Icy News: HP P4900 SSD Storage System Announced

HP has announced the P4900 SSD G2 6.4-TB SSD Storage System, an all-solid state drive array, at its Global Partner Conference. HP’s new Storage System is a part of the company's LeftHand Network P4000 family.The P4900 uses SAN/iQ 9.5 software to monitor the health of the SSD called the HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge. It has been integrated into the P4000 management console, which gives IT administrators the ability to see how much more remaining life an SSD has as well as alerts that predict drive outages and failures.

All-flash arrays are useful in virtual desktop and online transaction processing (OLTP) database environments because they allow millions of I/O per second to avoid boot storms. It also provides fast access to data allowing organizations to make decisions more efficiently.

The P4900 is available in two configurations: a two-node bundle of SSDs with a 6.4-TB storage capacity, and a one-node expansion with a 3.2-TB storage capacity. The new storage system uses 400GB multi-level cell SSDs with a serial attached SCSI interface, has 12GB of RAM, and uses hot-swappable power supplies. Additionally, the P4900 has four RAID controllers with 2,048 MB of battery-backed cache, which connects to the network with four 10GbE or 1GbE network ports. The P4900 supports RAID 5, 6, and 10.

With the addition of a P4000 G2 unified NAS gateway, the P4900 can support a common internet file system and network file system traffic. The 6.4TB P4900 is available for $199,000 and the expansion unit is priced at $105,000.

Full HP P4900 Specs:

• Drive Description - (8) SFF SSD Supported
• Drive Type - (8) 400 GB MLC SAS Solid State Drive
• Capacity - 3.2TB Starting, 102.4TB Maximum
• Storage Expansion Options - Use storage clustering capability and add the same P4900 G2 node into the SAN.
• Host Interface - 10 GbE (2) Ports, 1 GbE iSCSI (2) Ports
• Supported Operating Systems
  • Apple OS X
  • Citrix XenServer
  • HP-UX
  • IBM AIX
  • Microsoft Windows 2003
  • Microsoft Windows 2008
  • Novell NetWare
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux
  • Red Hat Linux
  • Oracle Solaris
  • SUSE Linux
  • VMware
  • All major operating systems and hyper visors are supported. 
• Clustering Support - Hyper-redundant clustered storage
• Availability
  • Redundant, hot plug power supplies
  • redundant fans
  • redundant, hot plug hard drives, integrated storage controller with battery-backed DDR2 cache
  • disk RAID 5
  • hyper-redundant clustered storage: Network RAID levels (per volume) 0,5,6,10,10+1, and 10+2 for up to four copies of your data allows data to remain available in the event of a disk, controller, storage node, power, network, or site failure.
• Thin Provisioning Support
• SAN/iQ Thin Provisioning
• Snapshot Support
• SAN/iQ Application Integrated Snapshots
• Replication Support
• SAN/iQ Remote Copy Asynchronous Replication with Bandwidth Throttling
• Multi-Site/Disaster Recovery Solution Pack with SAN/iQ Synchronous Replication
• Smart Clone
• SAN/iQ SmartClone
• Management
• Centralized Management Console, HP ProLiant Integrated Lights-Out 2 Remote Management, Baseboard Mgmt Controller IPMI 2.0   Source from storagereview.com

The 3.5" HDD shortage starts recovering slowly, the price may not go back to pre-flood phase soon. Even though 2.5" probably rise its price but still lower than SSD's. Through new technology of SSD and provide a cost-effective prices for people and enterprise, SSD gets the good opportunity to develop the market from this year. Just read the news of HP developing customerized SSD storage, HP is focus on the market of SSD! How do you imagine SSD market for following year?