HPE Intelligent Data Platform to Deliver Agility and BC With Autonomous Operations and Storage Class Memory

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) announced advancements to Primera and Nimble storage, including an AI-driven, self-healing and self-optimized system that delivers real-time autonomous operations.

Primera 600 storage appliance

This is part of an update to the Intelligent Data Platform that provides customers with an AI-driven, built for cloud, as a service offering that results in unmatched application availability and performance, agility, and automation.

New capabilities include:

Self-optimizing system operations with embedded AI in Primera, and advanced cross-stack analytics in InfoSight for Hyper-V
DR from a metro-wide disaster with 3-site replication across global sites for Primera and Nimble storage, and near-instant asynchronous replication for Primera
All-NVMe support for Primera that improves performance density, and Storage Class Memory for Nimble storage that delivers 2X faster response times
On-demand storage automation optimized for virtualization and containers for Primera

“Now more than ever, to maintain BC, organizations must protect their data in order to operate efficiently and without disruption,” said Omer Asad, VP and GM, Primera and Nimble storage, HPE. “HPE Primera and Nimble Storage customers are able to accelerate innovation and adapt to the changing circumstances of their businesses, while also preserving cash flow via HPE GreenLake, without compromise to applications. HPE reduces risk, eliminates complexity and lowers costs associated with data protection, and has the world’s smartest storage that utilizes AI to self-optimize in real-time, giving customers the power to run their infrastructure with agility and reliability.“

“HPE has been a collaborator in developing our storage strategy and moving to HPE Primera has helped deliver solid infrastructure,” said Scott Hood, senior manager, Deloitte ITS, Deloitte Services LP. “We have mission-critical applications using HPE Primera and having an infrastructure that is simple to manage and self-optimized can save us time managing our IT systems so we can better focus on serving our customers.“

Businesses are looking to bring new applications to market rapidly, while still supporting existing ones, in order to accelerate the speed of business, agility and innovation. However, it is nearly impossible for IT to keep up because they remain tied down administering, tuning and supporting infrastructure that supports mission critical applications and data. As a result, IT is forced to sacrifice agility for reliability. Given this, customers now demand primary storage solutions that deliver the cloud experience without compromising the performance and availability of mission-critical applications and data. Primera and Nimble Storage overcome the agility vs. reliability trade off between the public cloud and traditional enterprise storage by providing a modern, as-a-service experience through HPE GreenLake, combined with intelligence and automation that ensures applications are always-on and available.

“At Grove City College, we use technology to deliver unsurpassed learning capabilities, such as engaging video lectures and online courses that extend beyond the classroom,” said Vince Distasi, CIO, Grove City College. “Availability is paramount to us so as a HPE 3PAR customer, we were excited to hear about HPE Primera and its 100% availability guarantee. It gives us the peace of mind we need, and we loved the fact we could keep our existing HPE 3PAR array and move it to a DR site for additional protection.”

“So far, our experiences with HPE Primera have exceeded our expectations,” he continued. “The set-up and implementation process was transparent and seamless, and since we’ve had it in production, it’s accelerated our ability to deliver new and better services to our constantly-changing campus community.“

“As a customer owned public utility, we are committed to getting the most out of our IT resources while offering our customers the same level of innovation as our larger utility competitors,” said Mike Harris, CIO, Clark County Public Utilities. “That’s why we love our HPE Nimble Storage, because we don’t have to waste valuable time managing and fighting fires. HPE InfoSight’s excellent predictive analytics capability is integral to giving us peace of mind knowing we won’t have surprises from our storage environment.“

“Keeping our apps always on and always fast is also a big priority,” he continued. “We are excited about the new innovations for HPE Nimble storage to drive performance and BC.“

Infosight screenshot

Avoid disruptions with autonomous operations and cross-stack analytics
In today’s fast-paced markets, IT teams and businesses cannot afford to lose time reacting to fire drills and issues in the data center. InfoSight, an AI for infrastructure, helps IT teams focus on business priorities by predicting and preventing disruptions from storage to VMs. The company is taking intelligence to the next level by automatically acting on intelligence in Primera to ensure mission-critical apps are always-on and always-fast.

Primera is architected with an embedded AI engine that processes globally trained ML models to deliver real-time predictions into application behavior and performance patterns. Now, it takes action on the predictions to self-optimize system operations in real-time by intelligently and dynamically optimizing resource utilization to ensure fast and predictable performance.

In addition, the complexity of virtualized infrastructure makes application performance and resource management challenging and time-consuming for IT. InfoSight for Nimble storage is simplifies VM management and enable customers with Hyper-V environments with cross-stack analytics that pinpoints abnormal performance issues between storage and VMs, and underutilized virtual resources.

Near-instant data recovery and automatic protection across global sites
Ensuring applications are protected requires data to be located in multiple places, with flexible options across sites to meet every service level agreement. Primera raised the bar for mission-critical storage with 100% data availability guaranteed, and now includes enhanced HPE Peer Persistence that delivers transparent BC along with flexibility to replicate to a third site to recover from a metropolitan area disaster, and near-instant asynchronous replication over extended distances with a one minute RPO.

With Nimble storage, enterprises have a highly available platform with six-nines of measured availability, the company’s Peer Persistence with automatic failover across 2-sites, and asynchronous replication on-premises or to the cloud for extended distances. Now, multi-site replication enables 3-site replication – including to the cloud – delivering protection vs. a metro-wide disaster along with the flexibility in the cloud to use data for test/dev and analytics.

For both Primera and Nimble storage, replication can be configured in minutes with no specialized storage skills, no additional software fees, and no professional services required.

Accelerating applications with All-NVMe and storage class memory
In order for enterprises to achieve faste data response times for demanding workloads, the right underlying storage architecture is required to maximize the benefit and economics of next-gen protocols and solid-state media – including NVMe and storage class memory (SCM). Primera is designed with a multi-node, all-active architecture that delivers low latency with 75% of I/O within 250µs latency⁽¹⁾. Now, Primera supports all-NVMe, bringing its massively parallel architecture to deliver higher performance density. For SAP HANA, Primera with all-NVMe now supports 2X the number of SAP HANA nodes at half the price ⁽²⁾.

SCM brings the disruptive potential of the speed of memory – but is cost prohibitive as a persistent storage tier. Unlike other vendors, Nimble storage is architected with a cache accelerated file system that optimizes read performance in hybrid configurations. This architecture has been optimized for SCM cache with SSD persistent storage to deliver 2x faster response times, with an average of sub-250µs latency ⁽³⁾, at near the price of an AFA ⁽⁴⁾.

Accelerate application development with automated, on-demand storage
Across industries, organizations are transforming how they develop and deploy applications across hybrid cloud – with IT needing storage infrastructure to be more agile, more automated, and policy-driven to support evolving virtualization and container environments. For virtualization, virtual volumes (vVols) streamlines storage operations with VM-centric data services and policy-based automation. Primera now supports vVols, joining Nimble Storage, to deliver a comprehensive set of vVols capabilities, including DR with support for Site Recovery Manager.

“VMware and HPE are working together to make storage easier to manage as the pace of application development accelerates,” said Lee Caswell, VP, marketing, VMware, Inc. “HPE Storage is the leading partner in VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) adoption, helping customers across the world automate storage provisioning for modern applications in vSphere environments across the hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation.“

For containers, organizations need persistent storage for stateful applications, requiring SDS that enables self-service automation for developers. Primera supports the CSI Driver for Kubernetes, joining Nimble Storage, to deliver a developer-centric storage experience for dynamic provisioning and enterprise data services. This enables persistent storage for mission-critical applications deployed on container orchestration platforms, including the HPE Container Platform.

Availability:

Primera next-gen OS, Primera OS 4.2, is available WW in 3Q20 at no additional charge for Primera customers with valid support contracts.
Primera All-NVMe is available for order direct and through channel partners.
CSI Driver for Kubernetes 1.1.1 is available for Primera.
Nimble Storage 1.5TB Storage Class Memory Adapter Kits are available (direct and through channel partners) for existing or new Nimble Storage AF60 and Nimble Storage AF80 AFAs.
Nimble Storage 3 Site Replication is available as part of NimbleOS 5.2 release for any Nimble Storage customer with an active support contract
InfoSight Cross Stack Analytics for Hyper-V will be globally available in July 2020 for any storage customer with an active support contract.

Resources:
Blog: Primary storage news for HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage
Blog: AI that acts on your behalf? It’s here NOW!
Blog: HPE Nimble Storage celebrates a decade of innovation and steps into the future

⁽¹⁾ 75% of R/W requests within 250µs of latency across HPE Primera All-flash installed base.
⁽²⁾ Based on HPE internal testing, comparing Primera all-flash withPrimera all-NVMe.
⁽³⁾ Based on HPE demonstration of Nimble Storage AF80 with/without SCM running an Oracle database.
⁽⁴⁾ Based on a 10% ASP difference of Nimble Storage AF80 equipped with the 1.5TB Storage Class Memory FIO Adapter Kit

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