Ten flawless years for HPE XP storage arrays

[StorageExperts]

We just hit 10 years without one second of downtime. Here’s how.

All XP storage arrays in production have a decade-long streak of flawless uptime, defying expectations. Find out how HPE unlocked extreme reliability. – By Wolfgang Privas, Business Development and Category Manager, HPE

We have a storage array that is designed to almost never go down. But somehow, over the past 10 years, it has literally never gone down. Yes, you read that right. Every single HPE XP storage array in production has seen 100% uptime over the last 10 years. This seems like a very unlikely achievement. Maybe you think I’m going to include some fine print or add a disclaimer. Nope. The XP storage array achieved 100% data availability for 10 straight years because it was designed to do just that. We’ve engineered around almost every possible component failure with architectural redundancy and rock-solid software that we test extensively. It’s extreme reliability for those who say, “One second of downtime a year is too much.”

You will commonly see storage array availability metrics like 5-9s. This means you can expect the device or service to be accessible 99.999% of the time. With 5-9s reliability, you can assume 0.001% downtime. Over a year, that’s 5 minutes and 15.36 seconds.

In 2014, we designed a 7-nines architecture with the XP7. At the time, this was a big leap forward in storage reliability, especially for mission critical applications that require zero downtime. But it wasn’t enough. We wanted to take the architecture further.

In 2019, we introduced the XP8 with 8-9s of extreme reliability. That means you can expect it to be accessible 99.999999% of the time. With 8-9s reliability, you can assume 0.000001% downtime. Over a year, that’s less than one-third of a second (0.315 seconds).

Fun fact: 8-9s is 99.9% less expected downtime than 5-9s

And that difference in 5-9s versus 8-9s can matter a lot. In fact, the customers who buy the XP8 want zero downtime. Eight-nines of reliability in a storage array is the maximum amount of reliability available today.

I’m humbled by this 10-year achievement. It would be amazing if “some” XPs over the past 10 years had never gone down. What’s truly remarkable is that “every” XP that was sold and put into production had 100% uptime. To put 10 years without one second of downtime into perspective, let’s extrapolate 8-9s across 10 years. 10 years of operations should have seen 3.154 seconds of downtime. What the XP has achieved is truly incredible because if you add up all the downtime for every XP in the past 10 years, it would be less than what you should see on just one 8-9s device. Amazing!

I’m not sure it’s possible to architect a storage array that we could market with 100% data availability. Even if we could design and build it, our lawyers probably wouldn’t let us say it. But they will let us add a 100% data availability guarantee to every XP we sell. It’s a guarantee that offers peace of mind for customers going forward. But looking backwards over the past 10 years, a guarantee has been unnecessary.

If you want to see why storage component failure is common in the average high-end storage array but why downtime is uncommon – and how XP had zero downtime for 10 years straight, check out this infographic: 10-years no outages on HPE XP Storage Array

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Wolfgang Privas, Business Development and Category Manager, HPE

Wolfgang develops and introduces programs to position and sell HPE XP Storage. Also as part of this role, he is responsible for product lifecycle of the XP platform from introduction to end of life. He also supports HPE and HPE Partner Sales in large customer engagements. Wolfgang has an extensive sales experience having worked successfully in multiple sales and sales management roles for more than 15 years. Prior to joining the worldwide HPE XP team he worked as EMEA product manager looking after HPE high-end storage systems.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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