Category: Backup

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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:

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

Let’s get to it:

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Are Snapshots backups? And what do you need to protect against?

I got the idea for this post from a Twitter thread. I thought such discussions were dead but clearly they’re not, and decided to shed some light on this, having dealt with backup at insane scale in a previous life.

It doesn’t matter what a feature is called – can you use it to recover? And, if the answer is yes, how quickly and under which scenarios? And what are the downsides?

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More FUD busting: Deduplication – is variable-block better than fixed-block, and should you care?

Before all the variable-block aficionados go up in arms, I freely admit variable-block deduplication may overall squeeze more dedupe out of your data.

I won’t go into a laborious explanation of variable vs fixed, but, in a nutshell, fixed-block deduplication means that data is split into equal chunks, each chunk given a signature, compared to a DB and the common chunks are not stored.

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Is EMC under-sizing RecoverPoint and Avamar deals to win business?

It’s been a while since I wrote anything – unlike some, I actually have a day job and don’t use ghostwriters! Well, at least that’s my excuse.

My admiration for RecoverPoint is well known (see older post, which is referenced internally within EMC as a great pro-RecoverPoint article). It really is a good product and, next to VMware, my favorite EMC acquisition.

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Should your backups to disk consume more disk than you use for production? Seriously?

So, let’s talk about this not-so-hypothetical customer… They have:

  • A few sites
  • A lot of data per site
  • Much of the data is DBs and Multimedia
  • No replication currently
  • Can’t back up everything currently
  • No proper DR
  • Fairly significant rate of change
  • Not the fastest pipes between sites

They asked me to propose a solution that will back everything up and cross-replicate the backups between the sites. They want to move as far away from tape as possible.

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What is the value of your data? Do you have the money to implement proper DR that works? How are you deciding what kind of storage and DR strategy you’ll follow? And how does Continuous Data Protection like EMC’s RecoverPoint help?

Maybe the longest title for a post ever. And one of my longest, most rambling posts ever, it seems.

Recently we did a demo for a customer that I thought opened an interesting can of worms. Let’s set the stage – and, BTW, let it be known that I lost my train of thought multiple times writing this over multiple days so it may seem a bit incoherent (unusually, it wasn’t written in one shot).

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This has been one of the worst trips ever – because of one of the silliest DR exercises ever

Well, aside from visiting Flames and helping fix a severe customer problem. Those were rewarding. I still haven’t pooped that steak, BTW.

I was supposed to only stay for 1 day in Manhattan, fix the issue, ba da bing. I ended up staying an extra day – had no extra clothes and no time to get anything. Washed my undies on my own and used the hair dryer over a period of hours to dry them. I learned my lesson now and will always have extra stuff with me.

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