HPE Nimble Storage AF5000
Predictive All Flash Storage for the Modern Data Center

HPE Nimble Storage Products & Technology Overview:

Struggling to find the perfect combination of flash storage and predictive analytics?

HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays combine a flash-efficient architecture with HPE InfoSight predictive analytics to achieve fast, reliable access to data and 99.9999% guaranteed availability. [1] Radically simple to deploy and use, the arrays are cloud-ready, providing data mobility to the cloud through HPE Cloud Volumes. Your storage investment made today will support you well into the future, thanks to our technology and business-model innovations. HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays include all-inclusive licensing, easy upgrades, and flexible payment options – while also being future-proofed for new technologies, such as NVMe and SCM.

• Predictive Analytics
  

  • HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays automatically predict and resolve 86% of problems before you even know there is an issue.

  • Transforms the support experience through cloud-based predictive analytics and Level 3-only support.

  • Holistic view across the infrastructure stack to resolve problems beyond just storage.

  • Simplifies planning with prescriptive forecasts into capacity, performance, and bandwidth requirements.

  • Makes infrastructure smarter and more reliable by learning from the installed base.

• Radical Simplicity

  • HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays are simple to deploy use, and manage.

  • This product is cloud-ready and deploys flash on-premises or in the cloud with common data services and mobility between all-flash, adaptive flash, and HPE Cloud Volumes

  • HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays are future-proofed for NVMe and SCM. The offering comes with a satisfaction guarantee, all-inclusive software licensing, flat support pricing, replacing all the hardware for upgrades, and an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years.

  • Radically easy to integrate with many ecosystems and has a de

• Absolute Resiliency
  

  • HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays has 99.9999% guaranteed availability.

  • Triple+ Parity RAID can handle three simultaneous drive failures and provides additional protection through intra-drive parity

• Fast and reliable
  

  • HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays are scale-to-fit. They scale-up performance and capacity independently and non-disruptively; and scale out to four arrays managed as one for increased flexibility.

  • Up to 5X or more data reduction from variable block inline deduplication and compression.

  • Backup and disaster recovery (DR) from all-flash to adaptive flash arrays at onethird the cost.

  • Data reduction, snapshots, and Triple+ Parity RAID with no performance impact.

  • Sub-millisecond response time for performance-sensitive enterprise workloads

HPE Nimble Storage AF-Series Arrays

AF1000 and AF3000
The AF1000 and AF3000 are the perfect entry points for all IT organizations that require speed and economy for performance-sensitive workloads.

AF5000 and AF7000
The AF5000 and AF7000 offer high performance and attractive economics for performancesensitive workloads that need the best blend of price/performance/scalability.

AF9000
The AF9000 is designed for consolidating multiple large-scale performance-sensitive applications with aggressive performance and high scalability demands.

Nimble All Flash arrays support iSCSI and FC storage protocols.

Features and Benefits:

Absolute Performance to Power the Flash Data Center

Cloud Ready

Nimble arrays are Cloud Ready, giving you the flexibility to create a multicloud environment. Easily migrate data between on-premise flash arrays and the public cloud with Nimble Cloud Volumes.

Breaking the limits of All-Flash scalability

33% to 66% Lower TCO

Dramatic Data Center Footprint and TCO Reduction

Data Protection at One Third the Cost

Using flash for backup, DR and archival can sometimes be cost-prohibitive. That's why Nimble also allows its cost-optimized Adaptive Flash arrays to be used for backup, DR, Dev/Test and archival at a third of the cost of All Flash. And since both primary and secondary arrays share common data services, you'll get identical functionality and user experience.

Absolute Resiliency

Effortless Management

Storage is pre-configured and optimized for applications out-of-the-box. Tasks such as selecting RAID-level, media layout, aggregations and reserves are not required. Initial setup and configuration can be completed within two hours.

CASL Architecture:

HPE Nimble Storage solutions are built on its patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture. CASL leverages the unique properties of flash and disk to deliver high performance and capacity – all within a dramatically small footprint.CASL and InfoSight form the foundation of the Adaptive Flash platform, which allows for the dynamic and intelligent deployment of storage resources to meet the growing demands of business-critical applications.

CASL and InfoSight form the foundation of the Adaptive Flash platform, which allows for the dynamic and intelligent deployment of storage resources to meet the growing demands of business-critical applications.

Watch CASL Architecture Deep Dive
Storage architect Devin Hamilton provides an in-depth look at Nimble’s core architecture. (74:45)

Key Innovations from CASL

• Flexible Flash Scaling
  Flexibly scale flash to satisfy the changing performance demands of today's business-critical applications.
• Adaptive Flash Service Levels
  Tailor the amount of flash allocated to workloads on a per-volume basis. Assign one of three flash service levels (All Flash, Auto Flash and No Flash) to accommodate latency-sensitive critical applications to capacity-optimized applications, for management efficiency and optimal TCO.
• Dynamic Flash-Based Read Caching
  CASL caches "hot" active data onto SSD in real time—without the need to set complex policies. This way it can instantly respond to read requests—as much as 10X faster than traditional bolt-on or tiered approach to flash.
• Write-Optimized Data Layout:
  CASL collects or coalesces random writes, compresses them, and writes them sequentially to disks. This results in write operations that are as much as 100x faster than traditional disk-based storage.
• Inline Compression
  CASL compresses data as it is written to the array with no performance impact. It takes advantage of efficient variable block compression and multicore processors. A recent measurement of our installed base shows average compression rates from 30 to 75 percent for a variety of workloads.
• Scale-to-Fit Flexibility
  CASL allows for the non-disruptive and independent scaling of performance and capacity. This is accomplished by either upgrading the storage controller (compute) for higher throughput, moving to larger flash SSD (cache) to accommodate more active data, or by adding storage shelves to boost capacity. This flexible scaling eliminates the need for disruptive forklift upgrades.
• Scale Out
  Scale capacity and performance beyond the physical limitations of a single array by seamlessly clustering any combination of HPE Nimble Storage hybrid arrays. Eliminate capacity silos and performance hotspots, and easily manage all hardware resources across the cluster as a single storage entity.
• Snapshots and Integrated Data Protection
  CASL can take thousands of point-in-time instant snapshots of volumes by creating a copy of the volumes’ indices. Any updates to existing data or new data written to a volume are redirected to free space (optimized by CASL’s unique data layout). This means there is no performance impact due to snapshots and snapshots take little incremental space as only changes are maintained. This also simplifies restoring snapshots, as no data needs to be copied.
• Efficient Replication
  HPE Nimble Storage efficiently replicates data to another array by transferring compressed, block-level changes only. These remote copies can be made active if the primary array becomes unavailable. This makes deploying disaster data recovery easy and affordable – especially over a WAN to a remote array where bandwidth is limited.
• Zero-Copy Clones
  HPE Nimble Storage arrays can create snapshot-based read/writeable clones of existing volumes instantly. These clones benefit from fast read and write performance, making them ideal for demanding applications such as VDI or test/development.

Scalable Storage Capacity and Performance

Scale-to-Fit

Scale Out

HPE Nimble Storage's Adaptive Flash platform features a scale-out architecture that makes it easy to scale capacity and performance beyond the physical limitations of a single array. Any combination of HPE Nimble Storage CS-Series arrays can be seamlessly configured into a storage cluster that accomodates growing business-critical workloads and supports new ones, without complicating storage management by creating additional silos or breaking the budget with forklift upgrades. HPE Nimble Storage's innovative approach to scale-out storage dramatically simplifies configuration, upgrades, and management.

With HPE Nimble Storage scale-out you get:

• Single-console management of all storage hardware resources as a single entity
• Dynamic load balancing to eliminate performance hot spots
• Multi-array data striping, enabling any application to fully leverage the collective hardware resources of the scale-out group
• Seamless reconfiguration and hardware refreshes, without downtime
• Flexible configuration of any combination of HPE Nimble Storage arrays, maximizing storage ROI

Specifications:

All Flash Array Specifications
Nimble AF-Series Array	AF1000	AF3000	AF5000	AF7000	AF9000	Scale-Out1 4x AF9000
Raw Capacity (TB/TiB)2	6-46 / 5-42	6-92 / 5-83	11-184 / 10-167	11-323 / 10-293	23-553 / 20-503	2,212 / 2,012
Usable Capacity (TB/TiB)2	4-33 / 3-30	4-67 / 3-61	8-136 / 7-123	8-238 / 7-217	17-409 / 15-372	1,636 / 1,488
Effective Capacity (TB/TiB)2,3	20-165 / 15-150	20-335 / 15-305	40-680 / 35-615	40-1,190 / 35-1,085	85-2,045 / 75-1,860	8,180 / 7,440
Max # of Expansion Shelves	1	1	1	2	2	8
RAID Level	Triple+ Parity	Triple+ Parity	Triple+ Parity	Triple+ Parity	Triple+ Parity	Triple+ Parity
Max IOPS (100% Read)	40,000	60,000	140,000	270,000	350,000	1,400,000
Max IOPS (70% Read / 30% Write)	35,000	50,000	120,000	230,000	300,000	1,200,000
Onboard iSCSI/Mgmt 1Gb/10Gb ports per array4	4	4	4	4	4	16
Optional iSCSI 1Gb ports per array6	4 or 8	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	96
Optional iSCSI 10Gb ports per array6	4 or 8	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	96
Optional FC 8Gb/16Gb ports per array	4 or 8	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24	96
Max Power Requirement	550W / 0.61kVA	600W / 0.667kVA	700W / 0.778kVA	800W / 0.889kVA	900W /1kVA	3600W / 4kVA
Thermal (BTU)	1,802	1,965	2,293	2,620	2,948	11,792

SSD Expansion Shelves5
Raw Capacity (TB/TiB)2	6-184 / 5-167
Usable Capacity (TB/TiB)2	4-137 / 4-124
Effective Capacity (TB/TiB)2,3	20-685 / 19-620
Power Requirement	325W / 0.36kVA

Physical and Environmental Specifications
Dimensions	7”H x 17.5”W x 26.5”D 17.8 cm x 44.5 cm x 67.3 cm 4 Rack Units
Weight	80 lbs / 36 kg
Weight (All-Flash Shelf)	70 lbs / 32 kg
Operating Temperature	10 - 35° C (50 - 95° F)
Non-Operating Temperature	0° C - 40° C (32° F - 104° F)
Operating Humidity	8 - 90%
Non-operating Humidity	5 - 95%

Notes:

1. Scale-out configuration consists of 4x AF9000 arrays, each with two all flash shelves.
2. Raw, usable and effective capacities are shown in TB (10¹² bytes) and TiB (2⁴⁰ bytes). Usable and effective capacities exclude space used for parity, spares, and system overhead.
3. Effective capacity is the capacity of the base array and maximum number of expansion shelves. Assumes data reduction of five to one from deduplication and compression.
4. Onboard ports are 10GbaseT. Optional ports are: 1GbaseT, 10GbaseT or 10GbE SFP+
5. Each shelf consists of up to 48 SSDs. SSDs can be 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB or 3.84TB raw capacity.

* Learn More:
Video: HPE Nimble Storage Overview Whiteboard

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Services:

HPE Pointnext

HPE Pointnext leverages our breadth and depth of technical expertise and innovation to help to accelerate digital transformation. A comprehensive portfolio that includes—Advisory, Professional, and Operational Services is designed to help you evolve and grow today and into the future.

Operational Services

• HPE Flexible Capacity is a new consumption model to manage on-demand capacity, combining the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-premises IT.
• HPE Datacenter Care offers a tailored operational support solution built on core deliverables. It includes hardware and software support, a team of experts to help personalize deliverables and share best practices, as well as optional building blocks to address specific IT and business needs.
• HPE Proactive Care is an integrated set of hardware and software support including an enhanced call experience with start to finish case management helping resolve incidents quickly and keeping IT reliable and stable.
• HPE Foundation Care helps when there is a hardware or software problem offering several response levels dependent on IT and business requirements.

Advisory Services

Advisory Services includes design, strategy, road map, and other services to help enable the digital transformation journey, tuned to IT and business needs. Advisory Services helps customers on their journey to Hybrid IT, Big Data, and the Intelligent Edge.

Professional Services

Professional Services helps integrate the new solution with project management, installation and startup, relocation services, and more. We help mitigate risk to the business so there is no interruption when new technology is being integrated in the existing IT environment.

Documentation:

Download HPE Nimble Storage All-Flash Array Datasheet (PDF).

Download HPE Nimble Storage Product Brief Datasheet (PDF).

Download HPE Nimble Storage Technology & Features Primer Datasheet (PDF).

Download White Paper: Redefining Flash Storage (PDF).

Download White Paper: Scale-to-Fit Storage (PDF).