By Edgardo Lopez, Product Marketing Manager

Recently, I talked about how the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) network-based storage virtualization solution forms a solid foundation for an adaptive storage infrastructure that can significantly boost storage asset utilization while simplifying operations and improving efficiency.

It has been true for many years, that the best way to drive cost out of any infrastructure solution is by implementing common methodologies, tools, standards and techniques. An SVSP based storage infrastructure offers such a common set of tools and methodologies that will enable organizations to address an important set of use cases to streamline operations and improve productivity.  They include:

• Storage Consolidation and Centralized Management
• Non-disruptive Data Migrations
• Dynamic Tiered Storage infrastructures
• Rapid Application Recovery
• Efficient Application Testing & Development
• Cost Effective Disaster Recovery

Today,  I'd like explore the "Storage Consolidation & Centralized Management" use case with the SVSP; review how it actually delivers value within the context of simplified storage management, and discover how to evaluate this Use Case, economically.

Many customers today have storage arrays from different vendors or at least different generations of arrays, and models from the same vendor.  Except in very rare instances, the customer is forced to recall the capabilities of each type of storage and use a different set of management tools from each vendor, including data services options, in order to manage each array separately.  As the number of servers  (virtual and physical) and storage devices grows, hundreds or thousands of volumes must be individually monitored and managed by storage administrators--a daunting task to say the least.  Complexity, cost and capacity utilization rates are all negatively impacted in these traditional deployments, particularly when server virtualization is introduced.

A better approach is to use the SVSP platform to develop a consolidated storage infrastructure (see figure 1) that drives better economics.  The SVSP:

• Aggregates capacity via network-based virtualization from HP and non-HP arrays, to form centrally managed pools of virtual storage
• Dynamically provisions storage, reclaim unused space, maximize application uptime by expanding capacity on a "just-in-time" basis,
• Centrally manages multiple arrays and multiple data services with a consistent set of tools
• Creates storage tiers and easily migrates data among the tiers to optimize storage costs
• Improves capacity utilization with thin provisioning for all capacity under management irrespective of the array type
• Maintains unused capacity in pool for future requirements
• Improves in some instances performance by striping LUNs across RAID arrays

       Figure 1: Consolidation and Centralized Storage management with the HP SVSP

Consolidation and management of multiple arrays from various vendors is significantly simplified using the SVSP.   According to IDC (See Footnote #1), solutions like the SVSP can increase storage utilization by as much as 300% when compared to typical SAN Deployments.  It can also triple the amount of storage that a person can manage.   Overall, an SVSP deployment as illustrated in figure #1, can have a significant customer impact in three areas: business, operational, and finacial impact.  I've summarized these as follows:

Business impact:

• Flexibility Storage Infrastructure enabling faster responses to changing business conditions, particularly when server virtualization is part of the deployment
• Maximizes application availability for revenue-producing activity
• Greater asset utilization

Operational Impact:

• Prevents server downtime due to out-of-space conditions
• Reduces the time needed to respond to support additional servers, applications, and users
• Increases the amount of storage each administrator can manage
• Reduces administrative errors by using one management console for all storage devices
• Better performance due to volume striping across RAID arrays

Financial Impact:

• Reduces storage costs
• Reclaims unused storage
• Greater storage utilization
• Lower TCO, CAPEX and OPEX

For more details see:  www.hp.com/go/svsp

Footnote #1: "The Business Value of Storage Virtualization: Scaling the Storage Solution; Leveraging the Storage Investments", IDC, Richard Villars & Randy Perry,   Feb. 2009

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