HPE flashes out 3PAR, Nimble and MSA kit

There should have been no garbage collection on a data load, unless you were overwriting existing dedupe data with very large changes across the full data set, or doing very large deletes of existing dedupe data at the same time as the data load.

This was what EMC's XtremIO flash POC toolkit was designed for, many hours of meaningless overwrites to already preconditioned drives to artificially generate huge amounts of garbage. Followed by about 10 minutes of relatively meaningless performance testing, "Honestly Gov there is no agenda, we're genuinely helping you out by providing this test kit free of charge." :-)

Anyway all in the past these days, so you'll need to find some other FUD.

Re: 9450 size can't be right

4 controllers is 4U. Same form factor as the 8000.

Re: Don't even bother with 3par anymore

Nimble is a great platform but aimed at a different market segment, it's never going to eat 3PAR's lunch, if anything they're complimentary, one based on hardware acceleration for the higher end and the other on software and commodity x86 hardware for the software defined fans or more cost conscious customers.

The people spouting this around the Nimble / 3PAR positioning are either extremely ignorant of the two platforms capabilities or simply trying to confuse customers with FUD. The point being today the 3PAR 8450 doesn't need to go faster, due to the 3PAR architecture it's already much faster than anything from Nimble and pretty much any other mid range competition whilst including an extensive set of enterprise proven data services.

The fact the 8000 series (midrange solution) can still outpace it's main competition with a single socket Xeon and provide such density is partly down to the use of the ASIC, partly the software stack and partly the clustered architecture. As you stated adding more sockets to the mix would require an increase in footprint which isn't welcome in the midrange segment, hence why HPE have announced the 9450, which is aimed at those willing to sacrifice some density for additional flexibility and performance.

When faster is needed on the 8000 series then more cores and more cache can and will be added, it already happens between controller models in the 8000 range but the ASIC means the typical brute force approach of relying solely on multiple sockets and Intel's latest and greatest simply isn't required.

Management is through the SSMC GUI console which can be deployed anywhere and system reporter is held on array with reporting built into the SSMC. Cloud based analytics are provided by Store Front Remote today although that's likely where InfoSight will play a larger role in the future for all platforms.

Re: Don't even bother with 3par anymore

"ASICs sound great, but seriously delay engineering turn around. For a marker on how delayed, the 8000 series is still running single socket IVYBRIDGE xeon."

That's a design decision based on balancing cost / performance and stable supply chain not a limitation of the ASIC. Since you seem to have swallowed the ASIC bad, Software good Kool-Aid could you provide a more concrete example of where the ASIC is limiting engineering turnaround ?

Jamaican Bezel

That Bezel seems to honor former 3PAR CEO David Scott's heritage; he is 1/2 Jamaican. Fact.