Today HP announced that is was making a series of enhancements to its MSA Storage line. These enhancements include firmware upgrades to boost performance and new systems aimed at smaller sites. These new enhancements are aimed at making small to medium businesses more competitive.
Today HP announced that is was making a series of enhancements to its MSA Storage line. These enhancements include firmware upgrades to boost performance and new systems aimed at smaller sites. These new enhancements are aimed at making small to medium businesses more competitive.
Small businesses and startups are popping up what seems like every day. In order to compete these smaller companies need to be able to get time to value faster. While reducing equipment costs. HP MSA Storage is designed to help the startups, as well as some of the more established companies, be more competitive wile keeping costs down. HP released new firmware upgrade for MSA that will accelerate applications by up to 45% at no extra cost to the customer. The upgrade will optimize SSDs in hybrid storage configurations and increase performance by up to 37,000 IOPS. The upgrade is non-disruptive.
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
HP is also helping customer lower the price of hybrid flash deployment by offering several MSA 2040 bundles. The new bundles are aggressively priced, saving customers up to 45%, including the MSA 2040 Performance Tiering license. With a lower starting price of $13,300, the bundles can accelerate sales velocity for HP channel partners by reducing quote and pricing approval times. Along with the bundles, HP is also announcing that the HP MSA Storage family is now ENERGY STAR certified.
And finally, HP announced more flexible connectivity options for 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 supports 6Gb/12Gb SAS direct host connections. This connection allows up to 4 application servers to be directly connected creating a fully redundant shared pool of capacity that can scale up to 384TB. This would eliminate dedicated SAN switching infrastructure making deployments to smaller sites less costly and more simple.
Availability and pricing
Firmware upgrades to HP MSA 1040/2040, the latest version, GL210R004, and the new MSA hybrid flash bundles are available today.
- HP MSA 1040 SAS arrays are currently available and shipping worldwide starting at $7000.
- New MSA 2040 ENERGY STAR certified are available worldwide with a starting price of $10,970.
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