| Though I’d rather be writing this blog over a coffee and beignet in New Orleans, I’m still thrilled to be sharing the news about our HPE Storage Solutions for Microsoft, and specifically what’s new for the Microsoft Ignite audience. As we all know, this year’s Microsoft Ignite is taking place on the Web rather than the Crescent City, but our Solution team is still treating it like it’s our annual “Mardi Gras”. With that in mind, here’s what new for our HPE Storage Solutions for Microsoft. Let the good times roll! Throw me somethin’, Mista! HPE is an official sponsor of this year’s Microsoft Ignite show, which runs September 22-24. Along with the presence within the online venue, HPE has created its own web presence to supplement things, our “Virtual Booth”, due to all the related activities and content we had available. This pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across the company’s customer base, and in response HPE is stepping up the number of solutions to help these organizations achieve new ways of working and serving their end-customers, especially in the cloud. A key part of HPE-at-Ignite presence will be a series of Expert Videos. Storage team experts will deliver a few of these sessions, coverings topics from new a SQL Server solution built on a newly re-engineered storage platform, to Hybrid cloud data expansion, to Big Data HCI. The HPE Microsoft Ignite 2020 Virtual Booth landing page is the place to watch these video sessions, as well as get the latest Microsoft Storage Solution resources including technical whitepapers, solution briefs and other online assets. Starting with Microsoft Ignite week and beyond, we’re also rolling out more expert video content that couldn’t fit on the Landing page. These sessions are being delivered through the HPE Storage BrightTalk channel and are spanning topics from SQL Server Big Data Clusters, to Storage Class Memory, Highly Available Windows File Services, Hybrid Cloud data mobility, and Microsoft VDI. These sessions are supported by our strategic partner, Intel. Who Dat HPE MSA Gen 6? The company recently broke the news on the newly updated HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA) storage, which features a new architecture, ASIC, chipsets and health monitoring capabilities. The product team shared the key details in that HPE MSA Gen6 Announcement, for this storage product that is reaching new levels of ease-of-use plus price/performance. I’d like to highlight what it means for our Microsoft storage solutions, which I covered in more detail in the SQL Server on HPE MSA solution release blog. The higher levels of performance from the Gen6 platform will translate directly into more transactions for SQL Server databases, more apps hosted across your Hyper-V environment, and even greater Microsoft workload consolidation onto a single array. The new Tiering 2.0 algorithm alone delivers up to 45% more app acceleration than in the previous generation system. Other enhancements will increase workload availability, such as MSA-DP+, an advanced RAID-based data protection feature which protects data and enables faster rebuilds, and the Health Check tool which makes it easy to help ensure optimal system operations. HPE MSA storage has traditionally been used for entry-level and departmental SQL Server database environments. We expect this to continue, especially where organizations require on-premises control of their data and the hands-on ability to ensure services levels. There are also new realizations shared on a Solution team member’s blog regarding the benefits of a single RAID-protected Storage array versus having to maintain multi-node clusters of HCI systems for the same workload and data capacity. Innovation that takes the (King) cake The solution development hasn’t stopped at HPE since the last Microsoft Ignite event. The Storage krewe has led a parade of new offerings to meet the needs of our broad Microsoft workload customer base: Nimble Storage Extender for Azure Stack Hub – Need more data capacity for your Azure Stack Hub but don’t want to buy a whole new one? The HPE Storage Extender for Azure Stack Hub brings flexibility to the tightly defined Azure Stack Hub architecture, letting you just expand data capacity plus get the benefits of enterprise SAN data services. Windows Admin Center (WAC) Extensions – We’ve rolled out a number of WAC Extensions to expand the visibility and manageability of our storage products within the WAC dashboard. These include Windows and Azure Stack HCI extensions for the HPE Apollo 4200, as well as Storage Extensions for the HPE Primera and HPE 3PAR storage platforms. HPE InfoSight for Hyper-V – Breakthrough new HPE Storage AI capability that brings cross-stack analytics parity for Windows Hyper-V VMs that was previously only available for VMware ESX environments. Accelerated SQL Server on HPE Nimble Storage – Takes new NVMe SSD caching approach to increase performance for OLTP and other demanding apps. Lab verified benefits of Storage Class Memory powered by Intel Optane SSDs show back-end latency reduced as much as 50%. Similar lab validated solution also available for HPE 3PAR storage. SharePoint 2019 & Skype for Business Server 2019 on HPE Storage – Upgrade your SharePoint and Skype environments on-premises to the latest Server 2019 versions to modernize your infrastructure and take advantage of the latest in content collaboration and portal technologies. SQL Server Big Data Clusters (BDC) – A single scale-out solution for both relational and Big Data, built on HPE Storage and the latest data center technologies including containers and Kubernetes. Manage more data from across the enterprise with your existing SQL Server tools and expertise. In addition to these HPE Storage Solutions for Microsoft releases over the past year, there are even more in progress, including expanded testing and technical publications for the SQL Server BDC PolyBase feature, SQL Server leveraging HPE Primera storage enhancements, and SQL Server realizing new levels of performance with persistent memory (PMEM). Get (the party) started So if you haven’t already, definitely get registered for Microsoft Ignite. Then mix yourself a Hurricane or Sazerac, and go straight to the HPE Microsoft Ignite event Virtual Booth site to join the party with all our event activities, on-demand content and technical resources. And don’t forget our Storage news of the show, how the new HPE MSA Gen6 Storage can be the life of your party for Microsoft workloads – with more application performance, yet simplified management that fits any IT budget. Learn more at: the SQL Server 2019 on the new HPE MSA Gen6 solution Blog |
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