Two shelfs
A bit of false info in this article I'm afraid.
You can still add two shelfs to the large AF systems. All expansion shelfs hold 48 slots. Two raid groups with 24 each. You can expand the system capacity by adding only one raid group.
HPE has condensed, upgraded, future-proofed and guaranteed Nimble storage, both its all-flash and hybrid product lines. These Nimble arrays are positioned underneath the main 3PAR arrays and top-end XP arrays, OEM'd from Hitachi. The 3PAR arrays have a broader feature set than Nimble arrays which have out-of-the-box simplicity …
Seems like window dressing. NVMe drives are available and shipping in multiple storage arrays these days. HPE very carefully worded their announcement to build in the NVMe buzzwords, but doesn't come out and say the Nimbles will ship with NVMe drives. What gives? When they coming HPE?
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They're also Storage Class Memory (SCM) ready, but I'd suspect NVMe SSD will be provided when either they're required by the market as a whole or affordable enough for mass adoption rather than simply bragging rights.
HPE already sell plenty of NVMe drives but it's pretty obvious despite the marketing, that the price / performance balance and market demand isn't quite there yet for 100% NVMe shared storage.
More info here:
Sure buy all the NVMe disks you want today. They should provide you with 10 to 100 times the performance. They won't though as the arrays shipping with them are not NVMe end to end. Essentially they are doing a worse disservice by selling drives that far outpace the arrays ability to serve data.