As you look to capture, manage, and protect customer data from the cloud to the edge of your enterprise, you need something purpose-built to provide high availability, low latency and keep sensitive data secure.

We’ve found that HPE’s newest Enterprise Storage Array – the HPE Alletra – is a good choice for all these reasons as well as for its as-a-service options which offer some great cost-savings benefits.

The HPE Alletra provides improved and enhanced architectures based on the HPE Nimble and Primera enterprise-class arrays, and there are a few devices in the family that are worth considering depending on your storage requirements.

The Alletra 5000 is a hybrid array, supporting spinning hard drives as well as non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash for solid state drives (SSDs). The Alletra 6000 is an all-flash array which is purpose built for NVMe SSD drives. On the higher end is the Alletra 9000, based on HPE Primera’s high performance intelligent storage system, providing a mesh for controller node architecture, and supporting NVMe SSDs.

Each of the arrays can protect and ensure that data is available even in the case of a failure. Each array is fully redundant in terms of power, drives and SAN connectivity.

HPE says that Alletra can support multiple individual drive failures while providing six nines (99.999999%) availability and 100% guaranteed availability for production uptime for mission critical storage.

HPE Alletra is Purpose Built for the Enterprise

In the past we used to have to performance tune each actual volume and block size based on the applications that were to be supported. There does not need to be any custom tuning for most applications when you’re running those on the Alletra. Workload profiles are optimized for certain applications like Microsoft SQL and Exchange, Oracle SAP, etc. You can select the workload profile based on the application being used and the volume is automatically optimized as necessary for the application. This automatically provides the best performance in terms of IO and latency for that application.

And this applies across any industry. In the financial industry, for example, a trading floor requires high speed transactions, and any kind of highly transactional database will require performance tuning which is easily achievable on the HPE Alletra platform.

Data Privacy, Regulatory Compliance, Security and Backups

Speaking of the financial industry, many similar industries have several data privacy and regulatory requirements. Using the Alletra arrays, you’re able to keep your sensitive data encrypted and secure for all production workloads. The HPE Alletra fully supports data at rest, so that data is encrypted when stored on the NVMe SSD drives, and data that’s transmitted by the array is protected through in-flight encryption.

The Alletra arrays can also be consumed as a service through the HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform, providing a public cloud “feel” with the protection of a private cloud. In that case, you might elect to have GreenLake managed services address all your infrastructure requirements. This can be extended to support compliance and security as well, including HIPAA, PCI and GDPR. Compliance experts at HPE can help identify what requirements need to be met and make sure they’re enforced as part of your infrastructure.

Also, we’ve seen companies under cyber-attacks, where attackers hack into a network and quickly delete production data and production backups, which can basically freeze a business altogether, and hold the company at ransom.

The ability to monitor the network and storage access 24/7 365 that HPE GreenLake can provide is critical to make sure that your data is secure. And if an attack occurs, it can be identified and remediated quickly to stop a cyber-attack from potentially immobilizing the business altogether.

Alletra is fully integrated with replication technologies like VMware Site Recovery Manager which make data disaster recovery failover transparent. In addition, Veeam integration leverages storage snapshots for backup and data protection. You also have the ability deploy the Alletra 5000 and 6000 series as a group of arrays working together, almost like a federation, to serve up storage.

Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud Environments

As I mentioned earlier, some of our customers have opted to consume the Alletra Storage Arrays as an HPE GreenLake as-a-service offering. Some customers choose to have storage run on premise or even via colocation which can be fully managed by HPE as part of a GreenLake managed services offering based on a minimum amount of storage consumed monthly over a period of three- to five-years.

In this way, Alletra plays very well in a hybrid and multi cloud environment where you can consume it like a public cloud, but more mission critical, performance-sensitive applications can be kept on-premise. Plus, they could be tied in with the managed services to provide a fully cloud-like consumption of storage.

Data Analytics

Alletra is fully integrated with HPE InfoSight which provides artificial intelligence capability against the array. HPE InfoSight provides end-to-end visibility and recommendations to enable quicker problem resolution and eliminate level one and level two support issues. It monitors the array, receives metadata from the array and helps monitor performance to look for any type of degraded aspect in the array to pinpoint and mitigate issues in the future. It also helps you with planning and forecasting future infrastructure needs of the business.

Data Efficiency and Cost Reduction

There is large data efficiency, through deduplication and compression, which can help you reduce storage capacity requirements. An average data savings, depending on the data type, could be five to one for most typical workloads.

 This means that fifty terabytes of active data in your production environment, due to data efficiency through compression and deduplication, may only result in ten terabytes of actual usable storage that is consumed. This efficiency will be even better for datasets with more duplicates like virtual desktops.

Overall, the HPE Alletra is worth a look and a demo when you’re considering an upgrade or migration for your critical storage.