Tag: Performance

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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!

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HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4th, 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
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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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