Beware of Cloud Sizing Tools and avoid Reliability Angst

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.

  • Ensure all components in any sizing tools reflect your business requirements.
  • The simpler the infrastructure, the more reliable. If one must do things like stripe across many volumes in order to get decent performance even for medium-sized solutions, then that may be a warning sign that the solution is lacking.
  • Ensure all the underlying components in any pricing you see would fit your company’s mission-critical needs. For instance – what reliability and resiliency are the storage components rated for? And is that sufficient for your needs?
  • Ensure you are accounting for the right number of systems (Production-spec vs non, times number of applications, etc). This can quickly add up with certain apps.

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HPE Alletra 9000 – Primera Evolved

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.

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HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved

HPE Alletra

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.

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HPE Data Services Cloud Console – Solving Complex Operational Problems

The big announcement of HPE’s May 4th event was that of Unified DataOps through the HPE Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC).

DSCC is a true cloud-native control plane which delivers unified data operations through a suite of cloud services. DSCC automates data services and orchestrates infrastructure workflows for cloud operational agility and a simplified data management experience regardless of storage system location.

It’s important to clarify that this is aimed at both the CAPEX and OPEX customer bases, unlike certain competitor offerings.

DSCC is primarily a way to improve management, operation and orchestration, even for complex deployments, via Unified DataOps.

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Modern RAID Must Protect Against Multiple Temporally Correlated Errors

Modern data protection needs to adapt to protecting modern media. RAID is no exception. In this article I will explain why modern storage consumers need to be asking for certain kinds of protection and not settling for less.

To summarize, don’t bother with storage that can’t provide at least dual parity protection for any given piece of data (whether that’s an array, HCI or the cloud, it doesn’t matter).

Why? Two big reasons:

  1. Because media these days is both larger and fails differently than in the past. Which means Temporally Correlated Errors are far more likely to happen, so you need protection against those. It’s not doom-mongering. It’s based on data.
  2. In the olden days, arrays had small RAID groups that each held a handful of volumes. If something was damaged in a RAID group, at most you’d just lose that handful of volumes. Modern arrays use pools of space, typically made up of multiple RAID groups. This means that you can potentially damage all volumes in an array merely by losing data integrity in a single RAID group in the pool. I’m sure you aren’t exactly looking forward to experiencing that.

I will take you step by step through this, as is my idiom. It is though rather sad that I have to write this kind of thing in 2020…

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