‘Turbo Charger’: HPE Doubles Nimble Performance With Storage Class Memory

‘This is like putting a turbo charger in your existing car,’ says Comport Consulting CTO Erik Krucker, ‘You don’t need a new engine. You want to get a little bit more performance out of it so you add on a turbo charger. That is what storage class memory allows you to do.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has doubled the performance of its popular Nimble storage platform by adding storage class memory cache to the system.

The addition of the storage class memory modules delivers up to twice the response times on “read-heavy workloads” with an average of sub-250 microseconds latency for its AF60 and AF80 all flash arrays, said HPE Vice President and General Manager of HPE Primera and Nimble Storage Omer Asad.

The new storage class memory performance is being added to the AF60 and AF80 platforms without a price increase, said Asad.

HPE is also offering storage class memory kits for the AF60 and AF80 installed base, he said. The storage class memory kit is priced at about 15 percent of the total cost of the system, said Asad.

The addition of storage class memory provides customers with a dramatic increase in performance without additional cost, said Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 314 on the CRN SP500.

“This vastly increases the performance you can get from the array,” he said. “It creates a large cache tier that allows the array to get that performance without having to go to an all NVMe array which is vastly more expensive than SSD.”

The storage class memory opens the door for partners like Comport to provide a huge boost in performance for customers with the Nimble storage class memory kits, said Krucker.

“We can help our customers meet their SLAs without having to sell them a new array,” he said. “This is like putting a turbo charger in your existing car. You don’t need a new engine. You want to get a little bit more performance out of it so you add on a turbo charger. That is what storage class memory allows you to do.”

The storage class memory is a big channel sales opportunity given the broad reach of the Nimble all flash platform, said Krucker. “Nimble has a broad appeal in the general purpose array market. That is where Nimble really shines.”

HPE is also bringing all-NVMe to it Primera system with the ability to deliver twice the number of SAP HANA nodes at half the price.

The Primera all NVMe addition is the equivalent of a “screaming” fast Ferrari compared to a turbo-charged Nimble Mustang, said Krucker. “This gives Primera the ultimate performance it can possibly have,” he said.

The “number one call to action” for partners in the wake of the increased performance for both Nimble and Primera is to move the Nimble and 3Par all flash systems to Nimble SCM systems and Primera all-NVMe systems, said Asad.