HPE XP8 Gen 2 Announced

Properly leveraging the vast amount of growing data can be a momentous task for many organizations. Being able to reliably search, manage, store, and analyze content is vital for success, which is also true when it comes to figuring out how to move forward in digital transformation. HPE realizes this is most important when it comes to mission-critical environments that require the insights, intelligence, and automation that require resilient, fast, and reliable storage.

Properly leveraging the vast amount of growing data can be a momentous task for many organizations. Being able to reliably search, manage, store, and analyze content is vital for success, which is also true when it comes to figuring out how to move forward in digital transformation. HPE realizes this is most important when it comes to mission-critical environments that require the insights, intelligence, and automation that require resilient, fast, and reliable storage.

To address this, the company has introduced the new HPE XP8 Gen 2. This is built on the same architecture as the HPE XP8 (its predecessor), which was highlighted by its 100% data availability that spans the entire system’s installed base.

What is HPE XP8 Gen 2?

HPE XP8 Storage is a mission-critical flash storage solution designed specifically for enterprises that need “Tier-0 enterprise storage” (i.e., the fastest level of storage) for their vital applications that must keep downtime to zero. It also comes bundled with an intelligent management suite of software with proactive support to help simplify management.

The next-gen HPE XP8 is a faster storage system, so organizations can keep up with the ever-growing demands of today’s critical workloads. The HPE XP8 Gen 2 is quoted to deliver 33 million IOPS, which is an increase of 50% over the previous generation. Moreover, the cache IO latency has been reduced to less than 40ms, which is down from the 70ms of the prior XP8 model. The day-to-day operational performance has also been approved, indicating that it can achieve a random mix workload of 65/35–double the IOs per second.

To accomplish this massive upgrade, HPE engineers worked on optimizing the microcode of the array and added a new hardware-based compression accelerator. The latter improvement offloads the compressed data that moves into the storage drives, which effectively allows the storage controller microprocessor to handle more IOs.  The compression accelerator also improves the compression efficiency by 20% so organizations can store more data on the same amount of physical capacity in the array.

Seamless Upgrade From Last-Gen Model

To help customer migrate their current ecosystem to the new one, HPE will be offering an online data-in-place upgrade from HPE XP8 to HPE XP8 Gen 2. This will allow organizations to keep both their existing storage media data in place when replacing the controllers of the array.

Availability and Drive Support

HPE stresses that this upgrade will be completed with full data availability, meaning that your applications can continue to run while during the process; nothing needs to be migrated or moved. HPE also indicates that this upgrade feature will continue with all future generations of the HPE XP storage solution.

The HPE XP8 Gen 2 supports up to 69PB of internal storage capacity with an additional 255PB of external storage. Drive compatibility includes HDD, FMD, SSD, NVMe, and SCM drives, while organizations can concurrently deploy NVMe and SAS in a single HPE XP8 Gen 2 array. The next-gen HPE platform also fully supports end-to-end NVMe connections with FC-NVMe connectivity to hosts.

Built-in intelligence

HPE XP8 Gen 2 also features a range of built-in intelligence features such as HPE Performance Advisor virtual machine analytics, continuous-track remote data analytics, and predictive drive sparing. In addition, Intelligent Storage Manager and Data Protection Manager applications offer comprehensive storage management, data protection, and data reduction features.

HPE XP8 Gen 2 Availability

The HPE XP8 Gen 2 is slated for a release sometime in November 2021.

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