HPE has added to its Alletra storage portfolio with the Alletra 5000, a line of hybrid arrays that combine flash and hard disk storage, aimed at cost-efficient performance for a mix of primary workloads and secondary backup and recovery.
The Alletra brand was announced last year as a cloud-native block storage platform where all of a customer’s arrays can be managed through a single SaaS-based cloud console. The existing Alletra 9000 and 6000 lines are all-NVMe flash storage, with the 9000 based on HPE’s Primera platform and the 6000 based on the venerable Nimble storage arrays
Alletra 5000 is likewise built on the code base in the Nimble platform, but is a hybrid array model. This is claimed to offer performance at a better price point, with HPE stating it is up to 25 percent faster than existing Nimble Storage Hybrid Flash Arrays.
Writes to hard disk are said to be at flash speeds through the use of write serialization, with dynamic flash caching to speed reads.
HPE says the Alletra 5000 family targets general-purpose workloads, including serving virtual machines, test and development of applications, as well as backup and recovery.
Each array ships in a 4U enclosure and can be fitted with up to 21 HDDs and six small form factor SSDs for flash cache purposes per base array. An additional 21 HDDs and three or six Flash Cache SSDs can be connected via an expansion shelf, with up to six of these supported.
Drive capacities supported by Alletra 5000 are 2, 4, 6, 10, and 14TB, with dual controllers and Fibre Channel and iSCSI host connectivity options.
The Alletra 5000 supports Triple+ Parity RAID as standard. This means that an array can handle three simultaneous drive failures without data loss and zero performance impact, HPE said.
Like other members of the Alletra range, the new arrays feature HPE’s InfoSight AIOps, which uses predictive analytics to detect and fix problems without manual intervention.
Three models are available initially, with the Alletra 5010 featuring 42-210TB of raw storage, the Alletra 5030 supporting 42-504TB, and the Alletra 5050 with 42TB up to 1.2PB. Customers can scale up to any model within the family.
Nimble Storage customers can also upgrade to an Alletra 5010 and get double the storage capacity at a similar price point to a comparable Nimble Storage Hybrid Array, HP claimed.
Another feature HPE likes to claim for the Alletra portfolio is simplicity of deployment. The claim is that customers can simply rack the infrastructure, plug in the power, connect the network cables, and within a few clicks, the new array will be configured and available to serve application workloads.
HPE said customers choosing Alletra 5000 have the option of capex or pay-per-use models, or a flexible as-a-service consumption model with HPE GreenLake. Pricing for the new array family was not disclosed, however.
A data sheet for the Alletra 5000 is available here [PDF]. ®
