Hewlett Packard Enterprise is adding hybrid solid-state and hard-disk drive configurations to its Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000, pairing SSDs with SAS-4 hard drives of up to 32 terabytes. HPE says the combination is intended to offer high-performance computing customers more capacity and lower acquisition costs than an all-flash configuration.
The new options expand a product line based on the Lustre parallel file system. The E2000 is available in all-flash, all-disk, hybrid SSD-and-HDD, and tiered SSD-and-HDD configurations. Its new hybrid designs use 32TB SAS-4 HDDs, replacing the 24TB drives used previously, and SAS-4 drive enclosures configured for either 74 or 100 drives.
HPE links the change to the cost of flash: the company says NAND and SSD prices have risen sevenfold over the past 12 months. The new drive combinations give customers another way to balance performance, usable capacity and acquisition costs, rather than relying entirely on flash for storage capacity.
HPE’s performance and cost claims
HPE says customers can spend 82 percent less than they would on a comparable all-flash system while matching storage performance to processing requirements. The company bases that cost comparison on street pricing for 15 petabytes of usable capacity meeting specifications for a 1,024-GPU cluster.
For capacity, HPE claims the new configuration can provide up to 32 percent more usable storage per rack, allowing larger datasets to fit within the same data-center footprint. It also reports maximum per-rack throughput of 116 gigabytes per second for reads and 92GB/s for writes. HPE says that represents up to 41 percent more data throughput per storage rack than the next hybrid competitor, which it identifies as DDN.
These are vendor-provided comparisons and maximum figures; the supplied details do not describe the test conditions behind the throughput claims. Actual results will depend on the system configuration and workload.
How the E2000 is built
The E2000 uses modular building blocks to provide management, metadata and file-data services. A pair of System Management Units holds configuration and logging data on SSDs. Metadata Units manage global Lustre metadata; each contains two Lustre metadata servers and flash-based metadata targets. An MDU has 32 SSDs divided into two partitions.
File data is served by Scalable Storage Units, available in disk-based SSU-D and flash-based SSU-F forms. These units provide Lustre I/O data services and handle network requests. Their object storage servers use object storage targets to store and retrieve portions of the file-system data. The architecture lets deployments combine flash and disk across the system’s storage roles.
HPE’s wider Cray storage range also includes the C500 for smaller clusters, the E1000 and E2000 for large supercomputers, and the K3000 for extreme systems, sometimes paired with an E2000. The systems run Lustre or the DAOS parallel file system, according to HPE.
Rack management and availability
Alongside the storage announcement, HPE introduced a Rack Management Controller. Its initial support is planned for Cray Supercomputing GX5000 systems, with extensions for AMD and Nvidia rack-scale systems to follow. The controller integrates with HPE’s Supercomputing Management Software suite: Foundation for infrastructure management, Composable for resource sharing, and Observability for operational monitoring.
HPE says the integration shares rack-level telemetry and control capabilities, with the aim of improving visibility and simplifying operation and expansion of large, liquid-cooled HPC and AI environments. The company plans to make the E2000 hybrid configurations available in early 2027. The controller and software suite are scheduled for March 2027 on Cray Supercomputing GX systems, followed by AMD and Nvidia rack-scale system support in June 2027.
