HPE – A single point of contact for SUSE Enterprise Storage Solutions

Starting today, June 6, HPE is providing their customers with SUSE Enterprise Storage based solutions on HPE Apollo and ProLiant servers.  These are truly solutions, rather than assembled packages with divergent support paths, as HPE will architect the solution, sell it, and field support calls, providing the single point of contact that is always important when discussing new infrastructure for an enterprise data center.

This availability is happening in conjunction with the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, the Ceph Jewel release.  This update brings many improvements to the core Ceph code and introduces a number of non-production features that are ready for proof of concept and lab environments such as:

• Asynchronous Block Replication
• CephFS
• Multi-site Object
• Salt based management

The HPE solutions leverage the already stabilized features such as Swift, S3, and iSCSI interfaces and target use cases that leverage those including D2D backup, bulk storage, video surveillance repositories and virtualization environments.  Below, I’ll offer a brief overview of the hardware platforms and their relative strengths.

First up is the HPE Apollo 4510. This platform is capable of providing 68 3.5″ drives and plenty of PCIe slots for various connectivity options.  In addition, this platform has an M.2 boot enablement kit that ensures the 68 drives are utilized as storage capacity.

When combined with SUSE Enterprise Storage, this platform is a formidable capacity-oriented object storage node.  It is possible to configure this with multiple 10Gb or 40Gb interfaces, thus providing sufficient bandwidth to accommodate the throughput that the system is capable of delivering.

The next platform is one of my personal favorites, the HPE Apollo 4200.  This system balances capacity and performance quite nicely and features many of the same great attributes as the Apollo 4510.

With the ability to accept 28 total drives in the system, including the rear cage option, and again having the ability to utilize M.2 for boot media, this system is a great option for object OR block based workloads.  It is important to note, that unlike the 4500 series, the 4200 will fit in standard depth racks.   The lower density helps ensure a strong balance between system resources, capacity and available network bandwidth.  The rear cage can be used for SSDs to achieve a 6:1 spinner to SSD ratio for journals or additional spinning media.

This system supports the same connectivity options as the other Apollo platforms, thus making it a solid contender for your SUSE Enterprise Storage environment.

The next two platforms provide brilliant options for higher performance needs in any SUSE Enterprise Storage infrastructure.  The HPE Apollo 4530 is the same physical chassis as the 4510, but has 3 nodes with 15 drives each.  The platform shares connectivity and boot characteristics with the other Apollo options outlined above, providing a great performance building block with strong density.

The ProLiant DL380 is a mainstay in most data centers today and rounds out the performance band of storage platforms.  Again, fitting into the standard rack infrastructure, this platform provides a solid building block that most data centers can easily adopt.  Having a mature integration for the management software with existing data center processes and a lower capacity entry point makes this platform a perfect choice for an initial implementation of SUSE Enterprise Storage.

In support of these platforms, SUSE and HPE have created reference architectures and guides.

The Apollo reference architecture can be found by clicking here.

The ProLiant implementation guide can be found at this link.