HPE has recast its hyperconverged systems, adding gen 2 AMD processors to increase power, raise VDI performance and cut costs for the work-from-home era.
These are general purpose systems but HPE’s messaging today is all about working from home, virtual desktops, and lowering costs. As part of this, HPE is making the Nimble Storage dHCI systems available though a Greenlake pay-as-you-go scheme. Greenlake already includes SimpliVity HCI systems.
Patrick Osborne, general manager of HPE SimpliVity, said in a statement: “The covid-19 global pandemic is an unprecedented situation that is affecting all businesses, our communities, and our way of life … customers are looking to rapidly unleash mobile productivity and desktop virtualization, and HPE SimpliVity and Nimble Storage dHCI solutions provide performance and flexible payment options for our customers.”
The low-end 1U SimpliVity 325 is based on the ProLiant DL325 Gen10 server, which uses a gen 2 AMD EPYC 7002 series processor.
On average, the SimpliVity 325 delivers double the virtual desktops per server than rival HCI vendors and cuts per-user VDI costs by 50 per cent, HPE claims. The higher capacity SimpliVity 380s continue to use Intel Xeon CPUs.
Nimble Storage dHCI twins a Nimble storage array with ProLiant servers and the supported server range is expanded to 32 models. This includes the DL325 and DL386 systems with gen 2 EPYC processors and Intel-powered DL560 and DL580 servers.
A Nimble dHCI software update includes one-click, unified software upgrades for the server firmware, hypervisor and storage software.
Rob Collins, head of infrastructure and service management at PetSure, gets some airtime in HPE’s press release: “In the past, we were using AWS for our VDI workloads, but the costs were too high for us. With HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, we are able to reduce our operating costs by 50 per cent, improve our performance 2X for our VDI workloads, and achieve 50 per cent faster application provisioning.”
You can check out a SimpliVity 325 spec sheet and the Nimble dHCI spec sheet.
The SimpliVity 325 Gen10 is on order now and ships at the end of the month. Nimble Storage dHCI systems, with the expanded server support and software upgrade, are available in the middle of the year. Current Nimble Storage dHCI systems are available now through GreenLake.
