traditional enterprise class array like the V-Class, what about value add features, Sync / Async replication, snapshots / restore etc, etc.

Kove is DRAM, so not apples for apples, that's like vendors short stroking the array benchmark from cache, it's fast but has almost zero use case for the vast majority or workloads, that's partly why SPC exists, to avoid the smoke and mirrors used in Vendor benchmarking. 3PAR V-Class are squarely aimed at the vast majority of Enterprise workloads, not the corner cases handled by flash only such as Kove, Violin etc.

Chris, the 3PAR SPC numbers are very impressive when you compare to the real competitions SPC results. They could have added SSD to this test but then it would have skewed the results to the point they're no longer directly comparable against other vendor arrays. So why not beat the real competition hands down, with a real world solution (not a lab queen) running good old spinning rust which can be directly compared to previous submissions.

Persistent so what ?

It's DRAM and running a completey different and unrelated benchmark, what bit of this are you not getting ? Your argument is like comparing a 747 with the Space Shuttle. So what if it's persistent, anyone can make DRAM persistent it's done all the time with cache, but it doesn't make the numbers any more valid. BTW I hope it's got a better system than battery backed DRAM, otherwise I'd want two as a minimum or some form of destage to disk. I haven't seen one these new age arrays yet that once off the slide deck can touch a real enterprise array for capacity, availability or features.

R&D pays off

All of HP different storage systems, like EVA, the Hitachi, MSA and so on are now renamed. All begin with a P followed by a number.

Unified storage: Mission accomplished!

Hi Chris, thank you for the recognition of the killer HP 3PAR benchmark! I think it has been stated already in some of the comment postings, but wanted to emphasize the point that $/usable terabyte has traditionally been a major customer buying factor. The Texas Memory Systems $/ASU (cost per usable terabyte) is 400% higher than the 3PAR array, and the economic efficiency for those aggregating lots of workloads in private and public clouds is a key factor.

Best regards,

Craig Nunes, VP of HP Storage Marketing

@@@

“HP is blowing its 3PAR horn loudly, saying it has doubled 3PAR's customer base since buying it last September”

So let me get this right, maybe I have a warped view of things but......

IDC shows that just before HP bought 3PAR, 3PAR had 0.58% of the storage market share. This is of course market share and not customer base, but gives an indication of the size we are talking about here.

Anyway, I would have expected the increase in customer base to be significantly greater given the size of HP, the IT refresh cycle and the fact HP customers have an alternative to the EVA. Let’s say a company that made washing machines sold 20 washing machines in 2010. They were then acquired by Walmart and in 2011 they had sold 40 washing machines! Hmmm wait a sec!

Sure, It would be very hard to double your customer base in a year if you had a 15% market share in a competitive environment, but when you’re sitting at just over half a percent, you can churn out some great benchmarks like this one and you get acquired by one of the biggest IT companies out there I would have expected the customer base to increase by more than 100% in a year.

I’m starting to think 3PAR could have doubled their customer base without the HP acquisition and HP is actually blowing a horn they should be a bit ashamed about.

@Man Mountain. Impressive? Really?

Growing 100% organically in 9 months in a single-digit growth market is indeed impressive.

However, converting existing HP EVA customers running out of service into HP 3Par customers while loosing overall marketshare isn't.

@AC Did you mean loosing or was that losing ?

@AC Show us the market share numbers then, HP's aren't in yet, so you appear to be jumping the gun.....or then again you could just be trolling for HP's competition.

Looser :-)