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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