HPE GreenLake for Block Storage offers far higher levels of resiliency and performance than public cloud offerings while retaining the ease of use and on-demand consumption of the cloud experience. See how as three of our expert team members dig deep into the topic.
In the modern enterprise, even as developers rush to leverage data for innovation and value, compliance teams remain concerned with protecting company assets and, well, complying with regulations. One risk category compliance is 
From a company perspective, it can be a significant challenge to strike the right balance between the need for speed, which these days means a cloud operational experience everywhere, and the desire for a strong, reliable IT foundation that keeps the auditors away. Fortunately, there’s HPE GreenLake, an edge-to-cloud platform that enables the best of both worlds – cloud-like convenience with extreme resiliency and performance – with no trade-offs.
The past decade has demonstrated the benefits of the cloud operational experience: it enables companies to go further, faster. However, even with the agility of cloud, the last few years have highlighted the crucial importance of also having a resilient organization that’s able to withstand disruptions or shocks from PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental) influences. In a recent Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey,[1] IDC analysts confirmed the challenges organizations face in ensuring resiliency for mission-critical applications. What are those challenges? Performance, security, and cost. In this context, how is an organization to strike the right balance?
SAP and HPE show the way
Let’s look at a specific use case. SAP HANA is a prime example of a mission-critical workload that supports strategic business transformation agendas and digital experiences around the world. HPE and SAP have maintained a collaborative partnership for over 30 years, with more than 25,000 shared customers worldwide. Never complacent, HPE and SAP continue to press forward, helping customers find their balance by reducing risk, bridging the digital divide, and accelerating innovation.
Recently, HPE announced HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, powered by HPE Alletra cloud-native data infrastructure. It’s the industry’s first block storage as-a-service offering to deliver self-service agility and guaranteed 100% availability.[2] Customers can finally realize the agility of the cloud operational experience while enjoying the performance, security, and resiliency required for their mission-critical and business-critical workloads.
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is the key element in delivering mission-critical workloads like SAP HANA as a service. Now, instead of spending time worrying about underlying hardware, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage enables customers to focus on business outcomes and service levels. It’s a subscription service that works much like a cloud offering – and it’s fully certified for SAP HANA. Customers simply choose storage based on their availability, performance, and capacity requirements, and HPE and its partner ecosystem handle the rest.
Exploring the power of STaaS
How does this storage as a service offering from HPE compare to other cloud solutions for SAP HANA? One of the biggest differences is availability. Customers using HPE GreenLake for Block Storage can choose a mission-critical option, which offers a 100% availability guarantee, or business-critical, which offers a 99.9999% availability guarantee. Both of these are significantly higher uptime than public cloud — and they can be adopted by existing MSP or customer IT operational models. Another critical distinction: because HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is dedicated infrastructure in the customer’s data center or colocation facility, the customer or service provider enjoys the added security of complete control.
Let’s look at the advantages of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage in detail.
Performance
Performance, especially the need for low latency, is a major factor in enterprise workload behavior. HPE has by far the highest performance density in the industry for SAP HANA solutions and is certified for up to 120 HANA nodes in just 4U of rack space. And when it comes to latency, important datasets like a database redo log require latencies substantially below 1ms; indeed, to be certified for SAP HANA, redo log writes must have consistent sub-ms latencies. HPE Alletra can go as low as 100 microseconds. Such low latency is a challenge to find in the public cloud, and prohibitively expensive to obtain. With HPE Alletra behind it, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage may deliver up to 20x better latency than standard public cloud offerings.[3]
Resiliency
In terms of resiliency, all HPE GreenLake for Block Storage offerings have, at a minimum, dual-parity RAID and extremely strict checksumming. In contrast, certain public cloud offerings may offer only 99.8-99.9% durability, which in the real world means that out of every 1000 volumes, one or two will be completely or partially lost every year.
Simplicity
Additionally, while enterprises are often bewildered by complex vendor invoices, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage offers customers a simplified billing experience that provides a transparent rate for consumed storage, regardless of whether the data replicates, reduces, compresses, or requires encryption. For instance, customers don’t pay a penalty if their data doesn’t compress or deduplicate. They are also not charged data ingress and egress fees, which can be quite expensive depending on how these systems are used. In short, this means mission-critical workloads delivered as part of HPE GreenLake potentially offer a lower total cost of ownership than available alternatives — including public cloud services.[4]
Wait, there’s more
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage can also auto-scale[5] to meet unexpected storage growth. Subscriptions start as low as 16TB and scale to hundreds of TBs – without downtime. Best of all, with HPE GreenLake, customers only pay for what they use. That means you can subscribe to the service and grow into new capacity without the upfront capital expense of storage that might not be used for years (or never: over-sized storage systems are quite common).
With HPE GreenLake, the infrastructure planning process suddenly becomes much simpler. You don’t have to predict exactly how much capacity you might use, and you don’t have to ask the business for all that money up front (which typically results in over-estimation “just to be safe”). Each month, you get a bill for what you are using, and you have instant access to usage trends on the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, so you can determine when your bill may go up, and by how much.[6]
Strike the right balance with HPE
By delivering industry-leading SLAs coupled with unrivalled ease of use, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage brings the cloud operational and consumption experience to mission- and business-critical workloads. It’s the ideal balance for your data infrastructure. Architecting for digital resiliency on HPE GreenLake for Block Storage eliminates infrastructure complexity and frees your teams to go further, faster. Meanwhile, the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform enables you to focus on business outcomes, maximize scarce resources, and leverage both talent and data to build new experiences that create more value for customers.
Check out HPE GreenLake for Block Storage
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- [1] Source: Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey, IDC May 2021
- [2] 100% Availability SLA requires Mission Critical Block Service, subject to shared responsibility model in GreenLake for Block Storage datasheet
- [3] https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/volume-types/
- [4] TCO comparison based on using publicly available information as of June 2022
- [5] Auto-scale supported with available variable capacity
- [6] Future portal tile enhancement
StorageExperts
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