transforming enterprise performance and …...the hpe nimble storage flash-array product offerings...

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Most businesses require speedy performance and high availability for their data and applications—and traditional hard-disk drive enterprise storage cannot keep up. Increasingly, organizations are turning to all flash and flash- based arrays to improve both issues, as they realize that the cost savings they provide cannot only be measured by cost per gigabyte. But for all its benefits, flash-based storage alone cannot close the “app-data gap” because the root cause of most of the problems this type of storage is expected to solve are caused by other data center issues that have nothing to do with storage. As a result, organizations need to find a flash-based solution like the HPE Nimble Storage array, powered by Intel ® Xeon ® processors, that offers intelligence as well as speed and reliability. This white paper delineates these challenges and recommends a solution that not only improves performance and reliability but leverages machine learning to solve problems before they can start. INTRODUCTION: WHEN DOWNTIME ISN’T AN OPTION Any business with an online presence (which is to say most businesses) depends on speed and reliability. Customers demand websites that load instantly and apps that are responsive and easy to use. In addition, they expect them to work smoothly and continuously, no matter where they are, what device they may be using, or what time of day it is—or year, for that matter. To maintain speed and ease of use, enterprises need a storage solution that is reliable as well as fast. They need proven failover capabilities that ensure standby systems will handle the data load should the primary system goes down. They need their systems to be able to access multiple backups of data should the primary data source be incapacitated by a ransomware attack or other setback. And they need a storage solution that can scale as data volume continues to increase without any hiccups to the way that data is served to their customers. Edge Solutions | 1 WHITE PAPER TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY The Emergence of Intelligent Storage

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Page 1: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE AND …...The HPE Nimble Storage flash-array product offerings consist of three types: • HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays are built for speed and target

Most businesses require speedy performance and high availability for their data and applications—and traditional hard-disk drive enterprise storage cannot keep up. Increasingly, organizations are turning to all flash and flash-based arrays to improve both issues, as they realize that the cost savings they provide cannot only be measured by cost per gigabyte.

But for all its benefits, flash-based storage alone cannot close the “app-data gap” because the root cause of most of the problems this type of storage is expected to solve are caused by other data center issues that have nothing to do with storage. As a result, organizations need to find a flash-based solution like the HPE Nimble Storage array, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, that offers intelligence as well as speed and reliability. This white paper delineates these challenges and recommends a solution that not only improves performance and reliability but leverages machine learning to solve problems before they can start.

INTRODUCTION: WHEN DOWNTIME ISN’T AN OPTIONAny business with an online presence (which is to say most businesses) depends on speed and reliability. Customers demand websites that load instantly and apps that are responsive and easy to use. In addition, they expect them to work smoothly and continuously, no matter where they are, what device they may be using, or what time of day it is—or year, for that matter.

To maintain speed and ease of use, enterprises need a storage solution that is reliable as well as fast. They need proven failover capabilities that ensure standby systems will handle the data load should the primary system goes down. They need their systems to be able to access multiple backups of data should the primary data source be incapacitated by a ransomware attack or other setback. And they need a storage solution that can scale as data volume continues to increase without any hiccups to the way that data is served to their customers.

Edge Solutions | 1

WHITE PAPER

TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITYThe Emergence of Intelligent Storage

Page 2: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE AND …...The HPE Nimble Storage flash-array product offerings consist of three types: • HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays are built for speed and target

Moreover, enterprises need a storage solution, like the HPE Nimble Storage array, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, that doesn’t break their budgets. Given the ever-increasing complexity of hybrid IT systems, with their mixture of physical and virtual servers, public and private cloud services, legacy infrastructure, and current storage, among other parts—any new or improved storage solution, no matter how inexpensive it may be in upfront costs, could end up costing a fortune if it fails to work seamlessly with the data center to which it has been added.

WHY ENTERPRISE ORGANIZATIONS ARE MIGRATING TO FLASH ARRAYSIn response to these mounting demands, enterprise organizations increasingly are turning to all-flash and flash-based storage solutions. Flash-based storage is known for being significantly faster than traditional hard-disk drives (HDDs). Simple SSDs (Solid State Drives) are about 1,000 times faster than HDDs in performing random I/O tasks and boasts bandwidth of between 5–100 times faster than the fastest HDDs.1

Until recently, flash arrays were considered to be too expensive to be used in enterprise data centers. Increasingly, however, the capacity cost differential between SSDs and HDDs is dropping. Research firm IDC predicts that the price premium between SSDs and HDDs will decline from 6.6x in 2017 to 2.2x in 2021.2

Moreover, enterprises are realizing that comparing capacity costs is just one of many metrics that determines the overall cost of a storage solution. Enterprises now consider additional cost drivers, including:

• Greater storage density, enabling more storage capacity in a significantly smaller footprint

• Storage compression that enables enterprises to store more data in less space

• Minimal power usage that saves on operating cost• Longer lifespan than HDDs• Markedly better performance and bandwidth capabilities• Deduplication features that remove unnecessary data

redundancies • Ability to integrate with the entire IT infrastructure, no

matter how complex it may be or how it is distributed across the organization

And these advantages seem to be intensifying. In July 2017, research firm Gartner predicted that “Within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays (SSA) will improve in performance by a factor of 10, and double in density and cost-effectiveness, therefore changing the dynamics of the storage market.” Furthermore, Gartner predicts that by 2021, “50% of data centers will use SSAs for high-performance computing and big data workloads, up from less than 10% today.”3

FLASH-BASED STORAGE ALONE DOES NOT CURE THE APP-DATA GAPAlthough migrating to flash-based arrays will help enterprises improve speed and availability, it alone won’t solve what Nimble Storage, now a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has termed “the app-data gap.” Nimble defines the app-data gap as:

Th[e] performance gap between the data and the application creat[ing] a bottleneck that impacts productivity and ultimately damages a business’ ability to operate effectively.”

Nimble came up with this concept after it conducted a 2016 survey where it collected data from “a vast range of IT infrastructure across more than 7,500 customers.” The company analyzed “more than 12,000 anonymized cases documenting examples of app-data gap related issues.”

The survey’s most surprising discovery upends the conventional wisdom that data bottlenecks, slow applications, and hampered availability are primarily a storage-based issue. While 46% of these data and application delays were a result of storage-related problems, the majority of problems (54%) occur because of other components in the infrastructure stack: 4

• Configuration issues – 28%• Interoperability issues – 11%• Non-storage best practices that

impact performance – 8%• Host, compute, or VM-related issues – 7%

In other words, enterprises can no longer just blame storage for lack of availability or application slowdowns. Instead, they face a great deal of detective work in getting to the root cause of any data-delivery problems, needing time and resources they probably do not have.

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ENSURING AVAILABILITY AND PERFORMANCE: THE NEED FOR PREDICTIVE ANALYTICSTo meet the challenges of ensuring data availability and fast application performance, enterprise organizations must take a proactive approach to solving bottlenecks and related problems, one that prevents problems before they occur or minimizes the impact to end users should they occur. As a result, predictive analytics has become an essential tool in the data center.

Predictive analytics works by mining large amounts of relevant data to rank and correlate past problem behaviors to predict and contain future ones. To do so, predictive analytics uses machine learning that can ingest all that data and iteratively learn from previous situations. As the machine learning algorithm collects more information, it fine-tunes its analysis and leads to progressively faster response times.

For predictive analytics to work effectively in the case of performance and availability, it needs insight into multiple systems that contribute to accessing and serving data. Fortunately, HPE Nimble Storage, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, offers comprehensive flash-based storage solutions with predictive analytics baked right in.

NIMBLE: SMART, FLASH-BASED STORAGE FOR FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCEHPE Nimble Storage solutions are engineered to close the app-data gap—to the tune of 99.9999% availability.5 This “Six Nines” level of availability, which has been measured across its entire install base, translates to less than 25 seconds of downtime per year. HPE Nimble’s series of flash arrays deepens HPE’s leading-edge storage portfolio that includes HPE’s scalable midrange to high-end HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays and HPE SimpliVity solutions.

In addition to unparalleled availability, HPE Nimble Storage smart flash-based arrays offer enterprises the following benefits:

• Storage consolidation without compromising services levels of either applications or workloads

• Performance and capacity efficiency• Integrated data protection • Proactive wellness

The HPE Nimble Storage flash-array product offerings consist of three types:• HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays are built for speed and target

high-performance or latency-sensitive workloads where all-flash performance is critical. In addition to blazing speed, they offer up to 66% lower TCO than competing all flash arrays.6

• HPE Nimble Adaptive Flash Arrays combine high-performance flash with cost-optimized disk drives to achieve optimal price and performance for mixed workloads. The always-on data reduction delivers up to five times space savings without a performance penalty.7

• HPE Nimble Secondary Flash Arrays lets enterprises put their backup data to work. With inline deduplication and compression, they provide cost-effective storage for backup and disaster recovery, while combining flash performance that’s fast enough to run real workloads. Secondary Flash arrays have deep integration with Veeam backup software to simplify the data management lifecycle.

THE INFOSIGHT DIFFERENCEThere are a number of reasons why HPE Nimble Storage flash arrays offer such high levels of availability and reliability. It starts with HPE Nimble’s storage platform architecture, which is designed in a way that there is no single point of failure. In addition, all of the HPE Nimble Storage solutions have:

• Redundant components that provide fault tolerance• Software architecture that also is fault tolerant, as well as

robust data integrity that includes Triple+ Parity RAID and end-to-end integrity validation

• Dual controllers for non-disruptive upgrades—with no performance impact in case of controller failure

However, the HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics Engine truly sets HPE Nimble Storage apart from comparable storage offerings from competing vendors. Using diagnostic sensors that are embedded in every module of code—thousands of sensor collectors within every HPE Nimble system—HPE InfoSight collects and correlates millions of sensor data points per second across its entire install base, which is something it has accumulated and analyzed over the better part of a decade. Whenever a problem is discovered in the HPE Nimble install base, HPE InfoSight assigns predictive health signatures.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise specializations include Platinum: Converged Infrastructure, Networking, Storage.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

© 2018 Edge Solutions LLC. All rights reserved.

1 O’Reilly, Jim. “6 Ways SSDs Are Cheaper Than Hard Drives,” Network Computing, July 12, 2017.2 Mellor, Chris. “SSD price premium over disk faaaalling: Updated IDC SSD forecast sees 44 per cent capacity CAGR 2016-2021,” The Register, May 22, 2017.3 Filks, Valdis. Joseph Unsworth. Santhosh Rao. John Monroe, “Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays,”, July 13, 20174 Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime?” August 2017.5 Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “HPE Get 6-Nines Guarantee,” September 2017.6 Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays,” August 2017.7 The HPE Nimble Storage Operating System (NOS) is built to optimize the use of system resources including the CPU and memory. This enables the arrays to provide Always-on data reduction without affecting the storage performance that is delivered.8 Based on actual customer data collected by the HPE Nimble Storage Support organization.

Edge Solutions | 7 Old Roswell Street | Alpharetta, GA 30009(888) 861-8884 | www.edge-solutions.com | [email protected]

Then, HPE InfoSight uses pattern-matching algorithms to continuously search for signatures across the systems. And when a signature is detected, HPE InfoSight prevents the associated issue from occurring or proactively resolves it, regardless of its origin.

As a result, HPE InfoSight automatically resolves more than 86% of support cases,8 which saves IT teams from having to identify and troubleshoot those problems. In its ability to see across the entire infrastructure, HPE InfoSight also simplifies IT planning with prescriptive forecasts into capacity, performance, and bandwidth needs.

CONCLUSION: IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY HPE Nimble Storage flash-based arrays, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, provide a comprehensive storage solution to businesses seeking accelerated performance, ironclad availability, and data protection for their most valuable resource—their data. And backed by the complementary products and services from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE Nimble Storage frees businesses from having to deal with seemingly intractable performance problems to focus instead on providing products and services that improve their customers’ lives.

Contact us at (888) 861-8884 to make your transition to HPE Nimble Storage.

ABOUT EDGE SOLUTIONS Edge Solutions simplifies information technology by providing creative solutions in a multi-cloud world. By combining deep engineering expertise for next generation technologies with best-in-class consulting services, we help enterprises drive a cloud-adoption strategy to achieve business objectives.