At HPE Discover, the company announced its new flagship storage platform. The HPE Primera family takes from both the HPE 3Par and HPE Nimble storage products and builds a new platform designed for high-availability and high-performance storage. This is HPE’s answer to the Dell EMC PowerMax in the Tier-0 storage segment. These are the storage systems that need maximum availability.
HPE Primera Storage
HPE Primera storage is designed as an active-active system for high-availability. From a performance perspective, the company is utilizing an ASIC accelerated design similar to HPE 3Par arrays. With that acceleration, it says using SAS SSDs works well since it is able to limit the impacts of features such as compression and deduplication.
From its Nimble acquisition, HPE has been rolling out InfoSight to more products and has the vision to move it deeper beyond storage and its Proliant server lines. With HPE InfoSight, Primera will be able to pro-actively recommend fixes both for issues that happen or may happen, in the array, as well as identify issues that sit above the array. An example of this is an unpatched VM that is creating performance issues. HPE InfoSight is able to recognize that pattern and recommend a fix.
HPE Primera storage is designed for mission-critical storage. The company says it is about simplicity “consumer-grade user experience” where customers can install and upgrade on their own. Primera has single click “zero risk” upgrades in five minutes. The rear of the unit was well-designed from a mechanical standpoint and we could easily pull out the floor demo unit’s various field replaceable units. The company says one can grow with data in place with online, inline, non-disruptive upgrades.
Given this proactive service, constant monitoring with predictive failure analytics, nondisruptive upgrades, and ease of physical service, HPE says it is able to guarantee 100% availability for Primera.
We asked, and HPE Primera will support storage class memory in the future, along with SAS3 and NVMe today. We recently covered that Dell EMC PowerMax Adopts Intel Optane DC D4800X as SCM. As one of HPE’s primary competitors, SCM is becoming a table stakes capability for this generation.
Final Words
As one would expect given HPE GreenLake Everything by 2022 or HPEaaS Strategy Launched coming out during the same Discover 2019 event, HPE Primera will be available via GreenLake.
We will see how HPE Primera evolves as new generations of storage technologies come out. We asked HPE on their approach to supporting technology beyond today’s PCIe Gen3 platforms. The Intel-based platform is able to be upgraded non-disruptively in the future to expand using larger and higher performance interconnects as they come out. HPE’s position is that Primera is an investment in critical infrastructure and so its job is to ensure customers who invest in the platform get the best performance over time.
What does it mean when it has 100% availability? 2 independent systems so the server has the data twice?
100% availability does NOT exist. Period. These platforms are designed by humans. Nuff said…
I doubt is truly 100%. Why not 2 controllers instead of 4 controllers to fulfill the availability. Look at its ASIC architecture design with co-sharing between 2 ‘separate boxes’ within one chassis. There is a problem for reliability if controller 1&2 failed within couple of seconds upon, or controller 3&4 fail via versa. ASIC chip need timing to resync. Hello.
I hope HPe engineering can dispute that.