Category: New Technologies

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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.
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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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The Loss of Important Knowledge and Acumen Through Perceived Commoditization

I posit that we now have a whole new class of consumer that is completely oblivious to certain hitherto fundamental concepts – and this can lead to poor business decisions and overall sub-optimal execution and results.

I got the idea after a discussion with an ex colleague (that’s now working for a cloud vendor) where he proudly proclaimed that infrastructure is unimportant and uninteresting.

I’ll start generically and shift to IT. The generic aspect of this problem is very interesting, since it’s lowering quality in all sorts of fields.

And never forget: Just because something is widely and easily available doesn’t mean it’s better. It simply means that more people have access to it.

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HPE Memory-Driven Architectures Extend to 3PAR and Nimble Storage

HPE has been innovating in the Memory-Driven Compute space for a while now (for example, HPE Labs’ The Machine project and Gen-Z ).

The driver behind this has been to transform application performance, not by increments but by leaps and bounds. Think orders of magnitude in reduction of execution time. For instance, at an organization performing Alzheimer’s cure research, they had a certain key analytics operation that took 22 minutes for each iteration (and they need to do many, many iterations). With a Memory-Driven system from HPE it now takes 13 seconds. This allows the researchers to reach useful results much faster – which, in turn, means the cure could materialize in a much shorter timeframe.

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Media is Not Created Equal and NVMe is Just a Protocol

In this era of over-marketing and misinformation, it can be refreshing to clarify things for customers.

Allow me to be refreshing regarding NVMe 🙂

NVMe is simply a protocol. Just like SCSI is a protocol. NVMe is most assuredly not a media type. Yet, storage vendors keep talking about “NVMe drives” and customers often think those devices are equal as long as “NVMe” is mentioned.

Alas, that’s not how things work…

Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as an NVMe drive. Or, at the very least, calling something an “NVMe drive” isn’t enough to describe what that media is, and it’s especially not enough to describe how fast it may be.

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InfoSight: How Nimble Customers Benefit from AI and Big Data Predictive Analytics

In past articles I have covered topics about how Nimble Storage lowers customer risk with technologies internal to the array such as:

Now, it’s time to write a more in-depth article about the immense customer benefits of InfoSight, Nimble’s Predictive Analytics platform.

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Nimble Cloud Volumes Removing Risk From Cloud Storage

As of February 27th 2017, Nimble Storage announced Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV), marking Nimble’s entry into the cloud space.

For those short on time: Nimble Cloud Volumes is block storage as a service, works with compute from AWS & Azure, and avoids the significant block storage drawbacks of those two providers. In essence, it is enterprise storage as a service, at a competitive price, while retaining all the cloud conveniences.

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Progress Needs Trailblazers

I got the idea for this stream-of-consciousness (and possibly too obvious) post after reading some comments regarding new ways to do high speed I/O. Not something boring like faster media or protocols, but rather far more exotic approaches that require drastically rewriting applications to get the maximum benefits of radically different architectures.

The comments, in essence, stated that such advancements would be an utter waste of time since 99% of customers have absolutely no need for such exotica, but rather just need cheap, easy, reliable stuff, and can barely afford to buy infrastructure to begin with, let alone custom-code applications to get every last microsecond of latency out of gear.

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Practical Considerations for Implementing NVMe Storage

Before we begin, something needs to be clear: Although dual-ported NVMe drives are not yet cost effective, the architecture of Nimble Storage is NVMe-ready today. And always remember that in order to get good benefits from NVMe, one needs to implement it all the way from the client. Doing NVMe only at the array isn’t as effective.

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The Importance of SSD (and other) Firmware Updates

I wanted to bring this crucial issue to light since I’m noticing several storage vendors being either cavalier about this or simply unaware.

I will explain why solutions that don’t offer some sort of automated, live SSD firmware update mechanism are potentially extremely risky propositions. Yes, this is another “vendor hat off, common sense hat on” type of post.

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Going Green: Why I Joined Nimble Storage

I am proud to announce that, as of today, I am a member of the Nimble Storage team.

Nimble Logo

This marks the end of an era – I spent quite a bit of time at NetApp: learned a lot, did a lot – by the end I had my hands in all kinds of sausage making… 🙂

I wish my friends at NetApp the best of luck for the future. The storage industry is a very tough arena, and one that will be increasingly harder and with less tolerance than ever before.

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Architecture has long term scalability implications for All Flash Appliances

Recently, many vendors announced the availability of large SSDs. It’s not extremely exciting – it’s just a larger storage medium. Sure, it’s really advanced 3D NAND, it’s fast and ultra-reliable, and will allow some nicely dense configurations at a reduced $/GB. Another day in Enterprise Storage Land.

But, ultimately, that’s how drives roll – they get bigger. And in the case of SSD, the roadmaps seem extremely aggressive regarding capacities, with 100TB per device coming.

Then I realized that several vendors don’t have large SSD capacities available.

But why? Why ignore such a seemingly easy and hugely cost-effective way to increase density?

In this post I will attempt to explain why certain architectural decisions may lead to inflexible design constructs that can have long-term flexibility and scalability ramifications.

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NetApp Enterprise Grade Flash

June 23rd marked the release of new NetApp Enterprise Flash technology. The release consists of:

  • New ONTAP 8.3.1 with significant performance, feature and usability enhancements
  • New Inline Storage Efficiencies
  • New All-Flash FAS systems (AFF works only with SSDs)
  • New, aggressive pricing model
  • New maintenance options (price protection on warranty for up to 7 years, even if you buy less warranty up front)

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NetApp posts SPC-1 Top Ten Performance results for its high end systems – Tier 1 meets high functionality and high performance

It’s been a while since our last SPC-1 benchmark submission with high-end systems in 2012. Since then we launched all new systems, and went from ONTAP 8.1 to ONTAP 8.3, big jumps in both hardware and software.

In 2012 we posted an SPC-1 result with a 6-node FAS6240 cluster  – not our biggest system at the time but we felt it was more representative of a realistic solution and used a hybrid configuration (spinning disks boosted by flash caching technology). It still got the best overall balance of low latency (Average Response Time or ART in SPC-1 parlance, to be used from now on), high SPC-1 IOPS, price, scalability, data resiliency and functionality compared to all other spinning disk systems at the time.

Today (April 22, 2015) we published SPC-1 results with an 8-node all-flash high-end FAS8080 cluster to illustrate the performance of the largest current NetApp FAS systems in this industry-standard benchmark.

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