It’s time for another Around the Storage Block Chalk Talk. I’m your host and chalk
board writer the IT Oddfather Calvin Zito. In this Chalk Talk, we’re going
to do technical overview of the HPE Alletra 9000. I did a general overview of HPE Alletra when we
announced it back in May 2021 – you can click on “i" on the top right of the screen to see that.
A short summary of the HPE Alletra 9000 is that it is intelligent, cloud-managed storage. It’s:
• Predictive and gets smarter every second. • Simple to install, set-up and operate .
• Timeless experience that keeps getting better. • And it’s resilient,
non-disruptive easy updates and upgrades. The HPE Alletra 9000 is flexible to easily adapt
to any environment, powerful to handle anything, and resilient for end-to-end data protection.
In this Chalk Talk, we’ll explore that more. The 9000 combines the best technologies of HPE
the scalability and enterprise of HPE Primera and 3PAR, the AI-driven automation and self-healing
capabilities of HPE InfoSight and the secure cloud management inherited from Aruba Central.
Let’s look at what makes HPE Alletra 9000 mission critical.
• Massive parallelization with all-active and multi-note.
• 100% availability guarantee with every system.
• Best performance and density – certified for up to 96 SAP HANA nodes.
• And the most advanced disaster recovery and high availability with active stretch clustering.
It’s ideal for large scale databases and containers with large scale consolidation of databases, hypervisors, and containers.
Here’s the first of a couple of overwhelming graphics I’ll show you. This one looks at
the features of the 9000 series arrays. Pause the video and read through the list. Impressive, yes?
Ultimate performance needs ultimate hardware. Software-defined is great for
features and functionality. But it’s limited by general purpose hardware. Hardware defined
provide the highest possible performance but lack flexibility and can be complex to maintain.
HPE Alletra 9000 takes the best of both using general purpose Intel CPUs with HPE customer ASIC
acceleration for extreme performance without complexity by enabling features through software.
I want to also compare the 9000 architecture to traditional arrays.
Traditional modular storage arrays are usually built on a dual controller architecture with
limited flexibility and resiliency. Traditional monolithic storage arrays provide a high degree
of scalability and resiliency but at the cost of expensive and proprietary architectures.
HPE Alletra 9000 is built on an industry-standard Intel-based active/active node architecture.
Thanks to the ASICs, it scales almost linearly from two to four
nodes without the burden of a monolithic array. And virtualization of everything also has distinct
advantages. Traditional arrays have RAID sets with limited number of drives that limit performance.
They also require dedicated spare drives. With the 9000, all drives are virtualized
and concurrently used. Built in wide stripping makes things far easier and improves performance.
And the virtualized pool has all the services from all the drives like sparing,
RAID sets, snapshot space, dedup, compression and more. It’s all very seamless and easy.
I mentioned the 100% availability guarantee. It’s a standard no-cost feature of all HPE
Alletra 9000 systems. If you experience less than 100% availability, HPE will work
to resolve the issue and provide a credit that can be redeemed on future HPE Alletra 9000s.
Next is our Timeless Storage program. This is an option upfront service providing tech
refresh after 3 or 5 years at no additional cost. It keeps your 9000 current, reduces storage TCO,
no data migration, and no downtime and again, you can do it on a three or five year cycle.
A question that I hear is how do I manage HPE Alletra 9000. There are several options:
• Data Services Cloud Console is our cloud-based management tool. There’s
also the on-node UI and OneView integration. • There are CLIs for different OSes and PowerShell
as well as API based RESTful API and SMI-S. • We have our analytics that you can view
via the HPE InfoSight portal and there are multiple management integrations
like with VMware, Microsoft, Docker, Kubernetes and more.
Here’s another flyby graphic – that features Data Services Cloud Console that I mentioned
at the beginning and the AI-driven global intelligence of HPE InfoSight. I have Chalk Talks
on these and if you click the I at the top right, there’s a playlist that has more on all of these.
One of the legendary features that customers of 3PAR and HPE Primera know well
is Persistency features. Here they are briefly: • Persistent Cache. With four controllers,
your write cache data is always mirrored between two controllers.
• Persistent Ports enable the host paths to remain online with no IO disruptions in failure
situations and during online firmware upgrades. • Persistent Checksum delivers T10 Protection
Information for end-to-end data protection from the OS layer
to the HPE Alletra 9000 drives with no impact to applications or host operating systems.
I want to touch on flash optimization features. The HPE Alletra OS virtualization and hardware
abstraction optimizes the use of flash to minimize duplicate writes with features like deduplication,
compression, zero detect, and thin clones. It minimizes reservations
with allocation size, reservation-less always thin snaps, and system-wide sparing.
It maximizes net capacity through the data reduction and other technologies I mentioned
and maximizes the SSD life with adaptive sparing, adaptive writes, and data packing.
A picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to the life of flash.
Two numbers tell the story. 97.3% and over 90%. What do these mean? We have years of
telemetry data and hundreds of thousands of SSDs and between September 2012 and May 2021,
97.3% of all 3PAR and HPE Primera systems have reported SSD life left of over 90%.
Two more things – let’s look at simplifying disaster recovery and high availability.
There are a few options with HPE Alletra 9000: • Asynchronous Periodic Remote Copy allows for
an adjustable RPO of between one minute and several months at continental distances.
• Synchronous and Active Synchronous Remote Copy can be deployed at
metropolitan distances with an RPO of 0. • And Peer persistence based on synchronous
Remote Copy provides simultaneous transparent failover of host I/O from one to another HPE
Alletra storage system and has RPO and RTO of 0. And to wrap up, this is one of those place
where you should pause the video. Here’s the all-inclusive list of HPE Alletra 9000 software,
what’s in the OS and the other software that is included. It’s a long list.
I have an HPE Alletra 6000 deep dive so watch for it.
To learn more go to hpe.com/storage/alletra.
There's always a ton of information on our blog at hpe.com/storage/blog.
And you can find me on Twitter as @CalvinZito. Thanks for joining me on this Around the Storage Block Chalk Talk.