Enterprise storage solutions represent a core component of enterprise IT infrastructures that must now possess new features to meet modern IT challenges. As such, enterprises must scrutinize how well these solutions position them to address these challenges. DCIG’s recently published Competitive Intelligence Report highlights five features that the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and Dell PowerStore respectively offer to meet these challenges.
Modern IT Challenges
Cybersecurity threats. Anywhere, anytime data availability. Hybrid cloud adoption and growth. VMware software licensing changes and VMware hypervisor alternatives. Complex IT infrastructures. These represent many of the concerns for which enterprises must account for as they manage their modern IT infrastructures.
Adding to the dilemma, enterprises rarely have the luxury of deploying point solutions to respond to each challenge. Rather, enterprises must identify and deploy solutions that position them to comprehensively address and respond to these challenges.
These solutions ideally will include features that equip enterprises to:
- Improve and strengthen their cybersecurity posture.
- Maximize their current VMware software licenses while positioning them to use VMware alternatives.
- Meet ever-increasing application and workload capacity and performance demands.
- Remain online indefinitely across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
- Minimize the cost, time, and effort required to effectively manage ever evolving and increasingly complex IT infrastructures.
HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and Dell PowerStore
The HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and Dell PowerStore both offer features that help enterprises respond to these challenges. The recently published DCIG Competitive Intelligence Report compares how well these two solutions differentiate in the following five features and capabilities:
#1: Product Architecture and Data Availability
Capacity and performance features remain the backbone of enterprise storage solutions. As such, enterprises still expect modern enterprise storage solutions to possess both the capacity and performance characteristics that they need.
However, enterprises want storage solutions to do more than meet their current storage capacity and performance requirements. The product’s architecture should account for either planned or unplanned capacity growth, performance growth, or both. This requirement demands that modern storage solutions can scale capacity and performance independently of one another.
To meet these expectations, the solution will ideally:
- Scale its capacity or performance resources granularly and independently of the other resource.
- Scale both up and out.
- Minimize or eliminate hardware obsolescence associated with making these changes.
- Monitor resources for utilization and allocate and balance performance as needed.
Dell PowerStore includes five Gen2 T models with each model consisting of two active nodes in a paired configuration. In contrast, HPE offers HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 as a single model. The B10000 consists of a composable, disaggregated, scale-out architecture that enterprises may configure to meet different use cases.
#2: Optimizing and Future Proofing Storage Investments.
Enterprises frequently must address unexpected changes to their IT infrastructure that require introducing more capacity, more performance, or both. To avoid prematurely replacing hardware in their existing IT infrastructure, they want to optimize and future proof their hardware investments.
Storage solutions can be particularly sensitive to both planned and unplanned capacity or performance changes in the IT infrastructure. Enterprises often find they reach the capacity and performance limits of a storage array before it reaches its planned end-of-life (EOL). This may require enterprises to prematurely replace existing storage solutions.
To address this situation, Dell and HPE offer options for enterprises to optimize and future proof investments in their respective storage solutions.
#3: AIOps for Hybrid Cloud Management
Enterprises already grapple with the complexity associated with managing their on-premises IT environments. Now the demands of computing in today’s world almost compel them to implement hybrid cloud computing. For better or worse, hybrid environments serve to only exacerbate the complexity associated with IT management.
To address this complexity, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) has emerged to help enterprises manage their hybrid IT infrastructures. Dell delivers its APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability that monitors and troubleshoots multiple components of a Dell IT infrastructure.
The HPE GreenLake cloud manages the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 using HPE GreenLake AIOps. It integrates with and enhances the AIOps analytics, cross-stack visibility, and performance insight capabilities of HPE InfoSight.
#4: Anomaly Detection
Ransomware still attacks by encrypting, exfiltrating, and/or deleting data. Thankfully, enterprise cybersecurity software can often detect these common types of ransomware attacks. However, enterprises must also deal with new strains of ransomware that have been designed to avoid existing storage- and network-based detection methods.
Hackers have created new strains of ransomware that encrypt data at very granular levels. This type of ransomware uses an attack methodology referred to as intermittent encryption. Rather than encrypting an entire file, it encrypts components of a file as small as 16 bytes.
This technique has the same net effect of encrypting an entire file as it makes the file unreadable and unusable. However, intermittent encryption incurs less system overhead since it only encrypts small chunks of each file. In so doing, intermittent encryption may evade common methods used by many algorithms to detect ransomware.
This has led to an increase in software that specifically performs anomaly detection. Rather than trying to identify ransomware’s presence, this software looks for anomalies in the data. Dell APEX AIOps for Infrastructure Observability includes a Cybersecurity feature that continuously monitors Dell resources within an IT infrastructure for security risks. As APEX AIOps monitors them, it performs multiple types of assessments that range from evaluating system configurations to looking for common, known vulnerabilities.
HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 equips enterprises to protect data stored on it from ransomware events using its immutable snapshot feature. The B10000 also leverages Zerto continuous data protection (CDP) to perform real-time, adaptive anomaly detection as data flows onto it.
#5: Server Virtualization Platform Support
Broadcom’s software licensing changes since it acquired VMware have prompted many enterprises to explore alternative hypervisor solutions. While enterprises will unlikely abandon VMware anytime soon, many have already begun evaluating competitive hypervisors.
This evaluation of competitive solutions has prompted the introduction of multiple VMware alternatives, including HPE VM Essentials (HPE’s own hypervisor). As enterprises evaluate these alternatives, storage providers must continue to demonstrate support for VMware vSphere along with other hypervisors. Both Dell and HPE have taken steps to address these current dynamics in the virtualization marketplace.
HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000: A New, Powerful, Flexible All-flash Alternative
Modern storage solutions must do more than simply, quickly, and efficiently provide storage. They must now address issues that enterprises routinely encounter in their IT infrastructures.
These include adapting to unexpected changes, controlling costs, detecting and responding to ransomware, managing IT complexity, and the rise of multi-hypervisor environments. To their credit, both HPE and Dell recognize these issues and deliver storage solutions designed to address them.
However, the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 offers enterprises a new, powerful, flexible all-flash alternative to Dell PowerStore. More importantly, it addresses these key challenges that enterprises currently face as they manage multi-hypervisor, hybrid cloud environments.
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Both HPE and Dell are or have been clients of DCIG. HPE commissioned DCIG to produce this Competitive Intelligence Report.