HPE announced today its 5th generation of the Nimble storage portfolio.
Besides a new generation of hardware, some other new features were shown as well. Let’s take a look at what was announced:
New hardware
The 3 current platforms ( AF All Flash – CS Adaptive Flash and SF Secondary Flash) gets streamlined in 2 new platforms called AF All Flash and HF Adaptive Flash families.
The current 1000-9000 will be replaced by 20-80 models. A logical mapping is available between old and new systems. In general, IOPS will be higher in the same price category.
Notice the availability of a new AF20Q modell, which is a quarter-pop modell: 12 SSD’s will reside in 6 DFC’s (dual flash carrier).
Find here an overview of all new AFxx models:
Same story for the Adaptive Flash family:
There is also a mapping available for the old and new Adaptive Flash models.
Notice the SF Secondary Flash arrays which will be replaced by the Adaptive Flash models.
This is an overview of the available HFxx models:
On the hardware side a lot looks the same, still a 4U chassis with 24 drives with or without DFC’s, depending of the AF or HF series.
HPE Store More guarantee
HPE announced a new program called Store More guarantee.
With this program they guarantee that Nimble All Flash arrays will deliver the most effective capacity per raw TB of flash than other All Flash arrays.
This is done by getting lower overhead on the initial system before data reduction, which shows that after the typical data reduction like deduplication, compression and zero-block detection, at the end more free space will be available for customers.
Once I get more numbers and facts about this claim I will post about this since this is important after all. Get more with less…
SCM / NVMe ready platform
It is good to see that HPE Nimble hardware is ready for next generation storage types like NVMe and SCM storage. However, I did not get any real information about the internal connectivity and practical implementation of all this. I keep on chasing for this information and will update this article asap…
The only clear statement made was the fact that customers can upgrade in a non-disruptive way to the latest technologies. How this will be done practically was not available at time of publishing.
Inline always-on dedupe on Adaptive Flash arrays
Dedupe is now standard on all HF models, excluding the HF20C deep scale model that will support compression only. In the previous generation of hardware only CS3000/5000 supported deduplication.
My take
This is a typical hardware upgrade where we see new generations of processors will raise the performance of the systems. Since Nimble is an atypical storage platform where not the number of spindles but the controller defines the performance of the system, it is normal that using new CPU’s will raise the performance after all.
No announcements were made on synchronous replication, I hope this will be coming soon with a next update, since that is what we are really waiting for, no?
More information can be found on HPE Around the storage blog from Calvin Zito aka HPEStorageGuy
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