HPE’s mid range Alletra 6000 bests the high end 9000 series

HPE’s mid range Alletra 6000 bests the high end 9000 series

HPE’s performance benchmarks of the new Alletra 6000 reveal surprising capabilities.

This week HPE unveiled their Alletra array performance results. Interesting to note in the results was that the top supported SAP HANA Node count rose from 64 for the clustered all-flash Nimble to 216 for the mid-range Alletra 6000. This represents an increase of 340%.

The surprise take-away, however, was that the 6000’s supported node count is also 2.25 times better than that of the high-end Alletra 9000 (with 96).

The source of the SAP HANA performance results – SAP

The performance numbers come from Dimitis Krekoukias, Global Technology and Strategy Architect fopr HPE’s Nimble Division. He posted the results in his Recovery Monkey blog on May 6.

Krekoukias himself found the data on an SAP webpage in the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory. The Directory serves as a guide to hardware for certified enterprise storage arrays. It indexes the solutions according to their maximum supported SAP HANA nodes.

The new line is called Alletra 6000, and is completely interoperable with Nimble and manageable both from its own GUI/CLI/API and Data Services Cloud Console. For the Alletra 9000 (the evolution of Primera) there will be a separate post.

“All the usual goodies of Nimble are still there,” writes Krekoukias. This includes the “fancy” direct-to-L3 support, InfoSight with infrastructure AI recommendations. The unit also offers 100% headroom even if running on one controller, SCM cache, Triple+ RAID, Cascade Multistage Checksums etc. What’s different, according to Krekoukias, is mostly the vastly increased speeds in real-world workloads, and the shorter form factor.

Krekoukias used the SAP data to chart the single node Alletra 9000 and 6000’s performance vs. Dell EMC, NetApp and Pure arrays.

The results? Alletra 9080 beats Dell EMC’s PowerMax 2000 and the 6000 beats Dell EMC’s PowerStore, NetApp A800 and Pure’s FlashArray//X90 as well.

Conclusion

“The Alletra 6000 represents a major architectural evolution of the Nimble design,” writes Krekoukias. “It has retained all the nice things that made Nimble a customer favorite in the first place, in a refreshed package offering significantly higher performance.”

“The more interesting part of course isn’t the “box”, as nice as the box is. It’s the ease of consumption, interesting data services, automation and orchestration that will be part of the whole experience, via the HPE Data Services Cloud Console.”