HPE Alletra vs Nimble: The Future of Data Storage Management

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Keeping up with customer and employee demand to deploy digital tools and businesses need to store every form of data, requires a solution that can scale and consistently deliver reliable results. With this comes the demand for security, speed, efficiency, and lower costs which saw the data storage sector undergoing a significant paradigm shift.

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When it comes to your organisation’s storage needs, it’s crucial to take an agile and versatile approach. As such, there are several factors to consider when choosing a storage provider for your business, including:

Security: Make sure you have adequate security measures, such as data encryption, firewalls and routine security audits, built into your SLAs.

Data backup and recovery: It’s possible you may lose access to your data, either through human error or due to a cyberattack. When this happens, it’s vital that you can restore your data and continue business as usual.

Additional features: Some providers will offer basic storage plans, while others will bring extra and useful features, such as file sharing and collaboration tools.

Ultimately, your organisation’s choice of storage provider should turn on which option can meet the unique demands of your business. This means looking at what’s available and making an informed decision. That’s why in this blog we’re going to take a look at how the new Alletra Systems from HPE differs from the soon-to-be-retired Nimble Storage systems — the evolution of Nimble into a more flexible, scalable platform with added features. Let’s dive in.

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Introducing Nimble

In September 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprises announced they were acquiring Nimble Storage for $1.2 billion. The move was widely seen as a way for HPE to bolster their position in the growing flash storage market. It also brought together two companies with complementary strengths. Nimble, known for its industry-leading InfoSight platform, uses predictive analytics to help customers avoid storage problems before they arise. Conversely, HPE’s expertise included enterprise storage solutions. The acquisition allowed HPE to tap into Nimble’s innovative technology while expanding its own market share. As a result of the merger, HPE is now better positioned than ever to compete in the dynamic world of flash storage. In addition to the all-flash version, Nimble also provides a hybrid solution that offers the best of both worlds: the performance of a SAN (storage area network) and the flexibility of NAS (network-attached storage). HPE expanded its block storage range by adding the hybrid Alletra 5000, offering users enhanced capacity and consumption options while reducing costs. However, most businesses prefer the hybrid solution as it can be utilised for a whole array of situations. You can work effortlessly between the cloud-based storage facility and the company’s data centre with the hybrid system.

The benefits of Nimble

Nimble storage’s cutting-edge data storage solution offers a number of benefits for businesses of all sizes:

Significantly reduce the costs associated with data storage: By using a combination of flash memory and traditional hard drives, Nimble Storage is able to offer high performance at a fraction of the price of other data storage solutions.
Highly scalable: It’s the only data storage solution on the market that is designed to scale up and out with your business.
Rapid data access: Businesses can quickly retrieve the information they need, when they need it. Nimble has one of the fastest times to provisioning, which means you can install and configure your storage array almost instantly.
Intuitive support: Nimble Storage is intuitive – it compares your issues with previous cases, so there’s a solution ready for you, and you can avoid downtime.

Nimble Storage uses AI and machine learning to make your system smarter, more dependable, and tailored to your specific IT requirements. It’s an ideal solution for businesses seeking genuine hybrid cloud storage.

A new vision for data and infrastructure

Hewlett-Packard has always been an innovative leader in enterprise storage. They’ve helped organisations of all sizes, including Fortune 100 enterprises, to power their mission-critical applications across all major verticals. Last year, HPE announced that the company will be transforming from enterprise storage to data management. This has been a significant milestone in HPE’s vision to become an edge to cloud platform-as-a-service company. This transformation ushered in a new data services platform that transforms HPE storage into a cloud-native, software-defined data services business. The platform offers:

Streamlined access to the data innovators
Data protection against any threat
Mobilised data to help accelerate apps and insights from edge-to-cloud.

The transformation marked the beginning of HPE’s quest to transform data and infrastructure management for hybrid cloud through an innovative approach called Unified DataOps. The complexity of infrastructure in many organisations, particularly those with extensive histories, drives the need for Unified DataOps. Their infrastructure is frequently fragmented and driven by manual methods that have evolved over time.

What is Alletra?

HPE Alletra fuses Nimble and Primera — the most recent addition to HPE’s cloud-native data infrastructure. Data Services Cloud Console securely manages Alletra, providing a cloud-based operational experience. Alletra offers a spectrum of systems designed for all workloads, whether on-prem or in the cloud. This latest edition includes the HPE Alletra 6000 and 9000 server series. Both Alletra all-NVMe flash array variants — the Primera-based Alletra 9000 and the Nimble-derived Alletra 6000 provide the architectural flexibility required to run a wide range of applications without sacrificing performance.

Alletra 6000

Optimised for efficiency, HPE Alletra 6000 is built from the same robust and innovative DNA as HPE Nimble Storage. It provides industry-leading data efficiency and delivers rapid and consistent performance. With Alletra dual-controller 6000, business IT can transition from owning and maintaining data infrastructure to simply accessing and consuming it on demand on an as-a-service basis. Combining resilience with intelligence, Alletra offers a platform with no single point of failure and guaranteed 6-nines availability. With its cloud-native capabilities and optimisations for efficiency, Alletra 6000 is ideal for business-critical workloads and provides an exceptional platform for businesses looking to transition to the cloud. Alletra is the future for HPE and complements Nimble like no other.

Support for your data storage strategy

Alletra is certainly top of its class. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that businesses need to tailor their data storage strategies according to their needs. Partnering with Nexstor gives you access to various IT service solutions that can be configured and tailored to their specific requirements. This gives you the freedom to focus on your customers, your bottom line and building your business while still getting all the benefits of backup and disaster recovery. We are experts in providing enterprise-to-enterprise personalised and specialised IT solutions that help businesses manage their data effectively. We can assess, identify, develop, and execute an enterprise storage solution to match your business needs. These include comprehensive management tools, data consolidation, virtualisation, data deduplication, cloud storage, or other established solutions. Contact us today to see how we can assist you in finding a data storage solution that fits your unique business requirements.

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Posted in Storage

Originally published on November 16, 2022

Rob Townsend

Rob is a co-founder at Nexstor and has dedicated his career to helping a range of organisations from SME to Enterprise to get ahead of the game when it comes to their compute, storage and data needs.

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