HPE announced some major new features for its HyperConverged portfolio Simplivity 380 and 2600 with the release of Simplivity software 3.7.7.
Storage and CPU expansion
The current Simplivity portfolio consists of 5 different models from storage point of view, goind from ExtraSmall to ExtraLarge.
So far, customers who wanted to expand their cluster(s) of Simplivity nodes, needed to do this by adding additional Simplivity nodes.
On top of that, it was required that the storage size of those new nodes needed to be the same size as the exisiting nodes in a cluster, at least from the capacity point of view.
Sometimes this could be an issue, when a customer wanted to grow only their storage, without CPU and memory.
He always needed to add a new node, including CPU and memory power (and an additional hypervisor license) for that new node.
HPE announced today that it is now also possible to grow existing Gen10 nodes in a cluster with additional storage only. This is done by changing the amount of SSD’s based in the node. This gives more flexibility for future expansions with a lower cost point.
It will be possible to do storage upgrades from Small (5×1.92TB) to Medium (9×1.92TB) , and Medium (9×1.92TB) to Large (12×1.92TB) nodes.
The kit will contain all drives, cables, array controllers and licenses. Storage expansion must be executed by PointNext.
It will be possible now as well to upgrade single-CPU servers to dual-CPU nodes. It is obvious that the second CPU must match the existing CPU. Initially this will be only possible on Gen10 based 380 models.
HPE Simplivity software 3.7.7
This seems to be a big update as well on software side, after previous version 3.7.6, seen the big list if changes in the release notes.
Expanded hypervisor support
Simplivity 380 supports now officially as well the latest VMware Hypervisor releases 6.7 U1 and vCenter 6.7 U1.
Larger clusters
Current cluster size was 8 nodes in 1 cluster, this number is now extended to 16 nodes in a single cluster. The maximum of nodes in a Simplivity Federation is now 96.
Faster deployment
The deployment of a Simplivity cluster was already straightforward with the Simplivity Deployment Manager, however it was a single node installation once at a time…
With the newest software it will be possible to do parallel node deployments and upgrades, to accelerate the deployment and update window even further.
More information can be found in the updated Quickspecs.
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