Enhanced XP7 plumps up flash while slimming dedupe

HPE's XP7 is an OEM'd Hitachi VSP array, which was announced in April 2014 as an update to the similar OEM'd XP.

The XP7 gained flash media in September 2015, using Hitachi's Flash Module Drives, proprietary format SSDs. Hitachi Data Systems updated its VSP flash and hybrid flash/disk arrays in October. So now HPE has followed suit, using the Hitachi array hardware and software as its base.

It positions the XP arrays, with 100 per cent availability (99.99999 per cent per single array, 99.999999999999 per cent with inter-connected arrays), as hybrid flash for mission-critical demands while the high-end 3PAR StorServ 20000, with 99.9999 per cent availability, is positioned as supporting the most rigorous, on-demand infrastructure with a virtually limitless, elastic pool of storage.

The updated XP7 features:

• 60 per cent greater performance (up to 4.8 million IOPS) to support large, mission-critical applications and large-scale consolidation
• Improved all-flash affordability at $1.20 per usable gigabyte
• 14TB flash module devices (FMDs), which support hardware-accelerated inline data compression
• Software-based deduplication and compression capabilities available across FMDs, solid state drives and hard disk drives
• improved XP7 Performance Advisor software for performance monitoring and troubleshooting
• Improved high availability options and new data migration packages for migration from legacy XP systems to XP7 storage

Pricing and availability

Gen 2 XP7 Storage controllers, flash module drives with software-based compression and deduplication are available worldwide for order now. Gen 2 XP7 controllers start at $20,800, 7TB and 14TB FMDs from $22,200, and software-based compression and deduplication from $11,600 per XP7 frame. ®