HPE Nimble Storage news: Bigger, faster, better

CalvinZito · ‎05-07-2018

Several times a year I have the privilege of sharing our latest storage news. Today is one of those days and I have HPE Nimble Storage news to share with you.

Our announcement is centered on new hardware and as you'd expect, it brings bigger, faster and better price-performance. But that's not all, and in this blog post I'll discuss it.

Summarizing what's new

My favorite means of communication is my ChalkTalks. And I have one for your that summarizes the news. It's a good six-minute summary of the news, so here it is.

For those of you that would rather read the news, here's what I cover in the ChalkTalk.

Store more with HPE

When customers are considering their all-flash storage options, one of the first things they look at is the data reduction ratio – this is the combination of deduplication, compression and other factors that give you more all-flash capacity.

I remember in the early days of all-flash, one of the start-ups had a page that showed what their average deduplication and compression rates were. But are data reduction ratios really the most important thing? We’d like to suggest that what you should be considering is the effective capacity. With HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays, we guarantee that you’ll store more. Let me explain.

With any all-flash array, you have a certain capacity of your array before you start to load data. Some of your space is going to be consumed by the array’s OS, RAID, sparing, garbage collection and more. And that’s before any data reduction. With Nimble Storage, our overhead capacity is minimal and as a result, you don’t lose as much capacity as the other guys. And in fact, it has up to 20% more usable capacity. That's what we're showing on the bottom left side of this diagram.

I think you see where I’m going for here, don’t you? After we use data reduction techniques like deduplication, compression and zero block elimination, you get 5x more capacity or more. However, with that extra capacity we have over competitive arrays, you’ll end up with better effective capacity with your array. That means more capacity for your dollar, or Euro or whatever currency you spend. I have a Store More Guarantee ChalkTalk that has the details, so check it out.

SCM and NVMe ready

Storage Class Memory (or SCM) and NVMe are both important technologies to the future of all-flash. And with our HPE Timeless program, the new Nimble Storage arrays can take advantage of both these technologies. Here’s an important competitive difference: Other all-flash vendors are only talking about flash and NVMe. But the combination of NVMe and SCM outperforms NMVe and flash by up to 10x – so that’s why this is an important topic. We’ll have more on SCM/NVMe on ATSB.

New hardware

Next let’s look at the new hardware, starting with the Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays. This is the choice for your high-performance primary workloads. There are three benefits to highlight:

Sheer performance and scalability: Scale-up and scale out with always-on data services and QoS
33 to 66% less TCO – with 20% more usable capacity versus the competition and backup and DR at one-third of the cost
Absolute resiliency – backed up guaranteed six-nines availability

In the ChalkTalk, I dive into the new models of the All Flash Array, so watch the ChalkTalk to get the details.

Next is the Adaptive Flash Array. There are two categories of workloads to consider with the Adaptive Flash Array:

First is hybrid flash workloads – this is for mixed, primary workloads where cost-effective flash performance is your driving need.
The other is secondary flash workloads – and this is for backup and DR, allowing you to put your backup data to work. You may remember that we had launched the Secondary Flash Array last spring – so we now have one product that can address both hybrid flash and secondary flash workloads.

Inline always-on deduplication

And the last bit of news here that I’ll share is that we now have inline always-on deduplication across the Adaptive Flash Array family, except the HF20C which is cost optimized for compressible data and doesn't support deduplication.

So let me summarize the announcement for you:

We’re so confident about our capacity efficiency that we have the HPE Store More Guarantee. Check out my ChalkTalk.
HPE Nimble Storage is Storage Class Memory and NVMe ready.
We have new Nimble Storage hardware for All Fash and Adaptive Flash arrays.
And we now have inline always-on deduplication for the Adaptive Flash arrays.

Get more info

Here are some links to resources on hpe.com that you can check out (now that they are live):

Blogs on ATSB

My colleague and product marketing manager Andre Franklin has several posts that dive deeper into the news.

HPE Nimble Storage: Bigger, faster flash storage. But is it better? Of course, it's better but read Andre's take on why.
HPE Store More Guarantee: Squeeze the most data per TB with HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays
You'll be able to see them all with this ATSB label Storage News. We use this label on all of our storage news blog posts but the latest will be on the top of this link so check it over the next several days for more details on our news today.

HPE Nimble Storage news: Bigger, faster, better

CalvinZito

Hewlett Packard Enterprise International