HPE Introducing QLC SSDs Storage for Alletra Storage MP

By Simon Watkins, director, WW product marketing, storage and cloud data services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE)

HPE Alletra Storage MP – an industry’s 1st disaggregated, scale-out block storage – just got better. Alletra Storage MP now supports the latest in NAND flash technology with NVMe QLC SSD drives, offering higher density, lower TCO, and optimized price-performance for capacity-intensive workloads.

Alletra Storage MP can use 30.72TB or 15.36TB QLC SSDs to deliver value-optimized, high-density storage that has a lower acquisition cost than storage arrays with TLC drives, while requiring less rack space and reduced power and cooling compared to legacy hybrid storage. You can start small and scale big with unrivalled efficiency and flexibility. And you can run any workload without compromise by leveraging the unique architecture, enterprise-class capabilities and simplified AI-driven hybrid cloud experience of the HPE Alletra Storage MP platform.

Alletra Storage MP 30.72TB NVMe SFF QLC SSD

Support for high density, cost-efficient QLC drives makes Alletra Storage MP a fit for an even broader set of workloads and use cases. It’s ideal when you’re looking to eliminate data silos by consolidating workloads onto a single platform. Alletra Storage MP with QLC can also provide a cost-effective path to modernizing storage from legacy hybrid to all flash. What’s more, it’s a great solution for running capacity-intensive VMware and database applications where price-performance balance is key. Moreover, Alletra Storage MP can take advantage of QLC SSDs to serve as a cost-effective storage target for disaster recovery or data tiering.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits of QLC-based Alletra Storage MP and what it means for you.

Reduce storage costs, footprint, and power consumption
Alletra Storage MP with QLC SSDs deliver high capacity at a lower cost/GB, reducing costs for capacity-intensive workloads. TCO is further reduced due to the higher data density which improves footprint and energy efficiency.

In addition, Alletra Storage MP with QLC offers state-of-the-art data reduction technologies to further reduce costs, save energy, and decrease your data center footprint. The company stands behind the data efficiency technology of Alletra Storage MP with a total savings guarantee of at least 4:1. [1]

With the HPE StoreMore Guarantee, you can be confident that you’ll get the most from your storage investment. You get guaranteed-effective capacity that helps ensure you’re buying just the amount of storage you need when you need it. And you don’t have to worry about buying an undersized – or oversized – array now or in the future.

Start small, scale big – with unrivalled flexibility
Unlike traditional node pair storage architectures, Alletra Storage MP is built on a disaggregated, shared everything architecture that enables it to flexibly and cost effectively scale out to keep pace with the growing and unpredictable demands of traditional, modern, and consolidated workloads.

The disaggregation is made possible by standardized composable building blocks, comprising separate compute (controller nodes) and capacity (NVMe expansion shelves/JBOFs), interconnected by a high-speed, redundant NVMe-OF back-end switch fabric.

The evolution from a traditional node pair design to this modern architecture enables you to scale capacity and performance independently – for greater efficiency and lower costs. You gain the flexibility to fine-tune, adapt, and elastically scale storage environments in line with workload requirements and evolving business needs.

Better still, Alletra Storage MP’s unique architecture is designed to support non-disruptive, data in-place, multi-generational technology refreshes. With the HPE Timeless program for Alletra Storage MP, you can protect your investment and keep your storage continuously up to date with a nondisruptive controller refresh at no additional cost. This reduces your TCO and can save an average of 30% over traditional forklift upgrades. Even better, it keeps your storage costs predictable, alleviates technology obsolescence concerns, and helps eliminate traditional storage purchasing cycles, complex data migration, costly rip-and-replace upgrades and expensive media rebuys.

Alletra Storage MP with QLC continues to deliver on the promise of disaggregated storage, enabling you to start cost-effectively with 8 QLC drives and scale out to over 16PB of effective capacity [2].

In addition, support for 8-to-24 QLC SSDs per enclosure – with the ability to upgrade drives in 2-drive increments and controller nodes in increments of 1 – enables you to maximize efficiency and cost savings via granular performance and capacity upgrades.

Run any capacity-intensive workload – without compromise
Alletra Storage MP with QLC offers higher density, lower TCO and optimized price-performance for capacity-intensive workloads while leveraging all the enterprise-class capabilities that Alletra Storage MP has to offer. No other QLC offering gives you benefits like these:

Accelerate your capacity-intensive workloads with consistently fast performance and sub-ms latency at scale.
Scale performance and capacity independently with disaggregated scale-out storage, enabling more flexibility, efficiency, and lower costs for evolving workloads.
Start small, scale big with one architecture spanning mid-range to enterprise. Non-disruptive, data-in-place upgrades – including a free controller refresh with the HPE Timeless program.
Maximize efficiency and cost savings with single controller node performance scaling.
Rely on a 100% data availability guarantee SLA for mission-critical apps-guaranteed as a standard benefit for every array.
Leverage a shared everything architecture that can tolerate multiple node failures.
Harness industry leading ransomware detection and recovery that enables real-time ransomware detection (even when standard entropy mechanisms fail), and RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes-to radically reduce data loss and downtime after a cyber-attack.
Boost agility and speed time to value with a consistent AI-driven cloud experience across on-prem and public cloud that simplifies operations across the lifecycle – from install to upgrade.
Put your storage on auto pilot with industry-leading AI-O/s that prevents disruptions before they occur, eliminates guesswork with cross-stack analytics, and transforms the support experience with predictive support automation.
Get fast and easy access to the largest array of hybrid cloud services on a single platform – HPE GreenLake – all delivered with an intuitive cloud experience everywhere.

Target use cases and workloads for QLC
We recommend that you assess your application infrastructure environment against use case and workload demands and determine the overall price and performance advantages in using QLC-based storage over hybrid and TLC based storage. These are among the best use cases and workloads for QLC based Alletra Storage MP:

Workload consolidation: Alletra Storage MP with QLC densities scales from 120TB (raw) to over 16PB of effective capacity and delivers consistently fast performance and ultra-low latency at scale. This makes it an ideal target for workload and large multi-petabytes data store consolidation. You can now simplify your infrastructure and eliminate complex data silos by migrating a broad range of existing workloads from ageing systems onto a single modern storage platform. And you can remove the risk and complexity of switching to a new storage platform with multiple options for quick, non-disruptive data migration. For example, with the Data Services Cloud Console on the GreenLake cloud, you can move data from legacy HPE storage or competitive arrays to Alletra Storage MP – online, non-disruptively, and without complex planning or dependency on extra tools.(video to see how it’s done).
Hybrid storage refresh: With the introduction of QLC drives, Alletra Storage MP can now replace high-capacity legacy hybrid or HDD based systems. For the same capacity, Alletra Storage MP is far denser and more space and power efficient than hybrid storage arrays. Refreshing your storage from older hybrid arrays to Alletra MP all-flash storage lowers operational spend, reduces management overhead, and helps shrink your data center footprint. This results in in considerable TCO savings over time.
Optimized price performance for high-capacity workloads: Alletra Storage MP with QLC drives is ideal for capacity-intensive VMware and database applications where optimal price performance is critical. It can also serve as secondary storage that is optimized for DR and data tiering uses cases, with the performance to run other applications such as development/testing and analytics.
Edge use cases or off-site replication target: Smaller HPE Alletra MP systems with flexible starting capacities can be scaled incrementally to meet growing business demands. This makes it a flexible solution for edge use cases as well as a viable low cost and native replication target for Alletra Storage MP with TLC drives.

^[1] Calculated as the ratio of Provisioned Space (including savings due to snapshots, thin and clones) to Physical Used Space.
^[2] Assumes 4:1 data reduction with fully loaded configuration with 192×30.72TB QLC SSDs

Resources:
IT block tech talk: QLC SSDs for HPE Alletra Storage MP
Top 12 reasons to choose HPE Alletra Storage MP with QLC drives – brochure
HPE Alletra Storage MP – solution brief
HPE Alletra Storage MP – analyst white paper
HPE Alletra Storage MP versus the competition