Explore new features and capabilities of HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus intelligent data storage server

[StorageExperts]

HPE recently introduced the newest member of the HPE Apollo 4000 family, the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus. It’s ideal for deeper data lakes and large scale analytics workloads. This new blog article explores some of the enhancements and technical advantages.

While I’ll be the first to tell you the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus is not a replacement for the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10, the fact of the matter is that there are some interesting new features in the 4200 Gen10 Plus that are worth talking about – and may open the door to satisfying ever-growing customer needs.

Driven by third generation Intel® Xeon® processor design, several changes have been made to the chassis and the server board. Most visible are the changes to the sheet metal and drive cages. There are now five drive cages supporting large form factor (LFF) and small form factor (SFF) drives. Drive cages one and two hold a total of 24 LFF or 48 SFF drives. When used, drive cages three, four, and five allow a total of 12 additional SFF drives. More on that in a minute.

HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus LFFThe Intel third-generation Xeon processors are designed to support PCIe Gen4. PCIe 4.0 is structurally similar to PCIe 3.0, with the primary advantage being a doubling of the bandwidth in PCIe 4.0.  The clear benefit is faster peripherals on the bus, with lower latency and higher bandwidth available. 

One of the peripherals from HPE using PCIe 4.0 is the performance-class Microchip SmartRAID SR932i-p storage controller. I mentioned the opportunity of using the optional drive cages three, four, and five to increase the storage potential of the Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus.  The SmartRAID SR932i-p storage controller is known as a tri-mode controller. That is, the controller supports SAS, SATA, or NVMe drives, and may be configured with either SFF HDD or SSD. By adding all-flash drives, companies like Scality can support features within their RING product such as “Burst Buffer” – without reducing the overall storage capacity of the server. In certain applications, “Burst Buffer” has already seen a 50% reduction in end-user latency.

If you’re not already familiar with OCP 3.0, you will be. OCP is the Open Compute Platform made up of industry leaders such as HPE and Intel. Initiated by Facebook in 2012, OCP is a community-based, community-developed standard. OCP NIC 3.0 is the culmination of the community’s efforts to create network interface cards (NICs) based on the standard. 

The standard has a goal of expanding the capabilities beyond the PCIe form factor. Today’s OCP NIC 3.0 cards are hot-pluggable,allowing you to install and repair the NIC without opening the server and powering it down. With the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus there is an OCP slot available on the rear of the chassis. NICs such as the Intel E810-CQDA2 provide dual-port 100 Gbit capability for the Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus.

Management of peripherals from multiple vendors can be a challenge in the best of circumstances. The OCP standard has thermal management built-in with a standard interface allowing monitoring software to monitor and manage temperature and power usage on any card that is OCP compatible. With the OCP standard, cards from any vendor should work within the platform.

HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus SFFFor high-performance OCP NIC 3.0 cards that generate more heat than a typical PCIe-based NIC. The Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus has designed in a multi-purpose slot directly above the OCP 3.0 slot allowing a special HPE OCP Thermal Enhancement Kit to be installed to keep the NIC operating a peak performance.

The Apollo 4200 Gen10 product has a long history with data lakes and analytics. It continues to be a primary workhorse in this arena, providing a mix of balanced compute capability in a storage optimized 2U from factor. For customers looking to increase the on-board analytics capability of the platform, the Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus provides the ability to customize the configuration with high-performance GPUs – and what is a growing opportunity – custom FPGA cards built to perform specific analytics processing.

The HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus is designed to handle the demanding thermal requirements these cards present. Of course, there are some trade-offs involved with using a GPU/FPGA. The Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus design makes drive trays three, four, and five optional. When using a GPU/FPGA drive cage three is not allowed.

The Apollo 4200 Gen10 remains a strategic product in the HPE storage family, with the Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus augmenting the portfolio with unique compute and higher bandwidth capabilities for specialized environments.

Learn more about the HPE Apollo 4000 Family portfolio. You can also find more specific technical information and specifications for the new HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus on our website.

Perry Merritt is a storage professional with more than 30 years in the computer storage community. He currently supports the Apollo 4000 family of storage servers along with SDS solutions including Scality RING.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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