HCI Failure Modes and Maintenance

I got the idea for this blog after speaking with multiple customers that were contemplating switching to certain kinds of grid computing/storage (like HCI) without fully understanding the ramifications of doing so.

You see, they were (rightly so) enamored by concepts such as automation, ease of consumption and scaling. But they forgot to ask some very important questions. See here for the dangers of getting too carried away with something new and taking things for granted.

This isn’t a post claiming HCI and grid-type storage constructs are bad. Like any tool, they can be used in various ways, some of them aggressively ill-advised. The point of this post is to help customers ask for the right configuration so they don’t get stuck with a sub-optimal and risky design.

I tried to make this post as short as possible but as someone once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Which, ironically, is a simplification of what Einstein actually said 🙂

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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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