P25431-003 HPE Apollo N2600 Gen10 Plus SFF CTO Chassis

HPE P25431-003 Apollo N2600 Gen10 Plus SFF CTO Chassis

The HPE P25431-003 Apollo N2600 Gen10 Plus SFF CTO Chassis is engineered as a high-density, highly configurable server platform tailored for modern data center workloads. Designed for storage-intensive and compute-heavy deployments, this Apollo N2600 chassis emphasizes modularity, serviceability, and thermal efficiency while enabling IT teams to assemble tailored configurations (CTO — Configure To Order) that match specific capacity, performance, and budget requirements. The chassis is an ideal fit for enterprises, cloud providers, HPC clusters, edge infrastructure, and scale-out storage systems that require Small Form Factor (SFF) drive density combined with HPE's Gen10 Plus reliability and management features.

Key Technical Characteristics

Drive Density and Practical Capacity

With SFF drive formats, organizations can realize significant raw capacity while leveraging drive redundancy and tiering strategies. A single chassis can support dozens of 2.5” drives, enabling petabyte-scale capacity when used in multi-chassis racks or clustered storage architectures.

Energy Efficiency Considerations

Selecting appropriate drive mixes (SSD vs HDD), enabling advanced power-saving features, and consolidating workloads onto fewer, more efficient nodes are key strategies to optimize Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) in deployments based on the Apollo N2600 chassis.

Firmware 

Maintaining up-to-date firmware is essential for performance and security—HPE provides tools for streamlined, validated firmware rollouts across fleets to minimize disruption and ensure compliance with security baselines.

Automation and Orchestration

The chassis supports automation via APIs and integration with configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef) and orchestration frameworks—allowing DevOps teams to treat physical infrastructure as code and automate repetitive tasks

Deployment Scenarios and Typical Use Cases

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Clusters

The Apollo N2600 is frequently chosen as a building block for SDS architectures. Its high SFF drive count allows administrators to design balanced nodes optimized for capacity, redundancy, and performance tiers. Typical SDS roles include:

Edge and Telco Deployments

For edge installations that require compact, durable systems, the Apollo chassis can be CTO’d for the exact mix of compute, storage, and connectivity required by remote sites or telco locations.

Compatibility and Integration Considerations

Interoperability with HPE Ecosystem

The P25431-003 is designed to integrate with other HPE infrastructure components:

• HPE storage arrays and SAN fabrics for tiered storage strategies.
• Network switches and fabric modules for high-throughput connectivity.
• Management stacks like OneView for unified operations across rack, blade, and Apollo systems.

Memory and CPU Balancing

For workloads that rely on in-memory processing, ensure sufficient DIMM population and fast memory speeds. Task scheduling, NUMA-awareness, and affinity settings can also improve predictable performance.

Firmware Baselines and Lifecycle 

HPE provides lifecycle bundles and firmware baselines tailored to the product family—applying these ensures

When Another Platform Might Be Better

If your primary need is GPU-dense AI inference/training, or extremely high single-node compute density without local storage, alternative HPE platforms (e.g., GPU-optimized DL servers) may offer better ROI. Similarly, if you need fewer, larger 3.5" drives per node, choose a chassis designed for LFF drives instead.

Scaling Out vs Scaling Up

The Apollo N2600 is optimized for scale-out models: add chassis/nodes to expand capacity and parallel performance rather than relying on expensive single-node vertical scaling. This fits modern cloud-native and distributed storage architectures, which favor horizontal elasticity. Yes — many configurations allow mixed drive populations (NVMe/SSD/HDD), but compatibility depends on the chosen backplane and controller options. Validate the specific CTO options to ensure full support.

NVMe across all configurations

NVMe is configuration-dependent. Some variants of the Apollo family offer NVMe-capable backplanes or direct-attach NVMe paths; check the CTO matrix to confirm NVMe compatibility for the P25431-003 chassis build you intend to order.

What management tools will I need?

HPE iLO and HPE One View are recommended for lifecycle management, remote support, and orchestration. Integration with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, or vendor-provided telemetry solutions) helps with capacity planning and predictive maintenance.

Plan for long-term capacity growth

Build headroom into power and network designs, and choose modular chassis and rack layouts that permit additional nodes. Follow a documented capacity growth plan that includes drive replacements, node additions, and fabric upgrades.

Real-World Deployment Examples and Best Practices

Object Storage Cluster Example

In an object-storage cluster (e.g., Ceph), each Apollo N2600 node can be configured with a mix of NVMe for journals/cache and high-capacity SFF SSDs/HDDs for data. Best practices include evenly distributing OSDs across nodes, isolating management traffic, and using replication/erasure coding tuned to your durability requirements.

Analytics and AI Staging Nodes

Use Apollo chassis to provide fast staging areas for datasets used in training models. Pair NVMe cache with high-memory CPU nodes to accelerate data preprocessing and batch ingestion.

Backup and Archive Roles

Configure some chassis in the rack as dense archival nodes with a focus on cost-per-GB using high-capacity 2.5” HDDs and slower RAID levels designed for sequential throughput rather than random IOPS.

Documentation and Validation

Always consult HPE product guides, Quick Specs, and validated configuration matrices for the Apollo N2600 family to ensure full interoperability and support eligibility. When possible, request reference architectures from HPE or certified partners for your target workload.

Closing Operational Tip

Investing time in upfront configuration validation, power and cooling planning, and automation scripts for lifecycle tasks will pay dividends in reliability and predictable performance for deployments built on the HPE P25431-003 Apollo N2600 Gen10 Plus SFF CTO Chassis.