Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
General category for posts
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.
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.
Continue reading “The New HPE Alletra Storage MP – The Era of Standardization”Some time ago I wrote about the dangers of taking certain things for granted with new technologies.
This time I wanted to use a more specific enterprise application example to show that customers need to be extra careful when comparing solutions, especially for mission-critical apps.
Sometimes being too high-level means missing the unspeakable horrors lurking under the covers. And ignorance doesn’t mean bliss… just nasty surprises.
To summarize: Avoid bait-and-switch so you avoid surprise costs and pain.
Continue reading “Beware of Cloud Sizing Tools and avoid Reliability Angst”
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.
Continue reading “HPE Alletra 9000 – Primera 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.
Continue reading “HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved”