HP Helion Synergy - The Hardware 2017

[Chili_Colorado]

Consider this picture.  What we have here is a full-on Helion  Synergy Openstack 5.0 hardware setup. 

HPE Synergy with Helion Cloudsystem 10

Now let's talk about what this baby can do.

[Chili_Colorado]

The above system is fitted with all of the parts necessary to use the Synergy Composer for dynamyic configuration of the Hardware.  Yes.  That is what they tell me.  I am currently learning what this means with the idea that some day soon I may actaully buy one of these things.

[Chili_Colorado]

Hmm.  216 people have read my post and chekced out my picture, but no comments yet.  I believe this is a major bottleneck to adoption of Openstack in the mainstream.  It is just possible that there just are not very many people who have installed HP Helion, and are actually running their environments on the platform.  Presumably HPE has labs where some nerds are working tirelessly with this exciting new technology.  If this is true I want a tour, and coffee, and scones.  

Back to the project at hand.  As designed this is the configuration summary for that 3Par:

Impressive numbers indeed.

And it comes with a hefty price tag as well.  This little chart is also part of the report:

I believe that this says read/write latency peaks when I reach the maximum IOPs above.  And if I can just stay under 112,000 IOPs the latency is fairly constant .4ms.  OK.  I can live with that, but in my environment I only have 3 VMs that break the 10,000 IOPs barrier.  This seems like overkill for me.

[Chili_Colorado]

Apparently I have an option.  The Synergy D3940 looks like it could fill the role of the 3par.  According to the HP documentation here >> https://www.hpe.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04815141.pdf on page 5 -

Manageability

The HPE Synergy D3940 Storage Module delivers fluid pools of storage resources to be composed, deployed and provisioned simply and quickly within a composable infrastrcutre environment. Deployment via templates and profiles and ongoing management is done through the Synergy Composer and HPE OneView version 3.0

and later

Yes it seems this will work perfectly with the Helion Opestack, and quite likely save me money seeing that I have no need for those expensive switches or the 3Par itself.  Now my hardware configuration could look like this:

Now without 3Par.

That certainly looks much cleaner, but what about those IOPs I need?  And how about size?  Can that little thing have the capacity I will require?

Interesting.

According to HP's spec sheet here >> https://www.hpe.com/us/en/product-catalog/synergy/synergy-storage/pip.specifications.hpe-synergy-d3940-storage-module.1008615217.html

"Supports up to 40 SFF 12 G SAS or 6 G SATA HDDs or SSDs SAS HDDs, drive sizes up to 2TB SATA HDDs, drive sizes up to 2TB Solid State Drives, drives up to 3.84TB Maximum capacity per storage module is 153.6 TB (raw)"

That will do, and IOPs?

Back to the quickspecs PDF Page 1:

Additionally, the Synergy D3940 Storage Module is optimized for solid state drives using a high performance SAS connection with sixteen 12 Gb/s SAS lanes.  This allows a single Synergy storage module to deliver as much as 8 times the bandwidth of other JBOD options reaching up to 2M IOPs*

2 million IOPs ?  I can't complain about that.  I will return to my HP Sales Rep with this information and find out what he says.  In the meantime I seem to have a 10U single frame deployable Openstack solution.  Hopefully I am correct in all my assumptions.