HPE B-Series Gen7 FC SANs Platform

By Rob Gee, product management, storage and big data, product manager for B-series FC switches, HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP introduces a generation of B-series FC SAN technologies approximately once every 4-5 years, addressing evolving data center demands. Let’s take a closer look at the company’s 7th generation of B-series SAN technology to see how this newly launched platform delivers the always-on, do more with less, increasingly autonomous building blocks of a modern data center.

 We’ve been telling our customers and partners for years that IT organizations need to ‘do more with less.’ In a world where fewer resources and increased demands are the new normal, IT platforms must deliver resiliency, agility, and simplicity. Still, they must do it with less human intervention than before. Consider a few technology trends from recent years that are changing the technology landscape as we know it. Flash storage is the de facto choice for many data centers worldwide. NVMe storage is becoming more common, bringing with it new benchmarks for performance. VM densities continue to rise; the pressure to deliver reliable and fast access to data and applications – while ensuring business-critical workloads function correctly – is more significant. These trends combine to underscore just how important it is to have data paths keep pace and deliver on growing and evolving user expectations.

HPE B-series Gen7 FC SANs B-series Gen7 Fibre Channel SAN is much more than speed

The 7th generation of HPE B-series FC SANs is evolving to keep pace with the demands brought about by new technologies in modern data centers. But, merely providing faster speeds, increased scale, and better performance isn’t enough. FC SANs must be optimized to deliver value in new ways that save time, money, and energy with more predictability than ever before. HPE’s B-series Gen7 SANs include new automation capabilities and advanced analytics that combine to transform the storage area network into an autonomous SAN.

With this as backdrop, closer look at latest enhancements with B-series Gen7 FC SANs:

• HPE B-series Gen7 FC SANs are self-learning
  They are ‘self-learning’ and proactively monitor millions of I/O performance data points through their network sensors. These sensors provide insight into the SAN environment and transform the data they gather into actionable intelligence. Thanks to these new self-learning capabilities, network administrators can quickly identify application and device performance across the fabric to understand anything that might compromise the fabric. They can then take corrective action before a performance issue impacts the business.

• HPE B-series Gen7 Fibre Channel SANs are self-optimizing
  
  They utilize the data gathered through self-learning capabilities to self-optimize. By automatically applying priorities for specific data traffic, They monitor traffic pattern shifts, make smarter decisions on traffic prioritization, adjust to avoid congestion, and guarantee performance levels for applications and storage workloads.

• HPE B-series Gen7 SANs are self-healing 

• 
  They automatically mitigate potential performance issues through new self-healing capabilities. If devices or traffic are not functioning correctly, the SAN identifies the issue, correlates the traffic behavior’s root cause, then recovers from the problem – but learns to avoid future issues. The SAN will also alert the admin of the issue and set up automatic healing actions, such as failing over to a different path or reverting to an older configuration.

There’s more…

In addition to new autonomous capabilities, the HPE B-series Gen7 SANs deliver the performance, low latency, and improvements you’ve come to expect with each new generation of FC products. With them, you’ll get faster data access with 50% lower latency than Gen6 SANs.

HPE B-series Gen7 SANs also support 64Gb line speed with 64Gb optics, which will become available mid-2021. With 3 generations of backward compatibility, now is the time to plan for HPE B-series Gen7 and the benefits realized with a Gen7 autonomous SAN.

Resource:
Website on products launched December 2020