Unlock your data's potential

PCQuest organized a webinar titled Unlock your data's potential. The speakers were Manoj Kolekar, Senior Evangelist, Technology, HPE, and Shaikh Jalaluddin, Solution Architect, Pentagon Systems & Services Pvt Ltd. It was moderated by Sunil Rajguru, Editor, PCQuest and CIOL.

Aanchal Ghatak reports.

Opening the conference, Sunil Rajguru remarked that with every crisis comes opportunity! There is no point in waiting for it to be over. Anticipation is power, said Tony Robbins. World War 2 gave us the Colossus computer, CDMA, rocketry, jet planes, and atomic energy. It also led to the birth of NASA. Covid-19 has been strengthening WFH, collaboration and mobile workforce. It is happening right in front of our eyes. We are realizing that, maybe, you don't even need an office! There is more use of no-touch technologies, such as IoT, Industry 4.0, drones, and connected cars.

Data still remains the new oil. The data explosion continues. There are more data centers, cloud operations, devices, etc. The upper limit for IoT devices has been put at 500 billion by 2030. That is why storage will also be important. There is an unprecedented demand for storage of all types, such as hybrid clouds, AI, analytics, etc. All will play a key role. We have to ahead with technological acceleration.

Shaikh Jalaluddin, Solution Architect, Pentagon Systems & Services Pvt Ltd, said that Pentagon has top-level partnerships with global technology players. We have deep expertise across IT infrastructures and technologies to offer industry-leading solutions. The team has deep experience and skills of HPE storage products to deliver storage assessment, sizing, PoCs, migrations, replications, conducting PoCs and service support.

Mission-critical storage: Manoj Kolekar, Senior Evangelist - Technology, HPE talked about the HPE Primera, and raising the expectations of mission-critical storage. Mission-critical apps are transforming the industry, and require more agility. We had the traditional apps such as virtualization, databases, ERP, EMR, etc. Now, there are modern technologies such as containers, real-time analytics, IoT and AI. People are now demanding more systems that are autonomous. More collaborations and platforms are being used today.

Going forward, there will be a physical infrastructure, where the physical presence might not be needed. Infrastructure now needs to be very intelligent, future-proof, and technology-agnostic. Intelligence will be more intelligent in future.

There is a forced trade-off between agility and resiliency. They are supposed to run 365x24x7. There is the high-end storage and the public cloud. We are now engineered to drive unique value in high-end storage. There are four pillars. There is global intelligence, powered with the most advanced AI for infrastructure. There is the all-active architecture, with multi-mode architecture for higher resiliency and limitless parallelization. There is the service-centric OS that eliminates risk and simplifies management. We also have timeless storage, a new ownership experience that keeps getting better.

HPE has now come out with the world's most intelligent storage for mission-critical apps, the HPE Primera. There are features such as on-demand experience, app-aware resiliency, and predictive acceleration. The HPE storage on-demand experience is mission-critical storage without any complexity. It is radically simple, with upto 93% reduction in time spent to deploy, manage, and scale. It is as-a-service and a consumption-based model having elastic consumption and cloud economics, with pay-as-you-go. It is timeless, with unique ownership experience in high-end storage for never-ending value.

The Primera platform is designed to eliminate risk and simplifying management with a service-centic OS. Being service centric means there is decoupled data services, is safer and self-upgradable, there are fewer node reboots required, and there is faster access to innovation. There is 100% delivery guarantee. We have moved from a monolithic architecture to a service-centric architecture.

The kernel needs to be rebooted in the monolithic architecture. In the service-centric architecture, once you boot the Primera storage system, every service runs within the Primera as a separate users' case. Now, you can only patch those services needed. There is no need to reboot the Primera system. This architecture is a completely changed one. Primera delivers 100% availability guaranteed.

As an eg., the Primera 670 has 4TB cache. These systems are very powerful in terms of the physical memory processors that they have. The Primera offers performance insights, topology insights, workload insights, and analytics infosights. This is not available anywhere else. Intelligence is the prime core of the Primera, and it is autonomous.

HPE Storage offers on-demand experience, with online, inline, non-disruptive upgrades with data in place. You can start small with efficient scaling, scale up and out, with simple refresh, and no disruptions. There is multi-node scale for performance and capacity. You get zero wasted investment with data in place upgrades. Upgrading is transparent to your apps and you. Everything that you do on the Primera is non disruptive.

Simplicity is the key! You can do automated setups with streamlined workflows. No separate tools are needed with built-in management. No tuning is required with all-active, always-on, data reduction and RAID6. There are perspective OS updates that are transparent to applications. It is API-driven for infrastructure as code. You can now get upto 93% reduction in the time spent to deploy, manage, and scale storage.

Primera is built for mixed workload environments. Nimble is a simple platform to manage. The Primera platform is best storage technology in the market. The NVMe-enabled architecture is JBOF enabled. There is the service-centric operating architecture, also with store more technologies, flash optimization and storage class memory (SCM), persistent technologies and multi-site replication. There is the mesh active-active architecture.

The memory pool consists of data integrity with T10-PI persistent checksum, zero detection and hash generation, tightly-coupled clustering, NVMe parallel processing, mixed workload and CPU offload, and fast RAID 10, 60. NVMe will now go on to become the de facto platform. It will change the way performance is delivered from that platform. The ASIC cluster is also very important.

There is the HPE adaptive data reduction and integrated data protection. There is zero defect, deduplication, compression and data packing. Primera has priority optimizations. QoS is enabled by throttling the VV-set of app green to 40,000 IOPS and 0.8ms response time. Resources for app red are freed up. Latency is very critical for apps. Primera array is designed to deliver 300ms.

There is HPE storage app-aware resiliency. The platform understands the behavior of the apps that are running and makes the necessary adjustments automatically. At Primera, we are going beyond the storage, looking at the compute and apps, tell the problem areas and the ways to resolve them. This is very unique to Primera.

We also have autonomous features on the Primera, such as AI/analytics, which gives the performance insights. The platform looks at the apps from the end customer perspective. There are workload insights and planning, recommendation engine, automatic workload management, and workload traceability and app awareness. AI helps in resolving performance issues. It tells you where saturation is happening, and gives recommendations, via recommendation engine. Workload management simulates the various environments.

HPE Infosight is the AI for the data center. It is collecting and analyzing millions of sensors per second. It is all happening because of the global intelligence. The customer impact is predictive support automation, pre-emptive recommendations, proactive management, and continuous improvements. Cloud-based AI platform has the predictive analytics engine, along with global learning and recommendation engine. The cross-stack telemetry includes compute, network, and storage, such as VMware, Oracle, MS SQL Server, and Exchange.

The predictive support automation and proactive remediation are also done. We have huge telemetry. We can scan telemetry data for simple signatures. If there is a fresh problem, a simple identity is created within a few hours. We identify the root cause and do resolution. Signature is added to case automation toolset. Case automation via detailed signature is now in place. We can prevent in future.

We also have cross-talk analytics for VMware environments. These can be for noisy neighbours, host and memory analytics, etc. There are no more escalations. There is root cause analysis with full stack expertise. Finally, we look at the systems and call you, if necessary.

Technology refreshes can be painful. There is need to rebuy capacity, painful data migration, disruptive downtime, and escalating maintenance. HPE Primera gives you timeless storage. Storage ownership is transformed, and there is reduced storage TCO. You also get technology that is always current and infrastructure that is kept continuously modern. The all new HPE Primera all-flash arrays are eligible. There is technology refresh every three years at no additional cost with zero disruption.

HPE Primera is the next-gen autonomous storage. The recommendation engine can simulate your workflows. Machine learning and global intelligence is built in.