HPE Alletra MP Hardware Deep Dive

HPE Alletra MP Hardware Deep Dive

New block and file services highlighted the HPE GreenLake Storage Day. While HPE emphasizes the operational and management benefits of making these services available in GreenLake, we’re interested in the new universal hardware platform that sits behind the scenes – the HPE Alletra MP storage server.

HPE Alletra MP

What the Alletra MP platform gives HPE is a purpose-built storage server solution that is flexible enough to handle a variety of workloads like the GreenLake storage services. Most of us in enterprise IT have had some exposure to supply chain issues during the recent pandemic. HPE, of course, was not immune to this and decided the faster they could pivot off of dedicated SAN storage hardware, the better.

While we’re seeing HPE put the Alletra MP server to work first in GreenLake, HPE obviously intends to leverage Alletra hardware platforms for their storage offerings in the future. The Alletra systems benefit a good deal from their ProLiant heritage but are tuned for the specific needs of storage I/O.

Before MP, HPE had started rebranding the Apollo storage line to Alletra. We saw this most recently in the Alletra 4110 and 4120 platforms launched earlier this year. The Alletra 4110 is a 1U all-NVMe storage server that supports up to 20 E3S or SFF NVMe SSDs (double-stacked backplane).

The Alletra 4120 is a 2U hybrid-NVMe storage server that supports up to front 24 LFF drives with 4 LFF, 12 E3.S or 6 SFF in the rear, and up to front 48 SFF drives with 12 E3.S or 6 SFF in the rear

While those storage servers have an interesting density story, they’re both simple single-server, single-node designs. What Alletra MP does is bring a more SAN-friendly, dual-node architecture to market with support for 24 U.3/U.2 NVMe SSDs. While it would have been fun to see a dense E3.S platform with the MP, the ecosystem of SSDs isn’t there yet in terms of qualified dual-port drives. That said, dissociating the underlying software for block and file from the hardware gives HPE a ton of flexibility for the future to tune hardware platforms just the way they like for GreenLake and the channel partners that pick up the Alletra servers for their own SDS solutions.

Swinging around the back of the HPE Alletra MP server, we start to get a better view of how this platform comes together. On either side of the rear of the chassis are power supplies. Above the power supply on the left, there’s an extra bit, a chassis identification module, which tells GreenLake how this particular Alletra MP is configured (block or file presently). In the center are the twin compute nodes, each powered by a single AMD EPYC processor.

As we take a closer look at the Alletra MP motherboard, we can see the fan bank at the rear of the server pulling air over the AMD CPU, 8 DIMM slots, and M.2 boot drives. The fans, in conjunction with those in the second node, would also cool the NVMe SSDs in the front of the unit and the I/O cards on the other side of the fans.

Each of the Alletra MP nodes has four OCP slots, giving HPE plenty of options when configuring these nodes for I/O. Today that usually means FibreChannel cards for the GreenLake block storage services and fast Ethernet for file storage. But there could be cases where both types are used or something else in those OCP slots entirely, depending on the customer’s need. Between the I/O banks is a dedicated HPE iLO card for out-of-band server management.