Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced advancements to HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage, including an AI-driven, self-healing and self-optimized system that delivers real-time autonomous operations. This is part of a comprehensive update to the Intelligent Data Platform that provides customers with an AI-driven, built for cloud, as a service offering that results in unmatched application availability and performance, agility, and automation. New capabilities include:

• Self-optimizing system operations with embedded AI in HPE Primera, and advanced cross-stack analytics in HPE InfoSight for Hyper-V
• Disaster recovery from a metro-wide disaster with 3-site replication across global sites for HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage, and near-instant asynchronous replication for HPE Primera
• All-NVMe support for HPE Primera that improves performance density, and Storage Class Memory for HPE Nimble Storage that delivers 2X faster response times
• On-demand storage automation optimized for virtualization and containers for HPE Primera

“Now more than ever, to maintain business continuity, organizations must protect their data in order to operate efficiently and without disruption,” said Omer Asad, VP and GM of HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage. “HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage customers are able to accelerate innovation and adapt to the changing circumstances of their businesses, while also preserving cash flow via HPE GreenLake, without compromise to applications. HPE reduces risk, eliminates complexity and lowers costs associated with data protection, and has the world’s smartest storage that utilizes AI to self-optimize in real-time, giving customers the power to run their infrastructure with agility and reliability.”

“HPE has been a collaborator in developing our storage strategy and moving to HPE Primera has helped deliver solid infrastructure,” said Scott Hood, Senior Manager, Deloitte ITS, Deloitte Services LP. “We have mission-critical applications using HPE Primera and having an infrastructure that is simple to manage and self-optimized can save us time managing our IT systems so we can better focus on serving our customers.”

Today, businesses are looking to bring new applications to market rapidly, while still supporting existing ones, in order to accelerate the speed of business, agility and innovation. However, it is nearly impossible for IT to keep up because they remain tied down administering, tuning and supporting infrastructure that supports mission critical applications and data. As a result, IT is forced to sacrifice agility for reliability. Given this, customers now demand primary storage solutions that deliver the cloud experience without compromising the performance and availability of mission-critical applications and data. HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage overcome the agility versus reliability tradeoff between the public cloud and traditional enterprise storage by providing a modern, as-a-service experience through HPE GreenLake, combined with intelligence and automation that ensures applications are always-on and available.

“At Grove City College, we use technology to deliver unsurpassed learning capabilities, such as engaging video lectures and online courses that extend beyond the classroom,” said Vince Distasi, Chief Information Officer, Grove City College. “Availability is paramount to us so as a HPE 3PAR customer, we were excited to hear about HPE Primera and its 100% availability guarantee. It gives us the peace of mind we need, and we loved the fact we could keep our existing HPE 3PAR array and move it to a disaster recovery site for additional protection.”

“So far, our experiences with HPE Primera have exceeded our expectations,” Distasi continued. “The set-up and implementation process was transparent and seamless, and since we’ve had it in production, it’s accelerated our ability to deliver new and better services to our constantly-changing campus community.”

“As a customer owned public utility, we are committed to getting the most out of our IT resources while offering our customers the same level of innovation as our larger utility competitors,” said Mike Harris, CIO, Clark County Public Utilities. “That’s why we love our HPE Nimble Storage, because we don’t have to waste valuable time managing and fighting fires. HPE InfoSight’s excellent predictive analytics capability is integral to giving us peace of mind knowing we won’t have surprises from our storage environment.”

“Keeping our apps always on and always fast is also a big priority,” Harris continued. “We are excited about the new innovations for HPE Nimble storage to drive performance and business continuity.”

Avoid disruptions with autonomous operations and cross-stack analytics

In today’s fast-paced markets, IT teams and businesses cannot afford to lose time reacting to fire drills and issues in the data center. HPE InfoSight, the industry’s most advanced AI for infrastructure, helps IT teams focus on business priorities by predicting and preventing disruptions from storage to virtual machines (VM). HPE is taking intelligence to the next level by automatically acting on intelligence in HPE Primera to ensure mission-critical apps are always-on and always-fast.

HPE Primera is architected with an embedded AI engine that processes globally trained machine learning models to deliver real-time predictions into application behavior and performance patterns. Now, HPE Primera takes action on the predictions to self-optimize system operations in real-time by intelligently and dynamically optimizing resource utilization to ensure fast and predictable performance.

In addition, the complexity of virtualized infrastructure makes application performance and resource management challenging and time-consuming for IT. HPE InfoSight for HPE Nimble Storage is now the first to radically simplify VM management and enable customers with Hyper-V environments with cross-stack analytics that pinpoints abnormal performance issues between storage and VMs, and underutilized virtual resources.

Near-instant data recovery and automatic protection across global sites

Ensuring applications are protected requires data to be located in multiple places, with flexible options across sites to meet every service level agreement. HPE Primera raised the bar in the industry for mission-critical storage with 100% data availability guaranteed, and now includes enhanced HPE Peer Persistence that delivers transparent business continuity along with flexibility to replicate to a third site to recover from a metropolitan area disaster, and near-instant asynchronous replication over extended distances with a one minute recovery point objective.

With HPE Nimble Storage, enterprises have a highly available platform with six-nines of measured availability, HPE Peer Persistence with automatic failover across 2-sites, and asynchronous replication on-premises or to the cloud for extended distances. Now, multi-site replication enables 3-site replication – including to the cloud – delivering protection against a metro-wide disaster along with the flexibility in the cloud to use data for test/dev and analytics.

For both HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage, replication can be configured in minutes with no specialized storage skills, no additional software fees, and no professional services required.

Accelerating Applications with All-NVMe and Storage Class Memory

In order for enterprises to achieve the fastest data response times for demanding workloads, the right underlying storage architecture is required to maximize the benefit and economics of next-generation protocols and solid-state media – including NVMe and storage class memory (SCM). HPE Primera is designed with a multi-node, all-active architecture that delivers ultra-low latency with 75% of I/O within 250 μs latency1. Now, HPE Primera supports all-NVMe, bringing its massively parallel architecture to deliver higher performance density. For SAP HANA, HPE Primera with all-NVMe now supports 2X the number of SAP HANA nodes at half the price2.

SCM brings the disruptive potential of the speed of memory – but is cost prohibitive as a persistent storage tier. Unlike other vendors, HPE Nimble Storage is uniquely architected with a cache accelerated file system that efficiently optimizes read performance in hybrid configurations. This architecture has been optimized for SCM cache with SSD persistent storage to deliver 2X faster response times, with an average of sub-250 μs latency3, at near the price of an all-flash array4.

Accelerate application development with automated, on-demand storage

Across industries, organizations are transforming how they develop and deploy applications across hybrid cloud – with IT needing storage infrastructure to be more agile, more automated, and policy-driven to support evolving virtualization and container environments. For virtualization, virtual volumes (vVols) streamlines storage operations with VM-centric data services and policy-based automation. HPE Primera now supports vVols, joining HPE Nimble Storage, to deliver a comprehensive set of vVols capabilities, including disaster recovery with support for Site Recovery Manager.

“VMware and HPE are working together to make storage easier to manage as the pace of application development accelerates,” said Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, VMware. “HPE Storage is the leading partner in VMware Virtual Volumes™ (vVols) adoption, helping customers across the world automate storage provisioning for modern applications in VMware vSphere environments across the hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation.

For containers, organizations need persistent storage for stateful applications, requiring software-defined storage that enables self-service automation for developers. HPE Primera now supports the CSI Driver for Kubernetes, joining HPE Nimble Storage, to deliver a developer-centric storage experience for dynamic provisioning and enterprise data services. This enables persistent storage for mission-critical applications deployed on container orchestration platforms, including the HPE Container Platform.

Availability

The HPE Primera next-generation operating system, Primera OS 4.2, is available worldwide in Q3 2020 at no additional charge for HPE Primera customers with valid support contracts.

HPE Primera All-NVMe is now available for order globally direct and through channel partners.

HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes 1.1.1 is now available for HPE Primera.

HPE Nimble Storage 1.5TB Storage Class Memory Adapter Kits are globally available now (direct and through channel partners) for existing or new HPE Nimble Storage AF60 All Flash Arrays and HPE Nimble Storage AF80 All Flash Arrays.

HPE Nimble Storage 3 Site Replication is globally available now as part of NimbleOS 5.2 release for any HPE Nimble Storage customer with an active support contract

HPE InfoSight Cross Stack Analytics for Hyper-V will be globally available in July 2020 for any HPE Nimble Storage customer with an active support contract.

Additional Resources

Visit these blogs to learn more about the updates to HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage.