HP MSA Storage enhancements make flash even faster and lower the cost of the market’s leading entry SAN array family(1)

PALO ALTO, CA, July 14, 2015—HP announced today a series of innovations for HP MSA Storage aimed at helping small and midsize businesses (SMBs) become more competitive, including firmware enhancements that can boost application performance plus new systems and connectivity flexibility to help reduce infrastructure costs at small sites.

It has never been easier for small businesses or venture-backed companies to turn ideas into new business models, creating new urgency around the value of time. To stay competitive, companies at all stages must have the ability to respond rapidly to market opportunities and threats. For startups and other SMBs lacking large capital reserves while facing fierce competition, the stakes are high.

HP is helping startups, established SMBs, and customers with small sites increase their competitiveness with low-cost ways to drive faster time to value and easy ways to reduce equipment costs with HP MSA Storage. New firmware enhancements for MSA 2040 Storage help customers make better and faster decisions by accelerating applications as much as 45 percent at no additional cost.² Several new MSA 2040 bundles lower the cost of deploying hybrid flash by up to 45 percent.³ New SAS connectivity for MSA 1040 Storage makes it the most affordable shared storage system in the market from a major vendor.⁴

“In the idea economy, time is everything. The smaller the business, the more this is magnified,” said Manish Goel, senior vice president and general manager, HP Storage. “HP is committed to bringing high-impact technologies like flash to smaller customers at incredibly affordable prices – and we are doing it on proven platforms like MSA to give them the power to accelerate their business growth with confidence in their IT infrastructure.”

Boost MSA 2040 hybrid array performance by up to 45 percent at no additional cost

The latest firmware upgrade for HP MSA 2040 Storage optimizes application access to flash-based, solid-state media in hybrid storage configurations. As a result, existing HP MSA 2040 hybrid flash customers can increase performance by up to 37,000 IOPS via a free, non-disruptive upgrade.²

Firmware enhancements include:

• Optimized data paths that maximize the effectiveness of controller CPU cache using built-in performance monitoring algorithms
• Peripheral Component Interconnect Express utilization improvements that minimize the number of transactions needed to complete each input/output (I/O) request
• Implementation of new, higher performance cache lookup techniques

These enhancements give HP MSA 2040 hybrid flash storage customers significantly improved application performance and dramatically reduced I/O latencies to increase business agility and user productivity.

“As a cloud service provider, our growing customer base is continually finding new ways to push our storage to the limits,” said Rick Mancinelli, Founder and CEO of C3 / Cloud Computing Concepts. “The additional IOPs and decreased latencies on our HP MSA 2040s allow us to provide our clients with a high-performance experience at a price point that keeps us ahead of our competition."

To help new customers accelerate business initiatives and access these higher performing systems, HP is introducing several new, aggressively-priced, hybrid flash MSA 2040 bundles. These bundles bring hybrid flash to even more affordable price points—up to 45 percent savings, including the MSA 2040 Performance Tiering license—with single-SKU ordering simplicity for faster time to value.⁵ Starting at $13,300, these new bundles also accelerate sales velocity for HP channel partners by reducing quote and pricing approval times.⁵

Greater flexibility and efficiency brings the benefits of shared storage to more smaller sites

HP also announced new more flexible connectivity choices for MSA customers looking to deploy shared storage to support application high availability without the cost of dedicated storage networking infrastructure. The new HP MSA 1040 SAS array with support for high performance 6Gb/12Gb SAS direct host connections makes it possible to directly connect up to four application servers to create a fully redundant shared pool of capacity that can scale up to 384 TB. Eliminating dedicated SAN switching infrastructure greatly simplifies deployment for smaller sites and costs 34 percent less than other connectivity options.⁴

HP is also helping customers reduce power and cooling costs through certification of the MSA 2040 Storage family as part of the ENERGY STAR program to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint. The EPA has reported that use of energy-efficient servers and storage within data centers can reduce energy consumption by 20-55 percent.⁶

Pricing and Availability** **⁷

• Firmware upgrades to HP MSA 1040/2040 are available via support pages on www/hp.com and are free of charge to existing customers on warranty or support contracts. The latest version, GL210R004, is available today.
• Various new, single-SKU, worldwide and regional MSA hybrid flash bundles are available today on hp.com or through HP authorized resellers.
• HP MSA 1040 SAS arrays are currently available and shipping worldwide starting at $7000.
• New MSA 2040 ENERGY STAR certified SKUs are now available worldwide with a starting price of $10,970.

¹ IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q1 2015 entry-level SAN-attached external storage, factory revenue during the first calendar quarter of 2015.

² Based on comparison of GL200 code release to GL210 prerelease code on MSA 2040 FC with SSDs. Based on internal testing comparing GL200 code release to GL210 release, HP MSA 2040 systems with SSDs can benefit from up to 45 percent greater random read performance and up to a 20 percent greater random write performance using an 8k block size and resulting in an average latency of 30 milliseconds or less.

³ Based on HP internal analysis, June 2015.

⁴ Based on HP internal competitive analysis of publically available competitive information, June 2015.

⁵ Based on HP internal comparison between US list prices and new single SKU bundles. Subject to change without notice. Other MSA bundles may be priced differently. Specific pricing information available through HP direct sales and authorized resellers

⁶ https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Report_Exec_Summary_Final.pdf

⁷ Estimated U.S. list prices. Actual prices may vary.