Introducing HPE Primera, the first storage unicorn with mythical powers

[StorageExperts]

Meet HPE Primera, enterprise storage for mission-critical apps that provides an on-demand experience, app-aware resiliency, and predictive acceleration.

In an attempt to explain the concept of opportunity cost, my college economics professor once told me that life is a series of tradeoffs. He talked about the exchange of one thing for another and how all decisions have consequences. Back then I was eighteen and I didn’t want to give anything up. I wanted it all: To do well in school yet attend all the parties. To spend money on frivolous stuff, yet have the savings to travel the world. And don’t get me started on choosing a major. . . 

Fast forward to today and time has taught me that my old economics professor was on to something. In life, it does seem like you can’t have your cake and eat it to. 

But why does that have to hold true for everything? I’ve spent the past decade working in storage. It’s generally accepted that if you need high-end storage with six 9s of availability for your most precious, mission-critical workloads than you have to make a series of tradeoffs on simplicity. Even worse, these tradeoffs never stop across the entire lifecycle of your storage.  For example, installation can be super complex. Tuning and troubleshooting can be never ending. And if you want to upgrade, you have to wheel in a new system and migrate all your data—a process that good take months to complete.

If data is at the heart of everything you do, how can you get ahead if you are weighed down by all this complexity?

The dawn of the intelligence era

Which brings me to why I’m so excited about our made this week at HPE Discover.  We introduced HPE Primera, a storage unicorn based on intelligence with the smarts to manage itself. I believe it ushers in a new era of storage for all your mission-critical apps.  Not only have we made it super simple but we’ve done this while raising the bar on resiliency and performance with an architecture built for NVMe and storage class memory (SCM).   

With HPE Primera. you get:

• An on-demand experience for instant app access to data consumed as a service. No waiting. No tuning. And no more forklift upgrades
• App-aware resiliency based on AI that sees the future to prevent disruptions before they happen
• Predictive acceleration with embedded AI to ensure your mission critical apps are not just fast some of the time, but all of the time

The reason why I call HPE Primera a storage unicorn is because of a series of innovations in intelligence, software, and hardware, as well as in the business model.   

Intelligence in the clouds and in the array

I don’t think I’m being too bold by stating HPE InfoSight has transformed how storage is managed and supported. Over the past decade, it has analyzed more than 1,250 trillion data points spanning storage, servers, and virtual machines. Through cloud-based machine learning, it has saved our customers over 1.5 million hours by predicting and preventing thousands of disruptions and providing automated recommendations. That’s a huge amount of time our customers get to spend pushing their business forward instead of looking back fighting fires.   

While other vendors try and catch up, we’re focused on extending the reach of HPE InfoSight. Our vision for intelligence is that it should live everywhere—so you can have access to insights where you need it and most importantly when you need it.

This is why HPE Primera leverages HPE InfoSight in the clouds and now embedded in the array to bring app-aware resiliency and instant insights to optimize your performance. It’s the industry’s only end-to-end AI pipeline for self-managing storage.

Built for NVMe and storage-class memory

Mission-critical means your apps can’t just be fast some of the time. They need to be fast all the time.

This is why HPE Primera was designed to get the most out of every resource. Why is this a big deal? If you were in a road race, would you hop on one foot as fast as you could? And save the other leg for when the first leg got tired? Of course not. You’d use both legs and sprint as fast as you could.       

We took the same approach with HPE Primera. This is why it has a unique, multi-node, all-active architecture to tap into more horsepower to reap the full benefits of NVMe and storage class memory.  Not only do you get mission critical resiliency, but you’re also freed from constant tuning because HPE Primera delivers balanced I/O across all physical components.

Consider it like on-demand video for mission-critical storage

These days, no one wants to wait for anything. For example, no one goes searching for a kiosk to rent a movie when you can stream it in a couple of clicks. This is the level of simplicity we bring to Tier-0 storage.

This on-demand storage experience is powered by the HPE Primera OS, which uniquely brings radical simplicity and advanced data services to mission critical apps. It’s designed for transparent upgrades, and deploying and upgrading data services independently. This means for the first time mission critical storage can be self-installed and self-upgraded in a matter minutes. No planning. No tuning. Just click away to enjoy a super simple user experience, improved resiliency, and faster access to new innovation.

Check out this new ChalkTalk video to learn more about HPE Primera:

Like a fine wine, HPE Primera gets better with age.

I mentioned this earlier, but forklift upgrades can be super painful. Migrations can take months. This is why HPE Primera is engineered to eliminate forklift upgrades with a non-disruptive process. With the Timeless Storage Program for HPE Primera we’ve transformed the entire ownership experience. No more forklift upgrades. All-inclusive software. Storage guarantees for peace of mind. Everything you could think of to make sure your investments get better with age.

We’re not done yet

But there’s “one more thing” (in the words of the great Steve Jobs). Since we’re talking about mission critical apps, availability is always going to be a top priority. With HPE Primera, we’re raising the bar on mission critical reliability. Every HPE Primera comes standard with 100% data availability guarantee. There’s no hidden terms and conditions. Read our solution brief and check it out for yourself.

Welcome to the (Prim)era of storage.

You may have to make some tradeoffs in life, but I refuse to believe the same holds true for your mission-critical apps.  With a 100% availability guaranteed combined with an on-demand storage experience, HPE Primera really does let you have your cake and eat it too.

 Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Matt Morrissey,  HPE Storage.