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Calling HPE 3PAR Users! Upgrade mission critical apps to HPE Primera with data-in-place upgrades

The increasing infusion of technology into every aspect of life and business consumes an ever-increasing percentage of energy. By developing sustainable IT strategies that look at each step of the product life cycle and identifying opportunities to drive greater IT efficiency, companies can reduce costs and climate impacts.

Supporting sustainable transformation

HPE-Primera_HPE-3PAR_mission-critical_blog2_shutterstock_411783619.pngThe rise of the cloud-anywhere experience, the explosion of big data, and the desire to drive innovation in this age of insights requires new technological advances.  As part of this evolution, most organizations go through the age-old technology lifecycle management (LCM) where they acquire, migrate, retire, reuse, and recycle their technology assets. While this LCM process deliver benefits to enterprise customers, their apps, and their stakeholders, it may also have unintended costs that need to be considered:

  • The expense (capital or operating expenditure) of acquiring and owning a new asset employed to derive value from the company’s data
  • The time required to migrate data to the new infrastructure, exposing an organization to risk and limiting how quickly an organization can realize expected value expected from the new technology
  • The additional power, cooling, colocation and associated hardware required to support two infrastructures during the migration process, generating unnecessary electronic waste.

HPE has developed a whitepaper on the financial and sustainability aspects of technology refresh cycles that is helpful to avoid these unanticipated costs.

Long ago, Benjamin Franklin stated “do well by doing good”. For Hewlett Packard Enterprise, our purpose empowers us to develop products that do exactly that by helping you connect, protect, analyze, and act on all of your data and apps, from edge to cloud, so you can turn insights into positive outcomes.

HPE’s mid-range storage portfolio has long supported data in place upgrades for customers to protect their investment in media, and upgrade to the latest generation of technology. When HPE Primera launched in 2019, it redefined mission critical storage, including a Timeless ownership model that provides investment protection from disruptive forklift upgrades. Previously, this was unheard-of for our customers’ most critical and demanding workloads. Timeless ownership provides customers with a whole new experience that reduces the expense, the time and the waste associated with legacy tech refresh. 

Recently, HPE introduced data-in-place upgrades to HPE Primera for HPE 3PAR high-end customers.  This is the first of its kind, inter-generational media retention offering for high-end data infrastructure deployments. 

Bottom line benefit #1: Reduced total cost of ownership

Available worldwide for HPE 3PAR high end customers who have all-flash 3PAR 9450 and 20000 systems, customers can upgrade to HPE Primera, while protecting up to 100% of their SSD investment – keeping  their data-in-place.  By reusing the existing drives and enclosures, customers save some serious cash—up to 40% of the cost of acquiring a new system, by comparison1

This capital can be repurposed to support new innovation and growth, because some customer SSD remains underutilized, and most storage systems saturate controllers well before the drive media. This means fewer SSDs need to be manufactured, and ultimately purchased, because companies are simply reusing what they already have! 

Post-upgrade customers enjoy the benefits of HPE Primera’s all-active architecture, backed with its services-centric OS, and predictable performance acceleration, powered by HPE Infosight. HPE Primera is designed with self-service in mind, and upgraded customers will have the ability to onboard to the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC). With DSSC they can realize the operational agility delivered by the cloud-anywhere experience by unifying data operations and data infrastructure.  DSCC liberates the technical staff from low-value, high-volume tasks that are best left to cloud-based templates that can be deployed from anywhere, and focus on driving the organization’s innovation agenda forward.

Bottom line benefit #2: Faster time to value for the organization and applications

Consistent with most tech modernization projects, the next step is data migration. Many large, global companies have expressed frustration at seeming to be in a state of constant data migration.  What is interesting is that the physical movement of data is not usually the issue. Instead, they find that the overall program management and operational coordination that is required – over an extended period of time as they migrate data from one system to the next – is the more onerous task. 

We all understand that the movement of data takes time, and this time can impede new projects and innovation from taking off in earnest. But with a data-in-place upgrade, there is no need for data migration. This reduces the elongated period during which applications are at risk of disruption. Unlike most technology refresh cycles that require extensive planning and coordination, followed by time consuming data migration, a data-in-place upgrade is a process designed to be performed during a planned maintenance window, in partnership with HPE Pointnext. It allows customers to carry forward their 3PAR drives and drive enclosures, while upgrading to HPE Primera, thus avoiding the need to power and cool a second system while conducting the data migration. 

The time saved further translates into value for the organization, courtesy of the HPE Primera architecture, which is designed for greater performance density compared to legacy high-end storage systems. Based on an HPE internal study, a 4N 3PAR 9450 with 345 TiB configured can realize up to a 155% increase in IOPS, 228% improvement in bandwidth in a 20% reduced footprint.

This means that the faster time to value can be realized by the organization – including PMO and applications!

Figure 1: Internal 2021 HPE studyFigure 1: Internal 2021 HPE study

Bottom line benefit #3: Lower environmental impact

Reduced cost, and more rapid time to value are important, but what is clear in the recently published 2020 Living Progress Report, is that the impact of technological innovation is having a real effect on our planet. According to the report, “The electricity consumption of information and communications technology (ICT), which includes enterprise IT, is growing between 6% and 9% per year and…it is projected that data centers will consume 3% of global electricity by 2025.”2

With a data-in-place upgrade to HPE Primera, we are excited to build on HPE’s mission to drive greater IT efficiency on behalf of our customers, in a number of ways:

  • The most energy efficient storage is the one that never had to be manufactured, nor turned on in the first place. By reusing the original SSD media, a customer only needs to acquire an additional SSD when additional capacity is actually needed.
  • Power and cooling requirements are reduced, as there is no need to install and operate two systems as part of a traditional data migration process.
  • When Asset Upcycling Services from HPE Financial services are leveraged, customers can responsibly retire any additional, or unsupported hardware, and have it refurbished if possible, or recycled – supporting HPE’s circular approach to product lifecycles.

Realizing the triple bottom line benefits: Reduced TCO, faster time to value, lower environmental impact 

Leaders must integrate sustainability considerations as a strategic imperative throughout their organizations to ensure they remain both resilient and competitive”, according to John Frey, HPE Chief Technologist for Sustainable Innovation. “Doing so will give them the tools to benefit from their digital transformation initiatives, thus positioning them for success in 2021 – and for long-term value creation over time. 

The increasing infusion of technology into every aspect of life and business consumes an ever-increasing percentage of energy. By developing sustainable IT strategies that look at each step of the product life cycle and identifying opportunities to drive greater IT efficiency, companies can reduce costs and climate impacts.

As I mentioned earlier, the most energy efficient SSD is the one that doesn’t need to be manufactured, and with a data-in-place upgrade from HPE 3PAR to HPE Primera, HPE can deliver a comparable 40% reduction in TCO realized by our mission critical storage Timeless customers – an industry first.  By doing so, this not only creates value for our customers, but it reinforces our commitment to being a leader in driving sustainable innovation, and delivering products and solutions designed with emphasis on sustainability and circularity.

To learn more about developing a sustainable IT strategy for your company, read HPE’s whitepaper on IT efficiency.

If you want to learn more about HPE’s commitment to Environmental and Sustainability Innovation, be sure to check out the 2020 Living Progress Report.

To learn more about how HPE can help you enjoy the triple bottom line benefits, please contact your HPE account representative.

1 Based on HPE internal analysis

2 Energy Efficiency (December 2019). Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy.

Andrew headshot.jpegMeet Around the Storage Block blogger Andrew Murphy, Product Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Andrew is an avid mountain biker, an experienced product leader, and a customer advocate obsessed with a passion for delighting customers and partners. Andrew has product management responsibilities for HPE Primera and HPE Alletra platforms. You can connect with Andrew on LinkedIn.

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