HPE Synergy- Six Years of Innovation
It has been a while since we talked about the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Synergy platform. It is hard to believe it was announced in 2015 and is already 6 years old. This platform was definitely built with the future in mind. It was designed from the ground up to support future technologies and communications bandwidth. Server hardware has taken a back seat to the conversations around Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, HyperConverged, Security, Ransomware and Anything as a Service.
Since 2015, the Compute Modules have migrated from the Gen9, to the Gen10 and now the Gen10 Plus. We still have a lot of conversations around hardware in the data center. The goal around the Synergy platform is to provide a “cloud-like” (on demand resources) experience in your data center.
Cloud-Like Experience
The HPE Synergy platform is defined as a composable, software-defined infrastructure that allows you to provide that cloud-like experience. This platform enables you to compose fluid pools of resources (physical or virtual compute, storage, and fabric) to meet the requirements of your workload. This can be done using the unified API to simplify and automate deployments. Using this API, you can provision the required resources with a single line of code.
The design of the Synergy platform allows you to manage one infrastructure that can quickly scale and reduce complexity in your environment. This infrastructure will support current- and next-gen apps, each with vastly diverse infrastructure requirements and service-level objectives. The applications can run on physical hardware, virtual hardware or containers, all in the same frame.
Industry Leading Security
As will all HPE Servers, the Gen10 and Gen10 Plus has provided industry leading security. They have designed and implemented an enhanced, holistic, 360-degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded, end-of-life decommissioning.
This all starts with the Silicon root of trust that is built into all Gen10 and Gen10 Plus servers. The Silicon Root of Trust from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been designated a 2019 Cyber Catalyst cybersecurity solution. It protects against firmware attacks, detects compromised firmware or malware, and helps to rapidly recover the server in the event of an attack. This starts with the HPE developed and proprietary iLO 5 management. The iLO 5 ensures all firmware and the BIOS have the proper signature before it allows the machine to power on.
This level of security protects all firmware and BIOS through a key programmed into chip silicon at a TAA compliant chip production facility. It also integrates security with HPE Secure Start and Secure Boot to protect all BIOS, firmware, SPS, IE and boot sequence. The recovery process automatically quarantines compromised BIOS and firmware, then re-flashes with a known good image.
Budget Savings
With composable compute delivered as an on-premises cloud service, you’ll gain agility and avoid costly manual configuration and management of compute resources. When coupled with HPE GreenLake, you will have a powerful, software-defined, composable compute infrastructure that composes physical and virtual compute, storage, and fabric pools into any configuration for any application. If you choose the pay-per-use model for on-premises compute assets, it will enable you to align IT spend with actual usage. You only pay for what you use above a reserve. This model will provide you with near-real-time visibility into your usage data, and you can set budgets, create reports, and build rules-based insights.
What’s New in HPE Synergy?
So what’s new in HPE Synergy? The latest compute modules announced is the HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Plus. This new compute module is an all-new design around Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable Processors. It can provide up to a 40% increase in performance over earlier processor generations. This performance gain is achieved with improvements to the product line design around the processor, memory, storage, and boot options.
The HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Plus compute module delivers the performance, efficiency, and flexibility of a 2-socket server to support the most workloads. The Gen10 Plus provides more cores for a new level of workload performance and expanding ESXi VMs, expanded the memory DIMM socket count to 16 slots per socket, with 8 channels @ 3200 MT/S increased speed. The new Gen10 Plus has also expanded the capacity and persistence of the Intel Optane 200 memory support.
There are many additional upgrades and improvements to the Synergy Frame, more information can be found at HPE Synergy Composable Software Defined Infrastructure Platform | HPE.
Contact Zunesis today to find out more about HPE Synergy.
High Availability
High availability has been a staple feature in datacenters for years. Keeping the infrastructure running and the lights on is imperative for companies in a world where small amounts of downtime can result in massive losses. As a company’s data becomes more valuable, it becomes even more important to extend that high availability to include their storage.
Storage-Based Replication
This is where storage-based replication comes in. Immediate access to data becomes crucial in case of a failure at the primary location.
Replication is an approach to high availability that stores data in multiple locations. Data is immediately replicated to those multiple sites whenever a change is made or data is added. This allows you to retrieve that data from any of the sites. These sites could be physical datacenters owned by the organization, or geographically separate cloud instances like Azure or AWS.
Since data is immediately replicated to secondary storage as it is written to primary storage, losses can be minimized to seconds, or even eliminated completely should the primary site go down. Generally, this is controlled by software, but more and more storage arrays are being built with integrated replication making it more efficient and easier to set up.
Typically, integrated replication requires storage arrays to be either connected physically, or in a storage area network or SAN. The arrays need the ability to talk to each other at all times in order to send data to the other array as soon as it is written on the first. These replication times tend to be measured in milliseconds.
HPE Alletra’s Peer Persistence
HPE Alletra’s peer persistence is a great example of storage-based replication. Two Alletra arrays that exist on the same subnet can become replication partners. With response times under 5 ms, the arrays can get any data written to one array copied over to the other almost instantaneously. Add in some extra features like load balancing between storage pools and a 99.9999% uptime, companies can be sure their data is always safe.
Another way of setting up replication is to use software. There are many vendors, and even windows server can be used. This type of replication usually involves clustering hardware together to make identical environments that mirror each other and can be used interchangeably.
How is this Different from Backups?
So how does this differ from backups? A backup is a copy of data from a certain point in time. Replication is copied immediately. Any change to primary data is immediately replicated and no restore points are created. Backups create and store restore points from multiple times allowing you to recover from past data sets if needed.
Backups are critical in the event of corrupted or lost data. So, if a hacker encrypts your data, or an employee deletes files, you can recover all that from a previous point in time. You can’t rely on replication for data recovery. This is because any encryption or deletion is immediately replicated, making your second copy useless.
Both are critical to ensuring access to a company’s data at all times. As data is becoming more and more valuable to data-driven companies, so are the technologies used to safeguard that data.
Contact Zunesis to learn more about data storage protection offerings.
