How HPE Nimble Storage Helps You Spend Less on Flash Storage

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The advanced data efficiency technologies from HPE Nimble Storage change the economics of flash and help you get the most out of your system’s flash capacity while improving flash media endurance. On your journey to the flash-driven data centre, it makes sense to make sure your flash storage offers superior capacity efficiency.

With the HPE Store More Guarantee, you can be confident that you’ll get the most from your flash investment. You’ll be able to store more data per raw terabyte with HPE and get more for less with better overall efficiency.

HPE backs this up with a guaranteed data compaction ratio for HPE Nimble Storage, based on your workloads and HPE Nimble Storage data efficiency technologies. It’s as simple as that.

What is HPE Nimble Storage?

HPE Nimble Storage is ultraefficient flash storage that dramatically changes the economics of flash and delivers a radically simple user experience for the enterprise. Deep integration and optimization of advanced data efficiency technologies automatically work to provide a complete solution with maximum efficiency to reduce the high cost and footprint of flash.

Designed for mixed-workload environments, HPE Nimble Storage data reduction operations are always-on for simplicity and ease of use, and run inline for peak efficiency without performance penalties. This not only increases the endurance of flash but also achieves consistent performance by not requiring resource-intensive, post-process tasks.

In addition, running data reduction inline provides predictable savings as data is loaded into your system and prevents running out of space due to deferred processing. Delivering complete data reduction with the HPE NimbleOS low-overhead operating system, flash performance is available and affordable for every workload.

5 ways HPE Nimble Storage delivers advanced data reduction

1. Always-on, inline deduplication

Deduplication on the HPE Nimble Storage array is highly efficient while maintaining high levels of performance. HPE Nimble Storage dedupe algorithms require far less memory in the array to manage and reduce the amount of data stored in a given volume of data. As a result, they manage more physical capacity with less memory, which means you spend less money on expensive flash.

Always-on removes the duplicates as the data arrives. High-performance write operations such as data copies, virtual machine (VM) moves or bulk data ingest do not shut down dedupe. This critical ability is the reason you don’t run out of space when running workloads that generate lots of duplicate blocks, such as parallel patch updates to a large number of VM images.

And by processing deduplication before any other data reduction techniques are applied, and before data is written to flash, HPE delivers better data efficiency and performance, and avoids high volumes of unnecessary writes, which cause premature flash-wear.

Navigating all the different data reduction ratios offered by every storage vendor out there can be difficult, because no two are alike. That’s why HPE goes beyond the ratio to focus on actual data consumption and capacity. Everyone’s ratios are going to be different, but with HPE you are guaranteed to store more data in the same, or less raw capacity than any competitive offering.

Want to know more about the impact of HPE Nimble Storage data reduction technologies in your environment? Find out how HPE Nimble Storage All-Flash arrays can simplify your storage and workload environment while reducing the cost and footprint of flash by speaking with your CDW representative.

2. Always-on, inline, adaptive compression

Advanced adaptive compression techniques automatically and dynamically switch between compression algorithms to deliver a reduced flash footprint and superior performance. HPE’s variable block size technique enables high-performance inline compression that helps eliminate the need to clump blocks together, avoiding the costly read-modify-write penalty on random updates incurred by competitive flash systems.

3. Block Folding

Block Folding achieves three goals: increased space efficiency to store more data, improved random write performance and enhanced flash endurance. Block Folding takes variably sized blocks resulting from deduplication and compression, and packs or folds them into large, storage-optimized chunks, which are then sequentially write-optimized to the storage media. The folding process naturally helps eliminate fragmentation, vastly reducing wear on flash and delivers superior write-optimized performance.

Random write performance also improves by coalescing random writes into a small number of sequential writes to the media. Sequential writes to the RAID groups dramatically reduce the number of RAID calculations needed and avoid read-modify-write activity associated with write-in-place RAID systems.

Using Block Folding, HPE Nimble Storage arrays offer one of the highest raw to effective ratios among major all-flash arrays while maintaining high levels of sustained, low-latency performance.

4. Automated thin provisioning

HPE Nimble Storage thin provisioning is completely automated and dynamically adjusts volume sizes for all workloads, automatically. This means you don’t need to worry about allocating volume sizes, you can simply let your workloads do their job and let HPE Nimble Storage take the worry out of provisioning.

5. Zero-pattern elimination

Zero-pattern elimination is a special case of compression and deduplication. If a block is full of zeros, rather than processing that block, HPE Nimble Storage frees the storage that would be associated with that data. For some workloads, such as databases that maintain initialized data blocks, this simple optimization substantially improves performance and data reduction.

To learn more about HPE’s intelligent storage solutions, visit CDW.ca/HPE