HPE has rebranded its Apollo 4000 data storage server line as the Alletra 4000, with two new products: the Alletra 4110 and 4120, both with Gen 4 Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors and PCIe 5 connectivity.
They join the all-NVMe Primera-based Alletra 9000, Nimble-based Alletra 6000 and Alletra 5000 hybrid arrays to provide a three-product lineup with three separate storage software systems.
The all-NVMe Alletra 4110 is a slim 1RU dual CPU server with up to 3TB of DDR5 memory and up to 20 EDSFF (E3.S) or SFF SSDs with up to 315 GB/sec of PCIe 5 bandwidth for the SSDs. We note Kioxia is shipping E3.S SSDs. Customers will get 307.2TB capacity with 20x 15.36TB SSDs.
The 4110 is built for performance-centric workloads – data stores for machine learning, distributed and NoSQL databases, high-performance software-defined storage, and data-heavy hyperconverged infrastructure.
The hybrid NVMe and higher capacity Alletra 4120 has one or two controllers in a 2RU chassis and up to 6TB of DDR5 memory. It is a successor to the Apollo 4200 Gen 10 server and a complement to the Apollo 4200 Gen 10 Plus server. The storage options are up to 24 LFF drives in front with 4 LFF, 12 EDSFF or 6 SFF drives in the rear, or up to 48 SFF drives in front with 12 EDSFF, or 6 SFF drives in the rear. You can have up to 225.6GB/sec of bandwidth to PCIe 5 NVMe, 24 Gbit/sec SAS, or 6 Gbit/sec SATA drives.
The maximum capacity is 734.4TB with 48x 15.36TB SAS SSDs and 480TB with 24x 20TB SAS SSDs.
It’s optimized for data-centric workloads spanning active analytics data lakes, software-defined storage, converged data protection, and deep archives.
Both the Alletra 4110 and 4120 offer GPU and FPGA support. They come from a zero trust starting point and provide security with a physical bezel lock, logical Configuration Lock, Secure Boot, FIPS 140-2 Smart Encryption, Self-Encrypting Drives, AES 256-bit encryption, and Secure Erase.
They are supported by HPE Integrated Lights Out 6 (iLO 6) which extends the hardware root of trust from protecting server firmware to protecting select storage and network controller firmware. A five-factor authentication model secures device connection to the GreenLake Cloud Platform. They can be managed by customers or consumed as a GreenLake service.
There will be Proliant servers with Sapphire rapids processors, but these Alletra 4000s are built to deliver storage and compute, not just compute – especially the 4110. Their NVMe drives and PCIe 5 support promise extremely high storage performance. They should be far more powerful in storage performance terms than the Alletra 9000, 6000 and 5000 – for now at least.
Explore HPE’s Alletra 4000 web resources here with a solution brief here. Both the 4110 and 4120 should be generally available in the second quarter this year.
