♻️ 🎹 👩🏽‍🤝‍👨🏼 HPE Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash HF60 Performance Testing & Brief 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 🔮 👨‍🍳

I would like to shed some light on an interesting line of storage systems HPE Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash and try to reveal the question of why marketers decided to call it "Adaptive Flash", and not more traditionally - "Hybrid Flash". Judging by the search, there are not many reviews and articles devoted to Nimble, so I hope that this material will be useful to those interested in this topic.

I got an array with flagship controllers - HF60. This is a 5th generation storage system (Nimble Gen5), but as of 05/04/2021 HPE announced (so far only AllFlash) 6th generation (Nimble Gen6), which will be called Allerta 6000. Adaptive Flash 6th generation - announcement expected in the summer of 2021. So for now, our experimental of the last (current) generation.

So what makes HPE Nimble Adaptive Flash so special?

Let's start from afar. Nimble Storage has its origins in 2008 and already in 2014 made a lot of noise by announcing a revolutionary achievement (at that time) - the availability of data storage systems exceeded 99.999%. In 2016, this figure was already 99.999928%. Traditionally, such successful startups are taken over by larger companies. So it happened with Nimble - in 2017 the company joined the ranks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. How did they manage to obtain such availability figures (and this is not laboratory, but real data)? In short: the architecture and the "add-on" in the form of the InfoSight analytical platform. Let's dwell on each point in a little more detail.

Architecture

If you are too lazy to read, you can watch the video (in English):

Nimble CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout). :

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Writing to Adaptive Flash Arrays — Adaptive Flash

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DRAM, «» CASL, :

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Reading process in Adaptive Flash arrays — Adaptive Flash

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InfoSight

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HPE Nimble 99,9999%, InfoSight.
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Nimble HPE Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash HF60 / 21x2TB HDD / 5.76TB (6x960GB) SSD Cache / 4x16GB FC ;
1: HPE DL160 Gen10 / 1x Xeon 4210R / 6x16GB DDR4-R / 2xSN1100Q 16Gb 2p FC / 2x500W;
2: HPE DL325 Gen10 / 1x EPYC 7551P / 8x16GB DDR4-R / 2xSN1100Q 16Gb 2p FC / 2x500W;
, . . Fibre Channel. 2 , 4 ;
VMware vSphere 7;
HCIbench 2.5.3;