The administrators of today’s virtual machines are tasked with what may seem practically impossible. The complex system requires multidomain experience under the constant pressure of supporting both traditional and modern applications, the nonstop battle against VM sprawl, and the ever-present need to cut costs.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) addresses many of these challenges, enabling compute, storage, and networking functions to be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure. It’s an ideal infrastructure for workloads with predictable growth, scaling compute and storage together. But what if your growth is unpredictable?

Introducing HPE Nimble Storage dHCI

What is it?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI extends the hyperconverged experience for workloads with unpredictable growth, where future apps and consolidation require different amounts of compute or .

What are the key benefits of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is:

• Intelligently simple, with native, full-stack intelligence from storage to VMs and policy-based automation for virtualized environments
• Absolutely resilient, with over six-nines of measured data availability and sub-ms of low-latency at consistent, high performance
• Efficiently scalable with the ability to independently scale compute and storage non-disruptively with industry-leading data efficiency guaranteed

Isn’t the term Dis-aggregated HyperConverged conflicting?

Not at all. Dis-aggregated refers to the ability to independently scale compute, network, and storage. HyperConverged refers to the flexibility, ease of use simplicity of HCI as well as the ability to converge multiple types of workloads. In 2019, IDC created a new category called Dis-aggregated HyperConverged.

What are the outcomes enabled by HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?

This intelligent platform disaggregates compute and storage, letting VM administrators accelerate time to market on a platform that flexibly scales while still integrating the hyperconverged control for simple management. To combat the firefighting that comes with always-on and always-performing applications, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI uses the most advanced artificial intelligence for infrastructure in the industry, to quickly diagnose performance problems and identify the root cause, automatically resolving 85-percent of problems without human intervention.

HPE Nimble Storage also breaks free from the rigid, inflexible infrastructure that leads to waste and anchors applications to either on-premises or public cloud – instead of a hybrid cloud solution. Independent scaling of performance and capacity provides flexibility for varying workloads, from transactional databases need more performance to data warehouses needing more capacity, avoiding costly overprovisioning.

What are the product lines that are included as part of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI configurations?

The product lines included with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI would be standard product lines for:

• HPE ProLiant DL (4Qx86 entry/value rack)
• HPE Nimble Storage (H5-H7)
• HPE switches depending on the switch type: HPE StoreFabric M-Series (1Y), Aruba 8325 (35), FlexFabric (NT)

How is HPE Pointnext Services involved in the dHCI offering?

HPE Pointnext Services is involved in two ways: for deployment services, where HPE Pointnext Services will be offering a deployment service and there will be a deployment SKU, and for support services (HPE Nimble Storage support and HPE Pointnext Services are currently working out the details on how best to ensure a good customer experience).

Does the new product solve a new customer problem, or does it serve existing customer segments?

For new customer problems, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI extends the hyperconverged experience to uses cases, complementing HPE SimpliVity.

For existing customer segments:

1. Customers who want HCI from an appliance perspective for workloads with predictable growth will win with HPE SimpliVity.
2. Customers who prefer disaggregated compute and storage for workloads with unpredictable growth will win with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.

Begin Your dHCI Transition Today With WEI

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is intelligently simple to use, ready for demanding applications, and built for efficiency at scale.

It extends the benefits of HCI to support workloads with unpredictable growth. Bring up full stack infrastructure in minutes and enjoy easy ongoing management through complete vCenter integration. You can also realize all-flash speed, native data integrity, guaranteed availability, data efficiency savings, and more.

Get the flexibility of converged with the simplicity of HCI by contacting WEI today.

The post Seven FAQs about HPE Nimble Storage dHCI appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Enterprise Storage

When was the last time you gave your storage solutions an in-depth and thorough review? Whichever enterprise storage solution you use for your organization, it’s important to make sure that the brain of your operations is working smoothly and data is flowing where it’s needed, when it’s needed. An enterprise storage checkup can determine the performance of an storage system and reveals how strong of a fit the system is for your enterprise.

For organizations looking into modernizing their storage infrastructure, here are 9 things about Nimble storage that are worth noting.

1. Nimble Storage is simple to manage. (You don’t need to be a storage admin.)
   Nimble Storage was designed for ease of use. The arrays are automated and simplified. There’s no need to know raid levels, drive types, and what to put where. The array is designed to know these requirements already.
   
2. Nimble Infosight pays attention.
   It details not only your array, but it also monitors the health of your virtual environment. Infosight will warn you if a VM is performing poorly and IT administrators are notified before they would otherwise realize something is wrong. It can suggest when to add more storage, more cache, or more performance proactively. Reports can be generated as needed for presentations or for backing up requests.
3. Dedupe support.
   Nimble’s latest OS (5.0.3) now supports dedupe and compression on spinning disks. Get the most out of your investment. This software is even backwards compatible for older models, so you can benefit more from your storage investment. It enables IT teams to pack more data into a smaller space to save power, cooling, and space charges.
4. Nimble is both a scale up and a scale out ²¹°ù°ù²¹²â.Ìý
   It is easy to add shelves and drives or combine up to 4 arrays to increase your storage. This gives you the most flexibility in storage expansion and design.
5. Less than 1 minute hold time before you reach a level 3 engineer
   Nobody likes to waste time on the phone with level 1 support. Get to the issue fast and a resolution faster.
   
6. 86% of opened cases are auto closed with a solution.
   Nimble Storage provides simple and fast support. A lot of issues have already been seen in other user’s environments. Nimble support correlates these issues and can resolve them quickly with known/proven solutions. Nimble will also proactively notify you of issues you may encounter so that you can avoid downtime or impacts to your environment.
7. Tightly integrates with Veeam.
   This provides the most functionality with your backups. Veeam integrated snapshots, replication awareness, and proven performance allow your backups to complete quickly and allows you to use your backups for more than just restores. You can spin up bubble environments to test upgrades/updates or new applications without impacting your production environment.
8. All flash arrays support triple parity+.
   You can lose up to 4 drives without a loss of data! One of the most resilient arrays on the market with a 6x9s uptime.
9. Quick setup and one of the fastest times to provisioning. Our engineers can install and configure your array in no time. This allows you to provision the storage in your environment quicker and expand your environment faster so that your business can be more agile. No more waiting weeks for implementation.

For many organizations, Nimble Storage is an essential tool contributing to digital transformation and a solution to consider in data center modernization initiatives. It brings benefits to a wide range of environments and is flexible enough to play well with many other technologies. Talk to WEI, an IT solutions provider and HPE Platinum Partner, to see if Nimble aligns with your enterprise storage needs and how it fits in your IT environment.

Next Steps: Do you want to get the most value from your storage investment? If so, download our white paper, “,” to learn whether your company could benefit from an enterprise storage checkup.

The post 9 Things To Know About Nimble Storage appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

The face of data storage in enterprise data centers has changed in the past few years with the rise to prominence of solid-state, or flash, storage. This advancement of storage technology has now become so widespread among enterprise IT infrastructures around the world that 49% of organizations surveyed by the indicated they already use flash technology, and another 38% have made plans to or are currently investigating the technology.

Flash or solid-state drive technology is seen commonly in devices from smartphones, laptops, and servers, but it has also revolutionized the storage array landscape. Of the organizations polled by ESG 63 percent reported using solid-state drives in storage subsystems today, 35 percent in all-flash arrays, and 30 percent as extended cache within hybrid storage systems.

Flash storage has increased in adoption due to its operational and economic benefits, ESG highlighted several of the following benefits from the survey respondents:

• Improved application performance
• Reduced power consumption
• Improved resource utilization
• Improved TCO
• Reduced operational expenses and improved SLAs

Better application performance isn’t flash storage’s only “plus”. Flash also brings significant decreases in power consumption over its HDD counterpart, dramatic reductions in rack and floor space, and features like data compression and deduplication that significantly maximize a healthy flash storage investment. Then there’s the decreasing cost per gigabyte of enterprise flash storage which makes it more accessible for many organizations. The timing on that is perfect because we are seeing more and more enterprise organizations struggle with accurately projecting storage needs with the exponential amount of data tied to critical applications and systems.

Data protection must adjust to cover exponential growth

Performance is a key benefit of a flash-based environment, and nearly 60 percent of current and potential users identified enhanced performance as a factor in their decision to deploy solid-state storage. But in an all-flash world, IT can’t let . By redefining the game for data storage, flash has also redefined the game for data protection by placing new requirements on the traditional mandate of speed and agility of recoveries, reliability of backup and recoveries, and increased speed or frequency of backups.

As far as features, flash storage is held to the same expectations of any enterprise environment including:

• Data deduplication for optimized storage footprint and TCO
• Application-consistent backups and hypervisor support
• Scalability
• Orchestration and automation of recovery processes
• Support of public and private cloud layers

These functions must be performed with no impact to production workloads. Data capture with tight data source storage integration is expected, as is data movement with direct data paths from primary to secondary storage. This is a commitment HPE has been working on with recent additions to its portfolio.

HPE Nimble and their 6-nines promise

According to the HPE website, is “smart enough to make 86% of problems disappear.” It leverages flash storage and predictive analytics to eliminate the app-data gap and guarantee 99.9999 percent availability.

Every second, HPE InfoSight analyzes and correlates millions of sensors from all of its globally deployed systems. As it works, it learns to predict and ultimately prevent the most common problems that can cause bottlenecks. In fact, ESG has quantified a 79 percent drop in operational expenditures related to costs and time spent managing storage.

Nimble Storage includes cloud native integration with AWS, Azure, and cloud-native API’s. () It is positioned as a very efficient family of arrays, with the ability to store more data per terabyte of flash storage than other all-flash arrays. It can also be combined with HPE Nimble Cloud Volumes for full cloud integration.

HPE Nimble delivers on more than just the sampling of benefits above. In case you missed it, HPE Nimble earned a spot in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays.

What does flash-integrated data protection look like?

(RMC) software integrates HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays with HPE StoreOnce Systems to provide a flash-integrated snapshot, replication and backup service that augments traditional backup approaches.

HPE RMC delivers the end-to-end data protection and rapid recovery that your applications demand, from the data center to the cloud, whether you use on-premises flash storage for its low latency and security, cloud for its flexibility and cost benefits, or if you employ a hybrid IT approach to achieve your right mix of storage. HPE RMC has proven benefits, such as:

• Fast – Deliver on SLAs with fast, non-disruptive, application consistent backup and recovery
• Efficient – Eliminate cost and complexity of traditional backup approaches with direct backup from HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble to StoreOnce
• Reliable – Protect applications with the performance of snapshots and the protection of backups
• Simple – Empower hypervisor and application owners to control backup and recovery direct and seamlessly from their preferred native interfaces

HPE RMC also delivers rapid, non-disruptive backup and online recovery. The solution eliminates the backup window and enables rapid online recovery with fast, non-disruptive, application-consistent snapshots. ( This reduces the backup impact on your applications, which supports the performance of your HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble flash deployment. HPE has really taken a holistic approach to the storage needs of the modern enterprise with these offerings, and WEI’s team of storage experts can help you determine which of these solutions (if any, or all, of them) are the right fit for your enterprise’s storage portfolio.

The takeaways

Flash storage is delivering on its promises of improved performance and efficiency, effectively changing storage and IT infrastructure in the data center as we know it. But it has also created a new set of requirements – particularly for data protection. In order to keep up the benefits delivered by flash technology, data protection processes have evolved to keep up with the sheer amount of data and speed at which it is being handled in storage.

HPE’s Nimble uses predictive analytics to recognize and resolve potential problems before they require support, and has cut expenses related to human management of storage by nearly 80 percent. With numbers like those, it might be worth taking a closer look. Contact the storage experts at WEI to learn how HPE Nimble, and HPE’s portfolio of storage and data protection solutions, can fit in your IT environment.

NEXT STEPS: Are you exploring flash storage or running into challenges managing it effectively? Check out our free download below to help you ensure you are making the right investment with flash storage.

The post Protecting Flash Environments with HPE Nimble Storage appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

• • IT as a service (ITaaS)
  • Efficient use cloud applications
  • Mobility, virtualization, and infrastructure modernization
  • Lower costs and risk

5 Reasons to Choose Nimble for Your Hybrid IT

1. Flexibility and Hybrid Storage. When HPE purchased Nimble Storage, they didn’t just acquire all-flash tech. Part of the acquisition also included Nimble hybrid storage, a predictive hybrid flash array. By using predictive analytics combined with hybrid flash performance, scalability, and availability, the Nimble Adaptive Flash array operates at an all-flash service level and storage system. It also has the ability to balance high performance at an “auto flash” service level while at the same time operating at a “minimal flash” service level, which gives your enterprise better optimization.

2. No Disruptions as You Scale and Grow. One of the beautiful aspects of Nimble architecture is its ability to scale-up seamlessly to grow the performance and capacity of an array without putting a halt on your enterprise. Attaching additional storage shelves allows Nimble to grow the capacity of a running system, while upgrades to the array’s controller modules scale the overall performance. Nimble also has the ability to scale-out in one managed cluster without disrupting processes. It joins together up to four arrays to build a scale-out cluster, which achieves both linear performance and capacity scaling.

3. Backup and Secondary Workloads. If your enterprise is looking for a solution that allows you to put your backup data to use, Nimble provides you that option. As a single device that is optimized for secondary storage tasks such as backup and disaster recovery, its flash performance also allows you to do real work with the secondary data sets. The solution instantly backs up and recovers data from any primary storage, and it saves time and space with always-on duplication. Flash performance also allows data protection administrators to perform instant restores, validate backups and more.

4. Data Security and Disaster Recovery. With more data being used with less infrastructure, thanks to the ability to manage large workloads with optimized consolidation, it is extremely important secure that data from external threats. HPE’s ability to mitigate risk in a hybrid IT environment is a major strength of its flash storage offerings. With its integrated data protection, risk is minimized in a hybrid IT environment through fully redundant hardware architecture and by using the speed of flash to protect workloads in .

5. Cloud Integration. Nimble Storage offers a range of “Predictive Flash” storage which offers simplicity and reliable performance, as well as cloud Essentially, it serves as a “flash fabric” across primary flash, secondary flash, and multi-cloud storage. The physical systems, together with public cloud storage service, provides a convenient way to establish and run the flexible data storage required by hybrid IT. This allows a free flow of data between onsite arrays and the cloud.

As tech continues to grow and evolve, the flexibility, adaptability, and optimization that flash storage solutions (such as Nimble) provide is going to be a necessity to keep up. Hybrid IT is about using a mixture of elements that work for your enterprise, an infrastructure solution that will no doubt be prominent for the foreseeable future. For these reasons, including the five listed above, hybrid and flash storage are a perfect match!

Still not sure you should invest in HPE’s Nimble Storage Solution? Contact WEI today for a personalized look at your enterprise’s hybrid IT strategy to find out how HPE Nimble can be used to your advantage.

Are you implementing a hybrid IT strategy? Are you running into challenges?

Check out our white paper, Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing a Hybrid IT Model, to best prepare for any unforeseen challenges.

The post 5 Reasons Why Nimble is the Flash Storage Solution for Hybrid IT appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

What storage solution can be found in both the enterprise and personal cell phones? Flash storage. It’s a flexible and compact option that does away with the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). While it is becoming more common to see flash in both the enterprise as well as consumer electronics, the similarities stop there. In this article, you will discover how is not just any other solution on the market and why you should choose their secondary flash array.

What is Flash Storage?

is a form of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory, or EEPROM; however, it is different than traditional EEPROM because it erases blocks of data rather than deleting one bit at a time. Unlike dynamic RAM (DRAM), standard EEPROM and flash are nonvolatile memory, meaning power is not needed in order to save your enterprise’s data with integrity.

As a solid-state storage option, there are no moving mechanical parts involved with flash storage, which reduces power consumption. And, since flash drives have no mechanical limitation for file access, they are able to retrieve information in microseconds, unlike hard disk drives which take milliseconds.

Nimble’s Secondary Flash Array Storage for Your Enterprise

Nimble Storage is built around reducing risk, improving reliability, and maximizing the productivity of your infrastructure and IT teams, while also giving your enterprise a competitive edge and making employees’ jobs easier.

Nimble’s secondary flash array is specifically optimized for the backup/disaster recovery and copy data management use cases. A flash cache provides performance to support recovery and also runs dormant workloads. Nimble’s snapshot-based replication allows fast, efficient data movement between Nimble’s all-flash arrays, hybrid flash arrays and secondary flash arrays. This secondary flash array also has a beefed up CPU and DRAM so inline compression and deduplication can be performed without impacting storage latencies. While most hybrid flash arrays in the industry do not do well in deduplication without impacting performance, it is a key component to Nimble’s secondary flash array.

Nimble’s triple parity plus RAID enables enterprise-class data integrity, no doubt a critical feature when optimizing workloads that have a high degree of data redundancy. You can expect, on average, an 18:1 data reduction ratio when used with Veeam.

Since it is optimized for snapshot-based backups to a flash tier, Nimble’s secondary flash array removes backup windows with zero impact to your host systems and with its excellent integration with Veeam in particular, secondary array flash use is particularly easy. The flash tier also provides near instant restores and offers the ability to run production or other workloads at full speed on space-efficient copies of the data. Workloads can include:

• Reporting
• Testing and development
• Quality assurance
• Analytics
• More

Further, with this type of storage you have the ability to test and verify backups for peace of mind. Replication enables disaster recovery configurations that leverage not only all-flash arrays, but also hybrid flash arrays, and ultimately public cloud environments. The platform also provides solid integration, with Nimble Cloud Volumes enabling an enterprise-grade multi-cloud storage service with the full feature set of the NimbleOS and a flexible “pay as you go” use model.

Nimble’s secondary flash array also brings other key Nimble features with it, such as Timeless Storage and cloud based predictive analytics. Through Timeless Storage, all Nimble arrays come with a , all-inclusive software licensing, flat support pricing, no-forklift upgrades, and an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years. InfoSight uses cloud based predictive analytics and machine learning to anticipate and prevent problems before they impact the business.

Final Thoughts on Nimble’s Flash Storage

Nimble’s flash storage, specifically its secondary flash array, offers your enterprise the security of storing your important data without the need for power and the ability to retrieve that data in microseconds. It also reduces downtime with the the ability to run production or other workloads at full speed on copies stored on the flash drive.

Ready to adopt flash storage? You might want to read through our tech brief, before you make a purchase. We certainly stand behind the move to flash storage, it’s the future of storage and offers monumental benefits, but our experience has showed that a flash storage decision is not one you make in a snap. One of the biggest mistakes companies make with a storage purchase is that they undersized it.

Talk to our storage team about your goals for flash and how you plan to use it; and we can help ensure you make a purchase that supports your needs now, and the future.

The post Why Your Enterprise Needs Nimble Flash Storage appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.