HP P4900 SSD System

HP has announced the P4900 SSD G2 6.4-TB SSD Storage System, an all-solid state drive array, at its Global Partner Conference.

For those of you who need performance for virtual desktops or OLTP you might just find this very useful. 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.

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.

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 2GB 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.

Full HP P4900 Specs:

8 SFF 400 GB MLC SAS SSD
Capacity starts at 3.2TB up to a maximum of 102.4TB.
Host Interfaces are 10 GbE (2) Ports, and 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.

Redundant, hot plug power supplies, redundant fans, redundant hot plug hard drives, integrated storage controller with battery-backed DDR2 cache disk
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

So quite a shopping list of features but putting them aside it is clear that this is a great storage array to deliver the IOPS you need for your VDI project.