HPE Apollo Systems Reviews

We've only been using it for about a month so far. This is a system that's on loan to us from HPE. It's a Gen10 version with eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs and four nodes. We have already purchased the unit. This is on loan to us until we receive the Apollo 6500 that we ordered.

For storage we're using a Seagate SSD Array, all-flash array, as well as EL4000. The Apollo 6500 is for machine-learning, specifically for wafer generation, wafer analysis, for one of our operations sites in Minnesota.

I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second -that would be outstanding. That in conjunction with what Mellanox offers would provide us with a very high-speed networking interface.

The other thing is we may could, perhaps, use more GPUs in the future, go from eight to 16 GPUs per instance. That could run head-to-head against the DGX-1, the DGX-2 that NVIDIA has developed in their own chassis. That would be interesting to see.

A primary benefit is high reliability. They have very good price performance and configuration options. Being able to configure them in different ways, for different node types, was something we needed.

In referring to the Apollos, what we liked about them was:

• A combination of the density
• The flexibility to run dual CPU nodes or add GPUs to other nodes
• Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world
• Being able to connect those in large quantities
• In Bridges, we have 800 Apollo 2000 nodes, and they have been running extremely well for us

Basically, we proposed HPE Apollo for some of our clients as a backup solution. It's quite rare to get Apollo requirements here in Sri Lanka.

I can remember two incidents where we proposed Apollo. One was for one of the largest apparel companies as a backup solution, and the other was for a government project, the Parliament modules. In both cases, we proposed HPE Apollo. Other than that, there haven't been many opportunities for Apollo in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Additionally, there was a requirement for HPE Apollo at one of the Sri Lankan medical faculties. It's not a common choice for most projects here.

The higher capacities stand out. HPE Apollo allows for high capacities compared to other solutions like the DM3000 series, which may have certain capacity limitations.

With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs. So for the largest capacity requirements, we usually propose Apollo.  Therefore, HPE Apollo offers higher capacities, making it suitable for storage-intensive applications.

The solution is indeed very easy to use and customizable. We haven't faced any issues when configuring and proposing it. Whenever it comes to HPE, everyone is quite convinced about the product's reliability. 

Apollo's most valuable features for us are its density and storage capabilities.

We're trying to keep all log files in our Hadoop server, which amounts to several terabytes a day of locked data that we need to analyze. Apollo allows us to use as few nodes as possible for this so that we have as much direct space capacity as possible. It gives us much more space per gigabyte.

We use HPE Apollo for specific requirements of Linux servers.

HPE Apollo's pricing is low, and implementation is very easy compared to other products.

The solution is used in the Telecom sector for deep learning and artificial intelligence. 

HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature. It supports more than one hundred twenty teraflops of precision computing and it supports a GPU in a single JSA. When it comes to GPU-to-GPU communication and NV Links it works well. Everything is related to artificial intelligence or deep learning. This is the best solution as of right now.

There are different types of servers, and there are different types of technology. HPE Apollo is good to go with the current requirement of any Telco sector, GPU-intensive workload, or deep learning environment.

I specifically purchased it to address a need I have for DPM. I needed DPM to back up to a specific location in both of my datacenters that I have in Ireland. I needed just a lump of slow storage, but that was big, to take 30-day disk backups before they were offloaded to tape. In that sense, it ticked all the boxes and it's been working fine for that.

Now, I'm moving on to StoreOnce, but I'm going to repurpose the Apollos after this. I don't know what I'm going to use them for after this, because DPM is gone. Moving on to Veeam and StoreOnce.

It's really very clever the way it manages to hide the disks away. This idea of pulling out the little trays, I just think that's really, really clever. It's very reliable. I haven't had a single failure at all in the year and a half; not the slightest problem with it. It's been a pretty good product so far.

We actually install Scality on the Apollo servers and so we have a ring, a Scality ring, where we store our customers' documents. That allowed us to migrate away from traditional NAS with a cost effective solution whose architecture is both scalable for the future and able to handle the PB scale of document content that we deal with.

Just not having to manage traditional NAS has made a big difference. Not having to manage traditional volumes and aggregates and LUNs and things like that. Being able to be flexible when it comes to that, and Apollo has made that possible.