Top 5 reasons why HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is so popular

[StorageExperts]

The demand for disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure continues to grow, because of its many obvious benefits and use cases – but there are other reasons, too. HPE blogger Chuck Wood shares a few of the architecture’s hidden features and less well-known use cases.

Customer adoption for hyperconverged infrastructure – both the all-in-one systems and disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) – continues to grow. You might know the main reasons: benefits and key features like high performance, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. But what excites me most is the variety of use cases customers are finding for dHCI, and the lesser-known features that are starting to gain traction among data innovators. Some of these seemingly small features make an enormous difference for HPE customers.

Here are the top five hidden gems and best kept secrets of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.  

The right HCI for the workload without tuning or trade-offs

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a great fit for edge environments, but it’s not the best fit for IT environments with mixed workloads that include large virtual machines (VMs) and databases. These larger, more complex environments can force you to buy more HCI nodes than you actually need to satisfy capacity or performance requirements. These islands of overprovisioned compute and storage can be expensive and costly to manage for your business.

But you do have another option.

You can avoid wasteful overprovisioning with the flexible, independent scale of compute and storage that HPE Nimble Storage dHCI provides. Independent scalability helps lower costs, so you spend less on nodes and rack space, and you can avoid the VM hypervisor tax when storage expansion is required without compute. Customers I’ve talked to really like how the solution delivers peak and predictable performance without tuning or trade-offs.

With HPE Nimble Storage dHCI you get absolute resiliency with the ability to sustain three drive failures along with fantastic data reduction that is always on, and the performance is fast. Alternate solutions force you to tune your resiliency factor and tune dedupe and compression when performance is required. This tuning can create siloes for given workloads, resulting in overprovisioning with poor SLAs for your business. 

Automation like you’ve never seen in HCI, thanks to AIOps and vVols integration

Every year, businesses demand more automation to drive productivity.

Customers who use HPE Nimble dHCI to manage and drive their environments rave about the full stack automation and how easy it is to manage VMs. With HPE Nimble Storage dHCI all components are managed with VM-centric data services and resource management right from vCenter, via an HPE Infosight dashboard.

Dashboard view from HPE InfoSight

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI with HPE InfoSight is the industry’s only disaggregated HCI powered by artificial intelligence.

Customers love HPE InfoSight for its AIOps capabilities that improve cross-stack visibility and save time. One user says HPE InfoSight is like Google Maps, because of the way Google Maps leverages all drivers for crowd-sourced insights, then uses the real-time traffic updates to help you get to your destination via the best route. HPE InfoSight takes advantage of real-time customer data, along with VMware expertise, to help you quickly diagnose VMware issues, while making VM-centric recommendations for next steps.

Another user said that one of his favorite features of HPE InfoSight is that it uniquely provides a single interface to view and quickly troubleshoot a variety of VMware issues including performance. Before, he would have had to use five or more tools with more effort to accomplish the same tasks.  

Also, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has very good VMware vVols integration to speed application provisioning, using templates along with VM-centric automation to control policies such as QoS for performance, VM-level snapshot backups, and data reduction. IDC mentions vVols as one of the factors to consider when customers are expanding the HCI experience to more workloads[1].

Flexible scaling without overprovisioning

HPE Nimble Storage dHCILike HCI, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is modular and lets you start small and grow as needed, but it’s more flexible and efficient because the architecture disaggregates compute and storage. As one customer in the media and communications industry notes, “We need to store lots of data with high reliability. HPE Nimble dHCI is simple and scalable. We can easily add storage capacity without adding more compute. That makes it easier for IT to support the company’s growth.”

Efficient, disaggregated architecture also means that there’s no overprovisioning, which translates to no wasted resources. You can use dHCI to consolidate mixed workloads and to drive better performance for business-critical apps.

The ability to modernize in minutes without rip and replace

VM administrators gain simplified VM provisioning and storage management with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, and can reuse existing HPE ProLiant Gen9 and Gen10 servers as dHCI compute nodes. In just five simple steps, the environment can be ready in minutes.[2] This creates even more value for current HPE ProLiant customers. Another customer reports, “HPE Nimble Storage dHCI allowed us to simultaneously upgrade our entire virtual infrastructure stack within our budget and we were able to upgrade to the latest high-performance servers and GPUs for better VDI performance.”

Resiliency, efficiency, and performance you can trust – and monitor from vCenter

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is based on a storage foundation with proven 99.9999% availability across its installed base. Data reduction is always on, and you can easily see the savings right from within vCenter, as well as the HPE InfoSight executive dashboard. With HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, you get always-on, inline deduplication and compression — with zero compute overhead — and superior data efficiency across all NVMe/flash and hybrid models.

Several customers give glowing reviews about the performance of the solution, commenting that it provides the fastest possible storage all of the time, for all applications – and doesn’t force you to make trade-offs between high availability, data reduction, and performance. Plus, you can trust the support from HPE for the entire stack comprised of hypervisor with HPE ProLiant and HPE Nimble storage.

Of course, our product features just keep getting better. Recent enhancements to the solution include more choice of compute options, more HPE ProLiant models supported, and integration with the latest Intel and AMD processors. HPE also added the ability to order either VMware ESXi 6.7 or 7.0 pre-installed from the factory with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.

I hope you found information in this blog that will help you plan for and build out your hyperconverged infrastructure.

For more information, check out these resources:

• A comprehensive guide to evaluating HCI: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Buyer’s Guide
• 8-minute demo video: HPE Nimble Storage dHCI
• eBook: HCI 2.0 from HPE – Powering through to innovation
• Learn how customers are successfully leveraging disaggregated HCI here.

Also check this out to learn the Top five reasons to keep Microsoft apps on HPE Nimble Storage DHCI.

[1] IDC, Expanding the HCI Experience to More Workloads: Factors to Consider

[2] ESG Technical Validation: HPE Nimble Storage dHCI

Chuck Wood is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for HPE Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure. He is responsible for all phases of product marketing, leading hyperconverged solutions for software-defined, dynamic datacenters. He blogs about his professional passion – demonstrating excellent customer outcomes based on HPE HCI and dHCI.

Connect with Chuck on LinkedIn. Find him on Twitter @chasypwood.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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