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Announcing HPE NimbleOS 5.2 - NOW GA!

Written on: Sep 30, 2020 1:27:32 PM

Written by: Alex Raben

Topic

[HPE, Nimble Storage]

Today, NimbleOS 5.2 is now available to customers under GA Candidate (GAC) status, for production environments.


This upgrade can be requested via HPE Infosight's whitelist process through HPE Nimble Support. Continue reading to understand what features you will enable by upgrading your HPE Nimble arrays.

First announced during May 2020, 5.2 has been in testing and now ready for the customer field - With this upgrade, HPE  offers and addresses the following:

  • 27 New Features
  • 39 Feature Enhancement Requests 
  • 1388 Bugfixes

As an overview, the NimbleOS 5.2.x platform delivers many new functionality & usability features as well as enhancements:

Nimble OS 5.2.x

Diving a little deeper, we will now cover each features in a more detail...

 

Storage Class Memory - AF-TURBO

Since the inception of Nimble Storage, they have been using SSDs to deliver an all-flash experience, by utilising NL-SAS drives as a capacity bucket. With AF Turbo, HPE now deliver an all-SCM experience without expensive SCM.

You can now live-convert a Nimble AF60 or AF80 array into an All Flash Hybrid array with Intel Optane flash memory. By adding this new flash media, the system will dynamically implement Nimble's market leading & patented caching intelligence, allowing for >95% of your random read IO to be services inside of Optane flash memory.

Storage Class

 

Fan-Out Async Replication

With NimbleOS, administrators have always been able to configure fan-out or fan-in replication traffic, though this has been for a single volume which can only go to a single destination.

With NimbleOS 5.2, a single Nimble volume (or collection of volumes) can be replicated & retained in two disparate locations - including HPE Cloud Volumes.

Replication

 

Increased Drive Capacity

A quick, but important one for large data users. 8TB SSD are now available for the AFA with 14TB HDD & 8TB SSD Cache for the HFA.

As an example a Nimble AFA using 8TB SSDs can now deliver 744TiB effective capacity in 4u (assuming an 3:1 data reduction without thin provisioning)...

Drive Support

 

32GB Fibre Channel

If you are a Fibre Channel centric IT organisation then keeping up with the latest port speed is important.

32GB is now available in dual port form, for all Nimble Gen5 arrays. Note these increased ports also  function at 16Gb and 8Gb speeds, respectively, where required.

32GB Fibre

 

SmartSAN - Target Driven Zoning

With SmartSAN Nimble array users can now auto-zone hosts to volumes automatically in the switch fabric without requiring any re-configuration. This makes using Fibre Channel almost as simple as Ethernet. When a volume is linked to an Initiator Group, the array will integrate to the switch fabric using PeerZone to do everything automatically. With HPE Brocade Fibre Channel switches, TDZ is enabled as default just enable it on your Nimble array.

FC Connection

 

Peer Persistance Enhancements

Launched last year, HPE have seen a large uptake in the use of Peer Persistence (Synchronous Replication with Automatic Failover). New features include:

  • Newly designed witness OVA for 1-click deployment
  • Significant enhancements to Automatic SwitchOver (ASO) technology for non-disruptive site failovers.
  • Support for 512 volumes synchronously replicating in each direction, up from 128.

Peer Persitance

 

Increased Volume Support

Last but not least - HPE have increased the maximum amount of volumes possible on the AF40 to 10,000 - inline with the larger AF60 & AF80.

Increased Volumes

 

Launch Information

During the Virtual Nimble User Group on the 21st May, Neale Simpkins, Technical Architect at HPE introduced 5.2 in detail - follow the below image which will take you to the video:

Screenshot 2020-09-30 at 12.43.36 

 

Further information

Do you have further questions? If so, contact our expert team today who can run through the above plus the ability to perform cross-generational upgrade, saving you time and money with HPE Timeless Storage.

Drop us a message today or call 01245 454 222.

Alternatively, if you're looking to deploy HPE Nimble Storage and would like budget costs, complete our easy to use calculator today and we will get straight back to you!

 

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