[Calvin] Welcome to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise "Around the Storage Block"
video blog I'm your host Calvin Zito
A couple weeks ago we introduced
some new HPE Nimble Storage. We are here at VeeamOn with Chuck Roman long time HPE
employee working in the tech marketing watch the energy stuff scopes yeah hi
[Chuck] I'm Chuck Roman I'm with the HPE Nimble Storage technical market engineering
team and I'm going to talk about the AF 20 today. [Calvin] So, AF 20. People that don't know
this is the All-Flash - the new All-Flash Platform. [Chuck] That's correct this is the entry-level
product on our all-flash platform that we just updated last week.
[Calvin] Okay so why don't we take a look at the inside.
Okay. So what are we looking at here, Chuck?
[Chuck] This is the front bezel of the All-Flash Array and it's very familiar to Nimble
customers in the past we do have the new HPE Element as an aspect on the front of
the bezel its uniform the colors a little bit different it's the HPD green
you pull it off and turn it around you'll see that we still have the LEDs
that will illuminate had this been actually powered up and running at the
time. This is the all-flash model so we have
the same dual flash carriers we had in the previous generation. With the new
hardware we've actually rotated these 180 degrees so they're facing the other
direction but we have two banks of flash drives in the array the top row in each
of the dual flash carriers comprise one bank and the bottom row comprises the
other and you could take these out independently,
or if you need to remove the whole Flash carrier. Other than that it's very
similar to the previous generation if you're looking at it from the front.
[Calvin] I see we get 24 carriers each one holds two SSDs so 48 in a single enclosure?
[Chuck] That's correct and we actually have a the minimum configuration for
this we have a product the AF 20Q for quarter populated and if we're talking
about that model this first column of drives will be populated and the others
will just be dummy carriers in there but upgradeable.
You can add three more columns of drives to get a full
configuration then you can add additional storage on after you fill the array shelf.
[Calvin] What if we take a look at the RAID controller?
[Chuck] On the backside of the array we see the redundant components. We have the redundant power supplies these are
both 3000 watt power supplies you can remove one at a time and the array can
continue to run just off the power supplied by one of one of these supplies.
Then we have redundant controllers as well. We have an active standby
controller architecture in the Nimble Arrays and I'm going to take out one of
these since the array is not powered up neither one of them is an active
controller right now so I don't have to be too picky about having to take out.
As you can see, it's a fairly deep controller here.
I'm just going to set it on top of the array.
We have a lot of features inside I'm going to take off this plastic airflow
cover here and you see the two CPUs.
Yyou can see the DIMMs for the the memory for the controller and also
the non-volatile RAM in here.
It's powered by this capacitor here.
So you can provide power in the case of a power failure to back it up.
Back here we havea feature - the tool-less NIC cage. So on the Nimble controllers we have PCI slots to allow
you to choose which host interface you want.
We offer iSCSI and fiber channel as options and we have here in this
particular controller we have one of the PCI cards installed. You have slots for
two more up here it's very simple this thumb screw here you removed the cage
which on the inside can see that
there's another thumb screw here that
would enable me to take out these slot covers and make it very easy to put in
the additional NICs, reattach them and go forward. If you look in here while I have
this off, you can see we've got the SASS connections if you have expansion
shelves for this array. They need out these SASS ports. We have some
on-board management ports on the controller another board itself.
Our management diagnostics. We also have the boot drive there,
that's where the Nimble OS resides.
We just boot off of that. Kind of just a bootstrap process. Here are some additional elements we
have on the RAID storage itself.
[Calvin] So one of the questions we got a lot when we launched this was you know we
talked about being NVME-ready, storage class memory-ready. Wow is a customer
that buys this product going to be able to easily upgrade to those technologies?
[Chuck] Well it's gonna be kind of two answers to that. One, it's easy for us as HPE to
upgrade the controllers because of the modular architecture in these new
controllers. We have daughter cards we have
kind of plug-in aspects that we can replace easily with new technologies as
they become available and ready for use and then it's a matter of replacing the
controllers at the customer side. So we're not going to have them take their
controllers apart and put new pieces in. We're just going to ship them new
controllers and because we have an active standby architecture we just go
in they replace the standby controller with the new one,
fail-over to that and then replace the other controller with the new technology
and they're up and running with a non-destructive upgrade.
[Calvin] Well Chuck, I appreciate your time. That's been a
great look at the new Nimble AF arrays the all-flash storage arrays and appreciate you
taking a few minutes to tear one down for us.
[Chuck] Glad to do it. Tearing down is easy.
It's putting it back together that the hard part.
[Calvin] Oh you better hurry up because we're gonna have
customers coming by here in a minute.
I always love hearing from you on Twitter where you can find me at @CalvinZito.
Our blog is at hpe.com/storage/ blog. Until next time, thanks for joining me!