Alletra Storage MP | Recovery Monkey

May 22, 2024May 29, 2024

The Architectural Benefits of HPE Alletra MP – Plus R4 Coolness

When we first released the new HPE Alletra MP platforms, I wrote a few articles going over the benefits and how the flexible new hardware platform manifests into different “personalities” for high end block and file solutions.

This time I want to take a deeper dive into the architectural benefits of our approach and how the new R4 software for Alletra MP Block enables certain things no other vendor can come close to – plus give a taste of what may be possible in the future given the amazing flexibility of the underlying architecture (it’s a blog, I can’t provide roadmaps here).

I will cover things like fractional multi-dimensional scaling (that allows things impossible with other vendors like adding a single controller node without needing to add capacity) but also resiliency in the face of simultaneous failures that would cripple all other storage systems I’m aware of. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive coverage of everything, but hopefully enough to give you a taste.

Let’s go!

April 13, 2023April 19, 2023

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4^th, 2023 announcements from HPE Storage was the scale-out HPE GreenLake for File Storage.

For the foundational piece explaining the common hardware between the various offerings please go here. For the Block storage piece, here.

The new HPE File offering is based on the HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware, and uses a common management interface for both File and Block, providing a seamless, centralized, multiprotocol management experience.

For the people that like looking at boxes, a small one would look like this:

A Small HPE GreenLake for File Storage System – Compute Separate from Capacity

April 6, 2023April 13, 2023

The New HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Powered by Alletra Storage MP.

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.

Bezel designers are the unsung heroes of storage. Without them everything would look the same.

April 6, 2023April 6, 2023

The New HPE Alletra Storage MP – The Era of Standardization

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.