Around The Storage Block

I had a really hard time deciding on just one thing to talk about in my quarterly article – there’s been a lot happening in storage and I didn’t want to miss the chance to tell you about it all. So this article will be a bit of a potpourri of news I want to share with you. So here we go!

HPE SimpliVity advances edge leadership!

We had a big HPE SimpliVity moment in early March. The focus was on expanded data protection solutions we have now with HPE SimpliVity. I have a new Chalk Talk that does a good job of summarizing what we’ve done, so be sure to watch it. I’ll pull a little bit from our announcement blog to give it to you in this article.

HPE has announced the industry’s most complete and automated data protection solution for the edge – building on HPE SimpliVity’s built-in, near-instant recovery capabilities to now include a simple and efficient direct-to-cloud backup service and cost-effective, centralized backup for compliance and long-term retention.

• HPE SimpliVity with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup enables edge sites to simply and efficiently back up directly to public cloud. Through policy-based automation in the hyperconverged platform, backups can be easily set up directly from vCenter, without additional software or appliances needed. When the time comes to restore back to on-premises edge sites, it’s a 3-click process without any egress charges. HPE SimpliVity with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup optimizes costs with consumption-based pricing, and the solution’s data efficiency limits bandwidth usage and data storage in the cloud.
• HPE SimpliVity with HPE StoreOnce offers a centralized, cost effective backup solution for customers who have long-term data retention needs or compliance requirements. The new solution reduces complexity, cost, and risk by easily replicating apps and data from HPE SimpliVity directly to HPE StoreOnce, and thanks to 20:1 data efficiency, it enables fast restores in 3 simple clicks. Plus, you can create fully automated backup policies in less than a minute for thousands of VMs across multiple sites, saving you time and worry, knowing your data is protected.

There’s also a very good technical blog post that dives into what’s new with HPE SimpliVity 4.1.0.

Veeam v11 is here – listen to the podcast!

At the end of February, Veeam released their highly anticipated v11. The big ticket items that is new in this included Continuous Data Protection, additional Ransomware protection, and new Instant Recovery features. I’m also excited about changes that Veeam has made that really benefits customers that are using HPE Apollo as an all-in-one Veeam Backup Appliance. Here’s a bit of what I wrote in my blog post that looked at Veeam v11:

One of the discussions Michael (Cade from Veeam) and I had (towards the end of the “other features” section of the podcast) was using the HPE Apollo 4500 as an all-in-one backup appliance. This means you’re using it to run your Veeam Backup software and as the target for your backup. In a weekly Veeam Forums email, Anton Gostev Sr VP of product management at Veeam was gushing about the work that had been done by HPE and specifically my colleague Federico Venier.  When I want to get details about HPE Storage and Veeam, I go to him. I want to share part of the email that Anton shared about the work Federico has done:

One area where v11 really changes the game is all-in-one backup appliances: deployments where all Veeam components are installed on a single server with lots of disks. Those who follow this digest closely know I’ve been promoting the usage of general-purpose servers for Veeam deployment for many years now, and every release we kept enhancing the engine for this deployment scenario. But if it was more of an evolution before, v11 is the revolution because it more than doubles the backup performance per appliance.

To get there, we had to make many changes even to the most basic stuff – for example, how we write backup files content to storage! We also had to revisit our shared memory transport engine that passes data between source and target data movers running on the same box – incredibly, at these performance levels, even modern RAM speed can become a bottleneck if you don’t work with it optimally.

Finally, once this was all behind us, we ran into compute becoming the primary bottleneck on multi-CPU servers! So we had to implement full NUMA awareness and enhance our data movers placement logic to ensure they never end up on different CPUs.

If you’re already using Veeam or are considering it, go to my ATSB blog and you can listen to the podcast I have that dives deep into what’s new with Veeam v11.

How smart is your storage? Take the 1-minute Storage IQ survey

Sandeep Singh, our VP of marketing in HPE Storage wrote an article looking at how smart is your storage. We think that storage backed by AI-driven intelligence is important to your business. Sandeep’s article is a short look at what we define as “Storage IQ” and a survey you can take to find out for yourself. So be sure to check that out!

Experience HCI 2.0: Take dHCI for a test drive today

What is HCI 2.0? How is HPE Nimble Storage dHCI erasing HCI limitations? I have a recent Chalk Talk I did that summarizes our view of HCI 2.0 and looks at dHCI so that’s worth looking at. You can also see a summary of what sets dHCI apart on ATSB but more importantly, you can take a test drive of dHCI and see for yourself. The blog looks at a few of the capabilities you can see in the test drive: single dashboard view, VM-centric operations, flexible resource scaling, quickly resolve issues, and one click upgrades. So while I saved this article for last, I think it could be the most important of the things I’ve discussed because you can see it in action for yourself. So check the blog post on ATSB.

Wrapping it up

I’ve been expanding what I do beyond storage. And in fact over the last few weeks, I’ve done several Chalk Talks that cover some of the higher level topics we are focused on at HPE (and expect more to come). I wanted to point you to my most recent Chalk Talks:

• HPE GreenLake for private cloud – here’s also a playlist of all my HPE GreenLake Chalk Talks.
• HPE solutions for telco
• What is HPE Complete? (this is more storage focused)
• Business Value of VDI solutions for hybrid digital workplace
• Dell EMC to HPE Nimble Storage (obviously more storage stuff here)

As always, you can find our Around the Storage Block blog at hpe.com/storage/blog. You can find me on Twitter as @CalvinZito and feel free to find me on LinkedIn – but be sure to tell me you are a Connect member.

One last thing – I have been podcasting for over 10 years. For the first 281 episodes, the name of my podcast was “Around the Storage Block”. I’ve decided to change the name to “Around the IT Block” podcast. I’ve been expanding beyond storage to look at topics beyond storage so I thought the time was right to change the name. If you don’t already subscribe to it, there are links in my Veeam v11 blog post to subscribe to the podcast so check that out.