It'll all end in tiers: HP tosses small biz another 3PAR-flavored bone

HP is adding some 3PAR-class storage services to its MSA entry-level arrays: automated data tiering, virtualisation and thin provisioning, and more, all via a firmware update. This continues a steady upgrading of MSA functionality. The MSA 2040 model is getting: Archive tiering that shunts cold data from fast SAS drives to …

[Anonymous Coward]

So The Small 3PAR Is Further Delayed?

This is all Dot Hill functionality that's been out for a while now even if HP wasn't shipping it. I thought the small 3PAR was supposed to be announced at HP Discover at the end of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So The Small 3PAR Is Further Delayed?

Was it ever delayed ?

Maybe you would be better requesting a road map session instead of trying to second guess a vendors product development cycle and launch strategy.Then again you could be just trolling, in which case it's probably just wishful thinking on your part.

[Riku]

Re: So The Small 3PAR Is Further Delayed?

While it may be DotHill functionality, given the likelihood it (and just about everyone else these days) runs on a Linux kernel, I'd be interested to know how many of them are just enabling Linux's bcache or btier utilities and calling it "innovation".

How small do you want? Do you need equipment smaller than a 7000-series or just a smaller price?

[Levente Szileszky]

Re: So The Small 3PAR Is Further Delayed?

Err, no, storage arrays are typically NOT running linux, they are typically built on some flavor of BSD, usually OpenBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

ASICs

Firmware update eh? Lucky they didn't bake the functionality into the silicon ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ASICs

Why ?

All of those features and more are available on 3PAR with it's built in ASICs, in fact HP are still turning on ASIC based features such as inline dedupe in their latest firmware release. Despite all the hand waving by HP's competition, they've continued to prove ASICs aren't a barrier to innovation, in fact completely the reverse.

The ability to offload much of the heavy lifting to ASICs means not only do they scale performance better than others, but they always have CPU cycles in reserve, enabling them to turn on new features at will. Whereas the competitions only available alternative seems to rely almost exclusively on riding Intel's road map.

[avh]

here is some that I know

Probably a good article for a blog post about what Storage arrays run which operating systems.

I find more storage systems are based on Linux these days.

EMC VNX1(block) - Modified Windows Server 2008 R2 (VNX-File DART is BSD?)

NetApp FreeBSD?

EqualLogic NetBSD

3PAR Debian Linux

Engenio (NetApp E-Series) vxWorks

P2000/MSA1040/2040 - Linux (see below)

[kernel_bin]

filename=kernel.bin

version=Linux version 2.6.38.8+ (kchaitan@ubuntu) (gcc version 4.3.3 (Sourcery G++ 4.3-234) ) # 1 Tue Jul 15 17:03:18 MDT 2014