Best AFAs From Dell EMC, HPE Nimble, NetApp, Pure Storage and Tegile

DCIG, Inc. announced the availability of the DCIG 2018-19 All-flash Array Buyer’s Guide edition developed from its enterprise storage array body of research.

This 64-page report presents a fresh snapshot of the dynamic all-flash array (AFA) marketplace. It evaluates and ranks 32 enterprise class AFAs that achieved rankings of Recommended or Excellent based on a comprehensive scoring of product features. These products come from 7 vendors including Dell EMC, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Tegile.

The current generation of AFAs offer significant performance benefits and operational efficiencies when compared to legacy HDDs arrays and first-generation all-flash arrays. They have the potential to increase performance another 10x as array providers and enterprises identify and eliminate outdated disk-oriented constructs from the data path.

AFAs from Hitachi Vantara, HPE 3PAR, NetApp and Pure Storage all earned DCIG’s coveted Recommended ranking.

Huawei
Among these AFAs ranked as Recommended, Huawei upgraded its Dorado from high-performance all-flash block storage appliance to a more robust enterprise all-flash array in the following three key ways:
1. Integrated many of the enterprise data services from the OceanStor enterprise array product into Dorado
2. Increased scalability by bringing Huawei SmartMatrix scale-out architecture to Dorado, with announced support for up to 16 scale-out controllers
3. Doubled or quadrupled density and capacity by offering 15.36TB SAS and NVMe SSDs for Dorado, providing up to 36.9PB of raw flash storage in a single cluster

The Dorado6000 V3 and Dorado5000 V3 distinguish themselves from other Recommended products by their robust connectivity options. All Dorado V3 arrays support at least 128 storage networking ports of 32Gb FC or 10Gb iSCSI. All support at least 64 ports of 40Gb iSCSI or 56Gb InfiniBand.

This robust connectivity is a good fit for the performance claims Huawei makes for the Dorado V3 arrays. Further, The Dorado5000 V3 (NVMe) is one of the first commercially available arrays to implement NVMe. The array retains traditional frontend connectivity to application hosts but uses NVMe for backend connectivity to storage media. A PCIe switch in each controller connects with up to 25 dual-ported Huawei NVMe SSDs in the same 2U enclosure as the controller.

HPE
The HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20450 and 9450 products also earned a Recommended ranking. These two AFAs represent the middle of the HPE StoreServ AFA product line and provide up to 6.6PB of raw flash capacity with densities of up to 140TB per rack unit.

The HPE 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) enables rich data services with high performance. The ASIC enhances raw capacity/density with hardware-accelerated zero block detect and in-line block-level deduplication. The ASIC also accelerates thin provisioning, thin persistence, automated space reclamation, metadata operations, and manages the PCIe cluster-interconnect.

Its rich QoS features enable confident consolidation by guaranteeing the performance of critical applications through bandwidth, IOPS and latency thresholds. Management APIs and an SDK-enabled integration with 3rd party automation and infrastructure management frameworks free IT staff to focus on other business priorities.

HPE InfoSight’s cross-stack analytics tool, VMVision, helps IT teams fix problems quickly. InfoSight pinpoints the source of application performance issues whether the problem originates in storage, the network or the application host. InfoSight’s recommendation engine can recommend configuration changes for things like unbalanced nodes, unbalanced storage utilization, unbalanced drive configura¬tions, or capacity utilization.

Products from Dell EMC, HPE Nimble, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Tegile each earned DCIG’s ranking of Excellent.

Tegile
Among these AFAs Tegile’s IntelliFlash HD arrays pair Tegile’s IntelliFlash Metadata Accelerated active-active dual-controller unified block and file storage architecture with Western Digital Corporation’s SanDisk InfiniFlash dense flash enclosures to provide up to 1,280TB of raw flash capacity in 10 RU, achieving a raw density of 128TB/RU. Tegile recently added support for up to 12 40GbE ports across its products, one of the few vendors currently supporting 40GbE.

IntelliFlash arrays separate metadata from the primary data path, storing the metadata on high-performance memory devices. This separation of data optimizes functions such as in-line deduplication, in-line compression and snapshots, while simultaneously accelerating all I/O.

The Tegile N5800 and N5200 are all-NVMe arrays offering up to 154TB of storage in 2RU. The N5800 and N5200 use the same IntelliFlash software and offer the same front-end connectivity options as Tegile’s other all-flash arrays but back-end connectivity to SSDs is via NVMe.

The DCIG 2018-19 All-flash Array Buyer’s Guide helps businesses drive time and cost out of the all-flash array selection process by:
o Describing key product considerations and important changes in the marketplace
o Gathering normalized data about the features each product supports
o Providing an objective, third-party evaluation of those features from an end-user perspective
o Presenting product feature data in standardized one-page data sheets facilitates rapid feature-based comparisons

Access to this buyer’s guide edition is available at $995 through the following DCIG partner sites: TechTrove.

AFA Products reviewed
Dell EMC Unity 550F All-Flash
Dell EMC Unity 650F All-Flash
Dell EMC VMAX 250FX AFA
Dell EMC VMAX 450FX AFA
Hitachi Vantara VSP F400
Hitachi Vantara VSP F600
Hitachi Vantara VSP F800
Hitachi Vantara VSP F1500
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20450
HPE Nimble Storage AF5000 All Flash Array
HPE Nimble Storage AF7000 All Flash Array
HPE Nimble Storage AF9000 All Flash Array
Huawei OceanStor 5300F V5
Huawei OceanStor 5500F V5
Huawei OceanStor 5600F V5
Huawei OceanStor 5800F V5
Huawei OceanStor 6800F V5
Huawei OceanStor Dorado5000 V3 (NVMe)
Huawei OceanStor Dorado5000 V3 (SAS)
Huawei OceanStor Dorado6000 V3
NetApp AFF A200
NetApp AFF A300
Pure Storage FlashArray//M10
Pure Storage FlashArray//M20
Pure Storage FlashArray//M50
Pure Storage FlashArray//M70
Pure Storage FlashArray//X70
Tegile HD2040 Series
Tegile HD2080 Series
Tegile N5200
Tegile N5800

Read also:
DCIG 2017-18 All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide
Recommended: HPE 3par StorServe, Dell SC 9000, HDS VSP, Huawei OceanStor and NetApp AFF A300
2017.04.04 | Press Release