Earlier this year, HPE announced their new “store, manage, protect” strategy. As part of these announcements was the release of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage and HPE GreenLake for File Storage, both powered by a newly HPE-developed storage architecture — Alletra MP.
This new architecture was seen internally within HPE storage leaders as revolutionary to the market, with a disaggregated design to independently scale performance or capacity, born in cloud management and multiprotocol platform personalities.
With Nexstor positioned as one of HPE’s leading storage partners, we were keen to become early adopters. Utilising this strong relationship, we became the First UK HPE Partner authorised to receive an Alletra MP demo system designed for HPE Greenlake for Block. We have written the following short blog series to share our insights and findings as a show and tell.
What is HPE Greenlake for Block Storage?
To answer this, I think the best place to start is to explain what HPE GreenLake is. The messaging has evolved and changed over the last few years; however, the simple answer is that it’s a single platform experience for all HPE products, solutions and services, and the much-desired single-user destination for new device onboarding, asset management, configuration and maintenance.
This cloud experience combines all routine and non-routine tasks in one MFA-secured platform for any solution consumed in any way – be it paid upfront, rental, subscription or flex consumption.
The HPE Greenlake platform provides the functionality to run the initial setup wizards and potentially the orchestration of said solution, limiting the time and effort required for crucial elements of the physical installation process. With the management capabilities of HPE GreenLake, the platform also enables the following functionalities:
- Review capacity, health and performance metrics
- Add, change and delete configuration items.
HPE’s ‘Journey to One’ vision is to combine all various websites and portals into 2 locations, support.hpe.com and cloud.hpe.com.
Alletra MP for Block Explained
Alletra MP, the latest storage hardware platform released under HPE Alletra, powers HPE GreenLake for Block Storage. While the MP stands for multiprotocol, remember that this isn’t Unified Storage. The Alletra MP cannot run both Block and File on the same system.
Instead, Alletra MP comes in 2 flavours (or personalities): Block or File. The two flavours are based on the same hardware and architecture; the only difference is the OS each ships with and, potentially, the connectivity media. So Alletra MP can technically be considered multiprotocol because it can be either Block or File.
What’s especially valuable about this platform is its simplified and standardised “Lego block” architecture and how it can enable significantly faster delivery times: solving a problem that the IT industry has been seeing a lot of these days.
Here’s how it works. UK channels can hold stock of Alletra MP base units. Then when a solution needs to be shipped to a site, the corresponding personality to the solution type — Block or File — is then loaded onto the hardware and shipped out. This will inevitably give HPE customers a far more simple, yet dynamic mechanism for expanding or deploying storage, whether it’s Block iSCSI, FC, NFS, ISCSI, SMB or S3… a way of working that hasn’t been seen before.
This is just the beginning. In this series of short articles, I’ll be sharing my insights and opinions on GreenLake for Block Storage. Check them out below!
And if you’d like to get more specific guidance on how your business can benefit from HPE solutions, just get in touch with one of our experts here at Nexstor.
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