XMA’s Infrastructure Solutions Team are seeing a growing interest in dHCI from HPE.
XMA Solutions Director for Infrastructure – Jen Norman – and her team of Datacentre Architects take a closer look..
We’ve been designing and installing Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions for some time now, and between Myself and my Datacentre team we have over (*cough) 115 years (*ahem) engineering experience between us. So when HPE came to us with a disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure solution last year, apart from repeating the name several times over to ourselves, we got onboard and got involved. Now we are privileged to have completed our first dHCI live production solution deployments earlier this year.
What could you be facing?
So maybe your VMware system is running out of storage capacity, your servers are dated and you can’t upgrade to run the latest versions.
Ok. Well you’ve done some research and investigation. You want a hyperconverged replacement where you can run concurrent workloads, and like the idea of being able to scale out storage or compute separately. BUT it would be great if you could get this delivered, supported and managed as a single product.
What else might you need?
Well as standard, you want a storage system that has options for encryption, compression and deduplication, application consistent snapshots and advanced replication (ether synchronous or asynchronous) with near all-flash speed and sub-ms latency for always-on apps. That’s a given.
Definitely VMware clusters running on the latest compatible server hardware and block level storage.
A complete turnkey solution? One that is monitored from the application to the storage, proactive alerting and with the ability to predict and prevent infrastructure problems before they happen.
Nothing less than a system designed for 99.9999% availability – no single point of failure, hardware redundancies with the ability to tolerate 3 simultaneous drive failures!
And you’re pretty sure that Procurement will want the choice on finance options – including future proofing, cloud like financing, with integrated support.
Then you definitely need a HPE disaggregated hyperconverged solution (dHCI)
And you are not alone. Since its inception in 2019 we have seen successful installations in Local Government and Education, with interest and opportunities growing in the Corporate, Commercial Enterprise and Healthcare sectors.
It’s a winning combination
You take the power and performance of the HPE Nimble Storage array, with its self-managing flash storage.
Add industry-leading HPE ProLiant Servers, include HPE storage switches, and deploy VMware vSphere.
Then this is all preconfigured as a turnkey solution!
Then automate with full-stack intelligence and policy-based automation for VM-centric management.
But here’s the best bit……
Add the power of HPE InfoSight over all this, and you have full-stack predictive analytics and support automation working for you that predicts and prevents issues. Infosight auto-routes any complex issue directly to L3 HPE Nimble support.
HPE have streamlined their support portfolio to offer four service levels that are easier to understand, easier to align to business needs which gives you visibility into IT assets and support status from anywhere.
You can flexibility and independently grow compute and/or storage – adding new dHCI compatible storage and/or servers when required – for scale-out upgrades that are non-disruptive and transparent to applications.
Eliminate over provisioning and add only the resources when needed. The Timeless Storage means no worries today or tomorrow with all-inclusive software licensing, flat support pricing, no forklift upgrades, and an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years with Timeless Storage.
And, if you’re reading this thinking ‘well this sounds great but I’ve still got Gen9 (or 10) Proliant servers that are in warranty and I don’t want to replace them yet’.. Well HPE read your mind, (just kidding, they leave that to your home speaker system and asked Alexa what you thought), and have designed the solution so you can use the existing compute you already have in place, add a Nimble array and the dHCI software allowing you to convert everything in to a dHCI solution!
Is this Complex?
HPE Nimble storage arrays can be installed and be up and running in half a day requiring no external tools or software – we have completed installations where the HPE Nimble arrays that have been physically installed, configured, integrated and have test VMs running within hours ready for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). They can be All-Flash (AF) or Adaptive Flash (HF) for mixed, mainstream workloads, where cost-efficient flash performance is important. It is a Secondary Flash array for backup and DR while allowing you to put your backup data to work.
For the compute you have the HPE ProLiant Gen10 DL360 a performance driven dense server or DL380 for performance and expandability. These servers deliver security, agility and flexibility without compromise – with the knowledge that you can confidently deploy for virtualisation.
These are completed with a choice of Ethernet HPE storage switches to meet your budget and installation size.
Root Cause…. Could it be the network? A server fault or a storage fault?
Once installed HPE InfoSight can help you stop spending days searching for a root cause deep in your hybrid environment. Every second, HPE InfoSight collects and analyses data from more than 100,000 systems worldwide, and uses that intelligence to make every system smarter and more self-sufficient. The result? HPE InfoSight predicts and automatically resolves 86% of customer issues.
Where to go for more information:
Why choose XMA?
We are an HPE Platinum partner and have trained and Certified HPE sales and engineers with Master Accredited Solutions Experts (top-level credential validates technical skills) with experience in building and sizing advanced enterprise systems. Continually staying up to date with the latest technology updates, strategies and programs. One of our core values is “customer focus”. We put our customers at the heart of everything we do. We don’t just provide technology we provide solutions.
Written by Jennifer Norman, Solutions Director for Infrastructure
