Dimitris | Recovery Monkey

April 22, 2026April 25, 2026

20x Faster Time to First Token: The HPE Alletra X10000 Edge for AI

In March 2026, HPE, NVIDIA, Kamiwaza and Signal65 published a paper (check here and here) showing about a 20x acceleration for both time-to-first-token (TTFT) and token generation rate, using an HPE Alletra X10000 to store the KV cache. The storage system used S3 over RDMA to achieve this (and is in fact the first NVIDIA-certified object storage system).

The test has, as of the date of this writing, the most complete benchmark disclosure of all the KV Cache competitive tests I could find. It also consists of an extremely hard workload with high concurrency.

I will explain why all this is important, why it’s different from competitor numbers, plus provide some insights about what this means regarding overall system efficiency.

Because the goal isn’t just to keep GPUs busy. It’s to keep them busy generating new stuff, not recalculating old stuff.

The benefits with this solution are numerous:

Far more workload becomes possible but also…
One could approach it as a lot less infrastructure is needed due to far more efficient use of the hardware, which means…
Lower power and rackspace requirements, which all leads to…
Lower Watt/token and lower $/token.

August 7, 2025August 20, 2025

Ransomware Detection in the HPE Alletra B10000 – Successfully Recover

With the R5 release of the code for the HPE Alletra MP B10000, among many other nice improvements (for example NAS and a nice new CSI driver), everyone now gets heavy-duty ransomware detection.

We have invented some new and unique ways for detecting modern ransomware that encrypts data in advanced ways (for example intermittent encryption), but most importantly, ways to detect encryption that doesn’t even look like encryption (which defeats other detection methods that rely on fixed entropy detection thresholds). See explainer here for more details on why this is crucial.

The whole point of doing this is early detection.

July 31, 2025August 4, 2025

Ransomware Detection Failure – Where does Technology Fail

This is a generic, foundational article to support related materials.

Modern ransomware that encrypts your data tries to evade detection – since that’s how the hackers maximize their payout.

The way they evade detection is by doing 2 main things:

Not encrypt everything – that evades detectors that look for massive changes in your data. So they might encrypt just a tiny bit in each file.
Encrypt in a way that doesn’t look encrypted 🙂

#2 is the interesting one and we will focus on that one in this article since that’s where most encryption detectors fail.

December 17, 2024December 18, 2024

HPE X10000 Deep Dive – Differentiation For Unstructured Data

At HPE Discover Barcelona 2024, HPE released the Alletra Storage MP X10000, the latest in our new line of shared hardware platform storage offerings.

It’s an innovative new platform specially made for unstructured data, and a long time in the making. This is HPE tech, not a partnership.

The initial workloads this solution is aimed at are anything requiring fast S3 performance, including AI workloads, data lakes, cloud native app development and high speed restore and backup.

It has several innovations such as RDMA for object, and is highly differentiated – plus, allows this kind of technology in a smaller possible starting capacity instead of only focusing on the huge side of the scale.

As usual, my aim is not to regurgitate basic information but rather to explain the true technical differentiation and get people excited about the possibilities on offer here.

The summary of the X10000 benefits are:

Disaggregation flexibility for separately expanding compute and/or capacity
Ability to scale down and not need huge capacities to get good performance
Balanced read/write performance and low latency for all workloads
Flexible, fully container-based architecture that opens up tons of possibilities for running customer code inside the storage solution.

Let’s get to it:

October 28, 2024October 29, 2024

How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees

I want to arm you with the knowledge needed to properly navigate storage efficiency guarantee contracts and arrive at a safe system sizing, with reasonable assumptions.

This is another of my generic, vendor-neutral posts aimed at helping the audience be aware of certain important things that I often see overlooked.

How does one navigate the small print around storage data reduction guarantees? What are you entitled to if the vendor misses the mark? And how do you minimize your risk when faced with certain sales teams that are determined to win even if it means huge customer risk?

Do you know your data makeup? And how it may affect a capacity guarantee? But, more importantly, how it will affect your overall efficiency?

Let’s start with a nice reductio ad absurdum example to illustrate what I mean.

May 22, 2024May 29, 2024

The Architectural Benefits of HPE Alletra MP – Plus R4 Coolness

When we first released the new HPE Alletra MP platforms, I wrote a few articles going over the benefits and how the flexible new hardware platform manifests into different “personalities” for high end block and file solutions.

This time I want to take a deeper dive into the architectural benefits of our approach and how the new R4 software for Alletra MP Block enables certain things no other vendor can come close to – plus give a taste of what may be possible in the future given the amazing flexibility of the underlying architecture (it’s a blog, I can’t provide roadmaps here).

I will cover things like fractional multi-dimensional scaling (that allows things impossible with other vendors like adding a single controller node without needing to add capacity) but also resiliency in the face of simultaneous failures that would cripple all other storage systems I’m aware of. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive coverage of everything, but hopefully enough to give you a taste.

Let’s go!

July 25, 2023April 8, 2025

HPE Ransomware Detection and Recovery in Zerto 10: Sophistication that Works

Ransomware seems to be at the forefront of many discussions today, and for good reason: The ransomware gangs make a ton of money by causing massive problems to businesses that are in turn losing billions because of this – but most importantly, losing time.

So eventually, like for anything that’s a problem, people tried to find solutions.

The challenge becomes finding what solutions truly address the problem in a realistic way instead of being mostly marketing in order to show a vendor isn’t behind in this area.

Some of you may remember the awesome Chrysler ads with Ricardo Montalban talking about “rich Corinthian Leather”. There is no such thing, the leather came from New Jersey. Corinth in Greece was never known for its prowess in leather anything – but the name sounded cool and different, so marketing went with it, as is their idiom. I’ll explain how HPE’s Zerto ransomware detection & recovery is truly useful in both detecting modern ransomware and rapidly recovering with a tight RPO. I’ll also show which types of protection are more like Corinthian Leather 🙂

A good example of Corinthian Leather: “Immutable Snapshots”. Practically every serious storage system from the major vendors has this technology, which mostly means locking snaps so that even if ransomware has infected the backup system (and therefore has the permissions to delete snaps, which is the least of the many things ransomware will try and do), the storage system won’t allow the deletion to happen.

Techniques like locking snapshots are, at best, a supplemental form of defense. Some ransomware indeed tries to delete snaps before the hackers demand the ransom – but they have already been encrypting your data for months, so your snaps are also infected…

So if you can’t detect, with accuracy, when encryption started happening, you have no defense and no safe recovery point.

To summarize: Aside from prevention, what’s most useful if you have been infected is:

Real-time detection but also…
…the ability to detect modern kinds of ransomware that fool methods like standard Shannon entropy detection (for example, encryption that results in compressible data) but also…
…the ability to very quickly recover, and with a minimal loss of data (tight RPO and RTO) – not in hours/days but seconds/minutes. Time is money and all that.

Let’s get started:

April 13, 2023April 19, 2023

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4^th, 2023 announcements from HPE Storage was the scale-out HPE GreenLake for File Storage.

For the foundational piece explaining the common hardware between the various offerings please go here. For the Block storage piece, here.

The new HPE File offering is based on the HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware, and uses a common management interface for both File and Block, providing a seamless, centralized, multiprotocol management experience.

For the people that like looking at boxes, a small one would look like this:

A Small HPE GreenLake for File Storage System – Compute Separate from Capacity

April 6, 2023April 13, 2023

The New HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Powered by Alletra Storage MP.

Now that we have the basic Alletra Storage MP hardware architecture details explained, what is the new Block storage offering from HPE?

It is the next evolution of HPE storage, combining novel approaches with certain tried-and-true elements and concepts from our existing systems.

For the people that love looking at boxes, here’s a photo of one of the new systems.

Bezel designers are the unsung heroes of storage. Without them everything would look the same.

April 6, 2023April 6, 2023

The New HPE Alletra Storage MP – The Era of Standardization

There’s the adage that variety is the spice of life, but, as usual, too much of anything can be a challenge.

Take, for example, storage hardware at any company that has multiple storage portfolio offerings.

Almost always, the hardware is different between the various offerings, sometimes extremely so. Not just in performance or capacity, but also in quality and reliability. And in many cases, the hardware is so dramatically different that there can be absolutely no sharing – the drives are different, the controllers are different, the chassis are different, the HBAs… maybe even the screws 😊 (lately I have been trying to keep things generic and not name names, but a prime example is Pure – FlashBlade is incredibly different vs FlashArray//X which is incredibly different vs FlashArray//C which is incredibly different vs FlashArray//XL).

At HPE we are taking major steps to standardize the storage solution hardware to provide a better customer experience.

In this blog I will discuss the new hardware and briefly touch upon the new software offerings that will all run on that same hardware – as usual, I will try to provide information and insights that may not always be found in official announcements or the product pages.

May 13, 2021March 28, 2025

HPE Alletra 9000 – Primera Evolved

I’m excited to announce that the evolution of the HPE Primera (which was the evolution of 3PAR) is now available.

It’s called the HPE Alletra 9000 and is the mission-critical Tier-0 complement to the Tier-1 Alletra 6000 (which in turn is the evolution of Nimble).

It retains the rich feature set of Primera and the 100% uptime guarantee. The main enhancement vs Primera is the increased speeds, and the fact that all the performance is possible in just a 4U configuration, making it the most performance-dense full-feature Tier 0 system in the world (by far). It is managed via the HPE Data Services Cloud Console.

A welcome enhancement (that is also coming to Primera) is that of Active Peer Persistence, which allows a LUN to be simultaneously read from and written to from two sites synchronously replicating. This means that each site can do local writes to a sync replicated LUN without the hosts needing to cross the network to the other site.

May 6, 2021March 28, 2025

HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved

I’m very excited to announce that the evolution of HPE Nimble Storage is now available.

The new line is called Alletra 6000, and is completely interoperable with Nimble and manageable both from its own GUI/CLI/API and Data Services Cloud Console. For the Alletra 9000 (the evolution of Primera) there will be a separate post.

All the usual goodies of Nimble are still there (6-nines guaranteed uptime, fancy direct-to-L3 support, InfoSight with infrastructure AI recommendations, 100% headroom even if running on one controller, SCM cache, Triple+ RAID, Cascade Multistage Checksums etc). What’s different is mostly the vastly increased speeds in real-world workloads, and the shorter form factor.

September 25, 2020October 1, 2020

Modern RAID Must Protect Against Multiple Temporally Correlated Errors

Modern data protection needs to adapt to protecting modern media. RAID is no exception. In this article I will explain why modern storage consumers need to be asking for certain kinds of protection and not settling for less.

To summarize, don’t bother with storage that can’t provide at least dual parity protection for any given piece of data (whether that’s an array, HCI or the cloud, it doesn’t matter).

Why? Two big reasons:

Because media these days is both larger and fails differently than in the past. Which means Temporally Correlated Errors are far more likely to happen, so you need protection against those. It’s not doom-mongering. It’s based on data.
In the olden days, arrays had small RAID groups that each held a handful of volumes. If something was damaged in a RAID group, at most you’d just lose that handful of volumes. Modern arrays use pools of space, typically made up of multiple RAID groups. This means that you can potentially damage all volumes in an array merely by losing data integrity in a single RAID group in the pool. I’m sure you aren’t exactly looking forward to experiencing that.

I will take you step by step through this, as is my idiom. It is though rather sad that I have to write this kind of thing in 2020…

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