Around the Storage Block Blog : LeftHand SAN

Video summary of HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions

CalvinZ — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:40:00 GMT

I was trolling a bit this morning on the Internet and came across a YouTube video interview with our own Bill Chambers. Bill came to HP from LeftHand Networks and was interviewed by Virtual Strategy Magazine during the event. While I realize the event was a few months ago, the video serves as a good summary of the HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solutions. Here's the video::

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(If you have any issues viewing the embedded video, you can view this video directly on YouTube by clicking here)

And just because I really got a lot out of VMworld 2009, I thought I'd give you with a couple of the blog posts that I had done around the event. These have some great information that many will find useful:

My very late VMworld summary: Lots of good stuff here - I'd highlight the video of the P4000 demo that was done during our HP Super Session. The demo highlighted a multi-site stretched single SAN failover. There's also a video of me doing my social media thing that at least my kids got a good laugh at when they saw it.
VMworld special podcast #1: I talked with Adam Carter, our P4000 Product Manager, about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for remote and branch offices

To all those in the U.S., have a great Thanksgiving Holiday!

Day 3 from TechEd

CalvinZ — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:55:00 GMT

By Ian Selway, Worldwide HP StorageWorks Solution Manager

I've just arrived back from London and I'm looking forward to Day 3 at Microsoft TechEd Berlin. Today we've supported Microsoft in their exhibition area, manning a partner kiosk and demonstrating our LeftHand and EVA integrations with Microsoft Server 2008 R2. We had Matthias Popp from our SSI team present on this integration during Microsoft's Multi-Site Clustering with Windows Server 2008 R2. It was a full session with over 300 delegates in the room, and a further 120 or so who couldn't get in. Matthias received a large ovation after his presentation, and a good deal of the Q&A at the end focused on what we could do with LeftHand and EVA and Microsoft Live Migration. As with previous days, traffic in the exhibition halls was very busy and there was lots of interest especially in our MDS600 tear down unit. I spoke with one customer from the UK who wants to take the unit home as he has an immediate demand for this type of JBOD unit to provide him lower cost bulk storage for his Exchange users and to archive off his SAP database. The way he sees it, he has a 400GB SAP database and he's more than happy to give them a 1TB SATA drive in the MDS600, and let them have as much space as they want. He also salivates at the thought of offering his mail users 5, 10 or even 20GB mailboxes because of the bulk storage he'd have with the MDS 600.

Another customer we met with today is a large Swiss company who are about to run a proof of concept with Server 2008 R2 and was pleasantly surprised with the Live Migration capabilities of EVA with CA/CLX. It bodes well for the testing and they should make a great reference customer for us, if they deploy as planned. The Microsoft virtualization marketing team were really happy with our support of their partner kiosk, and we spent time with them exploring where we could work together in future engineering and marketing activities to further promote our abilities together.

Tonight is a customer appreciation event in partnership with Brocade and AMD. It promises to be a great evening and apparently there's an all female brass band called the Venus party band so if you can read German you're welcome to explore what we're in for. More from TechEd day 4 tomorrow.......

(Editor's note: I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow morning; Ian's Day 4 post up may not happen until I return.)

Day 1 from TechEd

CalvinZ — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:00 GMT

By Ian Selway

Day 1 at Microsoft TechEd EMEA and it's nearly 4 PM and the keynote is just about to start.... Which is a pity as I have to leave for the airport for a one day visit to the UK. The HP booth seemed to be far and away the busiest of all the vendors attending, and the new HP booth branding is superb... great kudos to the EMEA team for such an outstanding job of setup. The event is fully booked with over 7,500 attendees and it felt like a good number of those attending came and visited us today......

So far the outstanding impressions from Day 1 has been the level of activity on the HP booth, and the interest level around power and power management during the HP breakout session on 'best practices for implementing Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP servers'. Included in that track was a really great demonstration of migrating a hundred plus mailboxes on one Exchange Server 2010 to another server in a remote data center. What was amazing was that it had zero impact on the users who could still access their mail system while the Live Migration was taking place. This is a great proof point for the integration of HP StorageWorks with Microsoft Server 2008 R2. The most asked about piece of storage on the booth was definitely our HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions. I met with one European medical university running 300TB+ of LeftHand storage.... Many of the customers wanted to understand what features we have with LeftHand integrated with Live Migration, and were glad to see how we have integrated Cluster Migration to enable the moving of storage from virtual machines in one cluster to another. The other capability they liked was the disaster recovery functionality of the multi-site SAN capability. So whilst I leave for the airport, the rest of the booth staff is off (along with another 100,000 or so visitors) to see Bon Jovi play at the Brandenburg Gate... Wonder if Bon Jovi will mention HP storage...LOL!

There's a great buzz here and it really seems like the IT business is on the uptick with lots of customers talking about buying this year. More from TechEd later this week.....

Better data protection for SMBs

CalvinZ — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:08:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

On today's podcast, we talk about the HP Total Care announcement with HP StorageWorks Marketing Manager Chris McCall. The announcement today has three StorageWorks components:

HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions - new application integrated snapshots that integrates the P4000 replication software with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This integration ensures application quiescing when creating point-in-time copies, simplifying the process
HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System - new NAS target for backup allows customers to create and backup to a CIFS and/or NFS-based file share and its provided free of charge. While many customers will find NAS-based backup a desirable feature, small and midsized customers will find this most useful.
HP StorageWorks DAT 320 Tape Drives - this is the seventh generation of DAT with 2X the capacity, 75% higher performance and around 50% less power than the previous generation DAT.

So with that, here's the podcast:

Here's a link if you trouble with the embedded player and a link to download the MP3 (right click and select "save as")

StorageWorks Tech Day starting now

CalvinZ — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:43:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

If you don't follow me on Twitter, you may not be aware that we have a blogger event going in on Colorado Springs. We've brought a number of prominent storage and virtualization bloggers and over the next day and a half, have a packed agenda. The topics we'll cover include:

Storage virtualization for enterprise customers - virtualize infrastructure, not just servers
Shared storage for virtual servers (SMB-focused)
Unified storage
Deduplication
Converged Infrastructure

We'll also have hands on sessions and demos of the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP), and HP LeftHand. Here's a list of who is here (the "@name is their Twitter user name):

Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) http://vmetc.com
Nina Buik (@NinaBuik) Connect Community (its a long URL so this is a hyperlink)
Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) http://blog.fosketts.net
Robin Harris (@StorageMojo) http://storagemojo.com (Robin has already post a blog - click here to see it)
Greg Knieriemen (@Knieriemen) http://www.storagemonkeys.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&Itemid=136
Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/
John Obeto (@JohnObeto) http://absolutevista.com
Frank Owen (@fowen) http://techvirtuoso.com
Devang Panchigar (@StorageNerve) http://storagenerve.com (Devang also posted a blog - click here to see it)
Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com
Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_Si) http://www.techhead.co.uk

I'm grateful to all of them for taking time out of their busy schedules to learn more about HP StorageWorks.

I'll be blogging here about what is going on and hope to have a few podcasts later in the week. If you want to follow the conversation real-time, we'll be using the hashtag #HPTechDay on Twitter. If you don't use Twitter, here's a URL where you can see all of the "tweets" using this hashtag: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HPTechDay.

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HP LeftHand on the VMware Community Podcast

CalvinZ — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Last week, I was invited by John Troyer, the host of the VMware Community Podcast, to join his weekly podcast. I met John at VMworld at the beginning of the month and he needed a partner to be a guest on the podcast. The format is a Q&A with the live and chat audience. On the call from HP were:

John Spiers, former CTO and found of LeftHand Networks, now our HP LeftHand Evangelists
George Wagner, Product Marketing Manager
Brad Katz, Support Engineer focused on integration with VMware
and me, HP Storage Guy aka Calvin Zito

I learned a lot and thought you might benefit from listening to this too. However, I can't figure out how to easily embedded the podcast here on my blog so let me give you a couple of options to listen to it:

Click on this link to open a pop-up streaming version of the webcast (note - it's about 55 minutes long)
Right click on this link and select "Save as" to download the MP3 file - it's a 24MB file

One question that came up during the podcast was a discussion about the pricing of our HP LeftHand VSA (Virtual SAN Appliance) software compared to a physical iSCSI-based array. We've talked about VSA on previous discussions here so I won't define it - if you're not familiar with it, click here to check out the product page where you can learn more. Someone on the podcast said that the cost of two VSA licenses was $10,000. and what's the point when you can get a cheap iSCSI array for that. So I wanted to talk more about that. First, the $10,000 price is a bit high. The U.S. list price is around 15% less than what was discussed on the call. So why is there value in software that can take direct attach storage on an ESX server and turn it into shared storage? Here are a bunch of them:

We have a cheaper iSCSI based arrays in our portfolio with our HP StorageWorks MSA family or our recently announced X3000 so it's not as if we don't know that you can get cheaper physical disk arrays.
You have to factor in up to 10TB of disk capacity which is what a single VSA supports - so compare the cost of 10TB of a physical array to the VSA allowing you to share up to 10TB of DAS that are probably sitting there today wasting away.
You get up to 10 VSA licenses with our HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual and Multi-site SANS. An incredible value.
We provide bundles with our servers that make the total purchase of the whole infrastructure - server, network, and storage - very attractive. These are the HP Virtualization Bundles that I've mentioned here previously.
VSA provides all the value of our P4000 SAN including replication, thin provisioning, Smart Clone, Snaps, Volume Copy and more. Last I looked, one competitor was charging an additional $60,000-80,000 for these value add features that are included FREE with both our VSA and P4000.
VSA can be spit across sites. A traditional iSCSI SAN - and this is key - can not.
With VSA you can manage other SAN technology behind it if it is shared as a LUN to the server with VSA.
With our BladeSystem, VSA can take advantage of existing Flex-10 infrastructure to manage QOS of your bandwidth
VSA is software not hardware. It is "greener" and subject to larger discounts for volume.

So with VSA software, we aren't just providing an easy way to turn DAS into shared storage for VMware but it does so much more.

I hope that context helps as you listen to the podcasts.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy. I'd love to hear from you and talk to you more about all things storage.

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Special VMworld Podcast #1

CalvinZ — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:41:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

During VMworld, I had a chance to talk with Adam Carter. Adam is our HP LeftHand Worldwide Product Manager and had just finished a session talking about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for remote and branch offices. I think you'll learn a lot about implementing VDI in a remote branch office and about our HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance. Adam also mentioned a VMware paper on this topic; this is a link to it.

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VMworld is almost here!

CalvinZ — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:02:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Next week is VMworld in San Francisco - and as the number one partner of VMworld, HP will have a big presence at the event. Are you surprised to hear that HP is the number one partner? Here are a few "fun facts":

We have more server models certified for VMware than any other vendor
HP StorageWorks has more certified storage systems on VMware than any other vendor
HP StorageWorks systems on VMware span SMB to Enterprises and include SAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel shared storage technologies.
We are also the only VMware certified solution that takes disks or direct attached storage systems in an ESX server and turn them into a virtual SAN with HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance.
HP and EDS have more VMware certified professionals (VCPs) -768-- than anyone except VMware

I'll be there tweeting and blogging with some other colleagues. You can follow all of us: @ProLiant, @BladeNews, @TSatHP, @HPITOps, and yours truly, @HPStorageGuy. We'll be using the hashtag #HPVMW to help you find what we have to say. Use it your self and join the conversation!

If you are going to be there, drop me a tweet or leave a comment. To help you find me, here's what my HPstorageGuy polo shirt looks like:

If you can't travel to VMWorld, you can get all of the latest buzz from us at www.hp.com/go/VMworld.

Lastly, here are a few of the HP sessions at VMworld that you might consider that I'll also be attending:

"Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure", with HP EVP Ann Livermore (Session ID SS5150, Tuesday at 9:30 AM
"VDI to the edge: deploying virtual desktops to remote and branch offices", with Adam Carter from our HP LeftHand (Session ID SV2493, Wednesday at 4 PM)
"Conquering Costs and Complexity in a Virtualized Environment: Research and Case Studies" with IDC Research Vice President Michelle Bailey (Session ID VM5401, Wednesday at 10 AM)

Look for a few blog posts from VMworld next week and look me up if your there.

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New format - podcast

CalvinZ — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:01:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

We wanted to try a new format with our blog so I'm happy to share this podcast with you today. We'll still post written blogs but we'll also mix in podcasts now and then.

Today's discussion is with Lee Johns. Lee is the Director of Marketing for our Unified Storage Division. Lee and I discussed a blog post that we had seen from George Crump, a storage analyst at Storage Switzerland. George talked about storage applications "like thin provisioning, snapshot, replication and other capabilities" and wondered why customers can't just buy this software capabilities and run it on their hardware. That's what Lee and I discussed in this podcast. Let me know if you like the format.

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Usability Corner Interview with Chris McCall: Usability, Virtualization and SMB

CalvinZ — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:38:00 GMT

By Mike Moroze, HP LeftHand Usability Corner

I sat down with Chris McCall the manager of product marketing in our Unified Storage Division (a part of HP's StorageWorks Division) to discuss how small and medium sized companies are looking at virtualization. What we're seeing is that more and more small and medium sized companies are finding that their virtualization requirements are similar to large enterprises. I asked Chris some question to help me understand the SMB and virtualization market better.

Usability Corner (UC): Virtualization seems to be taking off in the enterprise business space, do you see a similar trajectory for the Small-Medium Business (SMB)? If so, why?

Chris McCall (CM): No, I see a different trajectory for SMB. Virtualization in the SMB space is not growing as fast as in the enterprise space because virtualization puts up a few roadblocks that make it difficult for SMB's to implement. They can limit the full potential of virtualization. The biggest roadblock to virtualization is storage; for many SMB's, it's too expensive and requires too many resources to manage and implement. However, VMWare HA (high availability), and VMotion - require shared storage.

UC: Why would an SMB customer choose an HP LeftHand virtualization solution over another vendor's solution?

CM: For SMB customers that expect their virtual environment to grow, HP LeftHand solutions provides a very cost-effective entry point which is massively scalable. Purchase what you want to today and grow it to whatever size you want -- maintaining HA. And for customers that don't want to deal with external storage we have the VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) which transforms server disk drives into iSCSI SANs with the same level of scalability.

UC: Usability can bring several competitive advantages to a product. Can you comment on what advantages you see our customers relying on in terms of the usability of the HP LeftHand solution?

CM: Virtual Server environments provide a very dynamic application environment. Customers can roll out new applications, change configurations, and move workloads around very easily. So what does that mean from a storage manageability perspective? It puts pressure on being able to change storage configurations more often. Any product that allows simple on-line storage configurations so your storage needs can change quickly and frequently is not only a competitive advantage but a requirement. Our HP LeftHand P4000 Centralized Management Console allows us to do that easily - the GUI (Graphical User Interface) makes it simple without any downtime with your volumes.

UC: What key usability advantages do you believe that the HP LeftHand solutions have over the competition?

CM: Non-disruptive configuration changes, non-disruptive performance scaling, simple GUI requires less time to manage; Our solution provides for easy thin provisioning - there are no setting of thresholds, growth increments, etc. --- same with snapshots, you don't have to set reserves and there's no guesswork - the system takes care of all that for you.

UC: In the context of SMBs and virtualization - virtualization typically provides a fairly high ROI. Would you agree that ROI is an important decision criterion for virtualization? What other criteria are important for SMB storage decisions?

CM - ROI used to be the number one criteria; improving business continuity has become number one over the last year. For SMBs, business continuance has become more important because with virtualization, you're putting more eggs in fewer baskets.

UC: ROI of usability is also frequently referenced as a reason to ensure usability is considered in product development. Would you agree? What other reasons would there be to include usability in HP LeftHand solutions?

CM: Yes absolutely - usability is all about ROI. Customer satisfaction and troubleshooting are also critical -- the easier it is to understand what's going on, the more likely you are to avoid potential downtime.

UC: How would you rate the usability of our solution for the SMB customer compared to our competitors?

CM: Considering the comprehensive feature set provided in addition to simplicity, I honestly believe HP P4000 is the best- take a look at the Windows IT Pro article from by Michael Otey which just posted. [Note: UC tracked down this link after Chris suggested it and you can click here to read the article: http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/article/articleid/102478/hp-lefthand-p4300-48tb-sas-starter-san-solution.html ]

UC: What are the 3 or so main pain points that virtualization is solving for the SMB customer? How does our solution help alleviate these pain points?

CM:

First - Cost - you can run more apps on less servers. However, this means you're putting more of your eggs in fewer baskets, which leads to the next issue;
Second - Maintaining high availability
Third - Improve IT environment flexibility

HP LeftHand addresses the cost issue by providing a solution that allows you to buy only what you need to today and grow it non-disruptively. Also, thin provisioning cuts initial outlay, and for customers that want to leverage server disk drives, VSA eliminates the need for external storage hardware. High availability is achieved by HP LeftHand's highly redundant and highly available solutions that leverage Network RAID in addition to the traditional HW RAID. These solutions protect against more than just disk drives and controller failures. Our system can stay online during full node failures, air conditioning failures, power outages, etc. - applications never lose access to their data.

Our solutions improve your IT environment's flexibility. All configuration changes, and increasing performance and capacity can be done non-disruptively which delivers a flexible storage environment which you need for flexible IT environment.

UC: Any thoughts on how HP LeftHand can improve its customer focus in designing and developing solutions that meet our customer needs?

CM: Ultimately, we don't want users using our UI, we want it so simple that it rolls into the IT environment and you don't have to manage storage as a separate entity, everything just works... Storage tasks are automated with higher level IT tasks -- like rolling out applications or increasing application performance.

UC: Thanks Chris!

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HP LeftHand usability corner: Let's get this party started!

CalvinZ — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:58:00 GMT

By Mike Moroze, HP LeftHand Usability Lead

I'm back! Sorry it's been a while but it's been pretty exciting as we (LeftHand) transition into HP StorageWorks. Look for more frequent posts going forward...

So, this post is a bit different than my previous posts - in this post, I will show you how easy it is to set up the HP LeftHand Starter SAN using a screen capture video. The video is relatively short - less than 4 minutes - and shows just how easy it is to go from a couple of storage nodes that are available, but not yet in use, to an operational SAN ready to accept data.

The video starts with using a wizard to assign two storage nodes to a management group. Before that, you need to set up the storage nodes on your network and assign them IP addresses. You should also know what IP addresses you have available for a Virtual IP for load balancing, what NTP server addresses you plan on using, and what the naming conventions are that you want to use, etc. Once the nodes are discoverable on the network and you have all the info you need, you can fire up the wizard and in less than 15 minutes be ready to write data. Pretty simple - you're guided the whole way. Most of the time is spent on the SAN performing its tasks to set up the storage network. In reality, it only takes a couple of minutes of your time to input the necessary data.

The starter SAN is a great way to get started with just the storage you need now -- allowing you to easily grow your SAN as your storage needs increase.

The HP LeftHand SAS Starter SAN lets you start small and keep your SAN system simple as you grow. The most scalable entry-level SAN available today, the LeftHand Starter SAN is perfect for first time virtualization projects. Buy only what you need today knowing that you can scale your storage network non-disruptively to more than 320 disk drives.

Integrated replication capabilities, thin provisioning, and snapshots are included to ensure easy SAN management as the environment becomes more complex. Each SAS Starter SAN comes standard with SAN/iQ® software training, three years of support, and a fully integrated, enterprise class feature set. Everything you need to get up and running quickly, and all for an affordable price.

Check out the video and let me know what you think:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

[Editor's note: I'm hearing some browsers don't play the embedded video so here's a link that will open the video. It's also a larger video if you'd rather see a large window.]

So, let's get this party started with an easy-to-use, and easy to grow, HP LeftHand Starter SAN Solution.

[Editor's note: Prior to HP's acquisition of LeftHand Networks, the team had a blog called the Usability Corner. There are probably a number of readers that aren't familiar with this blog so here's a link to it so you can see some of the previous blog posts there. The goal of that blog was "to start a conversation surrounding the usability of LeftHand's SAN solutions. Technology is only as good as the users' experience and we intend to highlight the tips and tricks surrounding LeftHand's features to make managing your storage environment even easier." As Mike said, new posts for the LeftHand Usability Corner will appear in this blog.]

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Box score for NetApp capacity calculator

CalvinZ — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:34:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

So let me catch you up on what's happened here. We posted a blog recently talking about our HP Virtualization Bundles - bundles that include servers, storage, virtualization software, networking - essentially to make it very easy for midsize customers who are implementing virtual server environments to reduce the complexity of bringing their infrastructure up. Alex McDonald, whose role at NetApp is competitive analysis, dropped a comment pointing to a blog post he had trying to cast HP LeftHand solutions as having poor capacity utilization.

I can only assume that NetApp is seeing increased competition from HP LeftHand which I would totally expect now that the worldwide reach of HP is behind this great iSCSI-based solution. There were a lot of comments on his blog on the topic and we also posted something here by Jasen Baker, one of our field storage architects.

So, get out your scorecards and let me try to step you though the box score.

NetApp bats first

Alex got to bat first and we're the home team, so we'll bat last. Alex started it off by questioning a few things that Chris McCall had said in a video interview from HP Tech Forum. He first questioned why Chris worked for our Unified Storage Division since our HP LeftHand solution is an iSCSI SAN based system (SAN only, no NAS). I'm just wondering why Alex cares so much about our internal organization but I'm sorry to say we'll just have to keep Alex hanging on this one.

Next Alex questioned comments Chris made about the HP LeftHand solution being "green". Alex thought he had something here (though as I'll discuss in a moment, pretty much ignored everything Chris said about thin provisioning) and developed his LeftHand Capacity Calculator. Here's a look at it:

That's it - that's the calculator. Alex said all you have to do is stick in your total disk space and you always know your usable capacity with HP LeftHand. NetApp looks like they have a big lead but now the home team gets to step up to the plate.

HP's turn at bat

Alex demonstrated his lack of understanding of HP LeftHand and here's where he goes wrong:

Alex stated that his little calculator always worked. Jasen Baker wrote a nice post pointing out the faulting logic Alex used. The first issue is that our HP LeftHand solution can use either RAID 5, 6, or 10. So for example, on our HP LeftHand P4300 Storage System, RAID 5 utilization is 87.5% meaning it's a 7+1 configuration. In fact, I'm looking at a sizing tool and with a 6 TB system using RAID 5 with no Network RAID, all things considered, capacity utilization is over 78%. Isn't that a balk on our scorecard? Alex's "always" right calculator appears to be broken but there's more.
The big point Alex missed and continues to be confused about is Network RAID. This is a pretty cool and unique capability of the HP LeftHand solutions. As Jason said, "Network RAID is a unique feature of the HP LeftHand SAN that allows you to CHOOSE on a per volume basis how many replicated copies of your LUN / VOLUME are distributed across the SAN." It's an optional feature and Jasen went on to say, "Network RAID is dynamic, because you as the customer choose to turn it on or off depending on the application protection needs. With that choice, you select the use of additional capacity to protect your data in a manner superior to standard hardware RAID." Let me summarize what this means - Network RAID isn't always used and can be turned on when it's needed. Do customers use it? Of course! Do customers use it with all of their data? Probably not! Score that as an error and a run cored. Seems like the calculator's keys are broken.
And I noticed something else that just has me shaking my head; George Wagner is an HP LeftHand expert. On Alex's blog post, he pointed out that Network RAID "provides HA [high availability] for the volumes that require it". What was Alex's response to this? "Sorry, George it's got zero to do with HA". Wow - Alex thinks he knows more about HP LeftHand than HP does. Sorry Alex, the whole reason for Network RAID is to improve HA. John Spiers, a founder of LeftHand and former CTO said this, "When using Network RAID 2 it protects you from multiple disk faults, complete array faults and site faults with auto failover and failback.". Network RAID is a choice point - a great, low cost way to build HA into your HP LeftHand SAN. What's the cost? Unlike NetApp who will charge you for equivalent functionality and also lower your utilization, the only cost with HP LeftHand is the disk space used. And again, we give you control of this at a volume level and let you turn it off as you determine. If you want to compare capacity utilization of the two solutions then it has to be an apples to apples configuration. Alex is doing that and the comparison is bogus. I'd also suggest that the cost of the solution should be part of the comparison and I'm sure Alex nor NetApp want you to know the cost difference between the solutions. The umpire just discovered that Alex was using an illegal bat so his at bat suddenly isn't looking so good.
The other major flaw in Alex's calculator is how we use thin provisioning. Thin provisioning on our solution is leveraged across all of the storage objections: volumes, snapshots, clones, and remote copies. What does this mean? HP LeftHand uses something called "allocate on write" - no storage capacity is reserved up front for any storage object, be it a volume, snapshot, etc. Why does this matter? Because other vendors, NetApp included, have to set a reserve for each of those things. I don't know what their reserve - NetApp will have to answer that. And if you don't use the reserve, guess what - it's wasted space that can't easily be reclaimed. Whoa - it's a whole different game now, isn't it?

If you watch Chris' video, you'll notice that Alex didn't raise any questions about the great fit LeftHand has with HP. Chris talked about a day when we'll have HP LeftHand running inside our HP BladeSystem for a comprehensive solution - networking with Virtual Connect, storage, servers - all in an efficient infrastructure. Alex didn't raise this point because it's a competitive disadvantage. And of course he completely ignored that we have our virtualization bundle today... and I think you get the point why he ignored.

The last thing I'll mention is the overall value of the two solutions. Let's keep this high-level as I want to wrap on this:

Value add software like asynchronous replication, synchronous replication, clustering, and performance monitoring can cost upwards of $120,000 in licensing fees with NetApp. How much does the value add software cost with HP LeftHand? $0. Plug that number into your calculator and the value is clear. So while NetApp continues to argue capacity utilization (which they have wrong), they won't tell you about how much extra you'll have to pay to get what is included for free with HP LeftHand.
The HP LeftHand SAN pricing model is pay-as-you-grow. You buy capacity or performance when you need it rather than ahead of time as is the case with the NetApp architecture. You buy only what you need and scale your capacity and performance non-disruptively online with HP LeftHand SANs.
With NetApp, you'll have to oversize your controller today to accommodate future growth, buy more capacity than you need and as you fill your NetApp array and see your performance drop, you'll have to buy additional capacity to address the drop in performance. That point about performance tanking as they fill up their array may be something you hadn't heard of before but here's a chart from NetApp that shows that: Phew... Alex's calculator seems to have run out of batteries!
With HP LeftHand, thin provisioning is leveraged throughout the architecture - with NetApp, its limited and space is committed when you create objects. Remember, HP LeftHand uses allocate on write - making the most of the storage capacity. With our thin provisioning, the capacity is always available to you when you need it without any pre-commit of space.

Well, I think we've clearly demonstrated that the NetApp calculator is missing a few keys, out of batteries, and generally on the fritz. There have been several folks engaged in this discussion and Alex doesn't seem to want to admit anything he's stated is wrong. I also think that customers Alex has focused on a very narrow focus (capacity utilization) when what you really care about is the cost - which capacity utilization impacts. Every decision you make has a cost tradeoff - when decided on Fibre Channel or iSCSI, cost as at the core of that decision. So I'd challenge Alex that if you want to keep the discussion going, let's raise it to the level that customers will care - and get a new calculator.

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HP LeftHand capacity

CalvinZ — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:37:00 GMT

By Jasen Baker, Storage Architect

I once heard that in communicating your opinion or differences, you should not use personal phrases, such as "you always", "you never", "every time", etc. These make broad, sweeping assumptions which seldom reflect the truth, especially when communicating differences in products. Attention to detail, such as quoting someone's name when providing a source of argument, or consolidating many options into a single unified calculation over simplify and often times mislead readers who are looking for educated facts instead of uninformed guesses.

As an example, take a look at online value calculators. There are calculators for mortgages, calculators for the national debt, ROI calculators, and even storage capacity calculators. They do their best to point you in a certain direction, to narrow down the scope of what you will be working with, but don't truly take in all the factors, hence why the infamous asterisk * exists!

In responding to a recent blog post referencing "LeftHand Capacity Calculator" crafted to demonstrate useable percentages of available capacity, it's supposed to ALWAYS, come out this way.

To quote the blog, "That's because, regardless of how small or how large your LHN SAN, it's always:"

Image "courtesy" of NetApp

There's that word again, always.

In storage, there are useable capacities that always occur. That always, is the space you lose as a result of hardware RAID, well, unless it's hardware RAID 0.

First, the HP LeftHand storage nodes can be configured in RAID 5, 6, or RAID 10, all with various useable capacities. This calculator only has RAID 5. Why choose? The reasons are many, but most common are performance, protection and capacity. You choose, it's no different with us or any other vendor solution.

Second, "Disk rightsizing", a term used to explain why that 1TB hard drive you bought only shows ~932GB useable. Why? Well, that's because the hard drive vendors view 1MB as 1000 kbytes while your Operating system views 1MB as 1024 kbytes. That extra 24 bytes adds up which is why you truly don't get the actual hard size useable (this is before formatting it with your favorite file system as well). Again, nothing specific to use or any other vendor solution.

Third, Network RAID. What is Network RAID? Network RAID is a unique feature of the HP LeftHand SAN that allows you to CHOOSE on a per volume basis how many replicated copies of your LUN / VOLUME are distributed across the SAN. What is unique about this is it's DYNAMIC. You get to choose which volumes have it and which do not. What it offers you is the ability to survive entire node failures; if your nodes are physically separated and you lose an entire physical sites, your data remains online and available.

Hardware RAID is usually a set it and forget it configuration, and it's seldom changed. Network RAID is dynamic, because you as the customer choose to turn it on or off depending on the application protection needs. With that choice, you select the use of additional capacity to protect your data in a manner superior to standard hardware RAID. They key point here is choice. You have the choice, and if you change your mind, the system is dynamic and allows you to change the level of data protection on a per volume basis as often as desired. Unfortunately, a calculator without options isn't very reflective of real life. In essence, the above calculator was missing the infamous *Your mileage may vary...

To quote our previous blog poster "Unlike NetApp's space efficiency calculator, the LHN Duplication Calculator I've designed doesn't have any input fields or buttons..."

The HP Centralized Management interface WE designed, does have buttons, and even drop-downs, allowing you to choose how your capacity is used, ALWAYS.

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Making virtualization easy

CalvinZ — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:24:00 GMT

By John Spiers (Former CTO and a founder of LeftHand Networks, now working for HP StorageWorks)

If you haven't taken a look at the new HP virtualization bundles, you definitely should. The virtualization bundles provide an end-to-end solution that delivers application high availability without external storage. Sounds like a contradiction? Read on!

It has been characterized as a "mini-Matrix system", offering server, virtualization, storage and networking products configured and tested to reach the full potential of server virtualization. These bundles include ProLiant G6 servers, VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization software, ProCurve networking Switches, HP LeftHand P4000 and HP's Insight Control Suite (ICE) for management.

My colleague recently wrote about the virtualization bundles and it got me thinking about how unique these bundles are for SMBs and other companies looking to improve application availability and cost savings through virtualization.

Allow me to elaborate...

HP positions these easy-to-buy bundles as solutions that reduce the complexity and uncertainty of virtualization. You have rack or tower servers, highly available shared storage and networking with simple, centralized management.

Looking at the value of the bundles, Illuminata recently stated, "A major contributor to the value of what HP offers in these bundles is the fact that the requirement for acquiring, integrating and testing external SAN storage can be avoided."

We address one of the main hurdles on the way to server virtualization: the need for shared storage. Without shared, highly available storage VMotion, VMware HA or VMware FT cannot happen automatically, virtual machines cannot be moved and application users cannot be shielded from the outage of a physical server. If all you do is consolidate many virtual machines onto one physical server, you have basically placed all bets in one basket (traditionally knows as all eggs in one basket). Some workloads and business requirements can tolerate this scenario, yet many cannot. With HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance, the internal server disks (and directly attached disks) can be pooled in a VMware environment and act like a pool of storage, like a virtual SAN. The IT administrator ends us using a SAN without ever having bought a SAN, a physical SAN that is!

The majority of these Virtualization Bundles include physical SAN nodes. And another secret is that servers and the SAN can not only failover, but automatically failback and incrementally re-sync the data on the primary SAN without manual intervention and with complete application data consistency using VMware's vSphere Fault Tolerance capability. Not to mention that these meaty bundles include software for snapshots, cloning, remote replication, thin provisioning, multi-site synchronous replication and advanced performance monitoring - at no additional charge.

With this new technology combination, HP is clearly establishing a new paradigm in server and storage virtualization. This is what customers have been asking for, for years and they can finally get it. I don't know of a single vendor server and SAN solution in the market today that is comparable.

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Day 3 (Wednesday) Videos from HP Tech Forum

CalvinZ — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:44:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Today at HP Technology Forum we had a couple of our HP StorageWorks exec interviewed by Shane Pitman Editor in Chief from Neowin.net with some help from Andy McCaskey from SDR News.

The first one was with Brian Ignomirello, who I talked about in a my Day 2 Summary post, and is our CTO of the Americas HP StorageWorks Division. I can't embed the video on the blog but here's a link where you watch the interview with Brian: http://bit.ly/4hF1Ju. Brian gives a brief overview of StorageWorks, talks about storage technology trends, and some of his priorities as CTO.

The next interview was with Chris McCall. Chris manages a team of product marketing managers in our Unified Storage Division and recent came to HP via our acquisition of LeftHand Networks. Here again is a link to his interview: http://bit.ly/SgPmy.

One other note - I'll post a more complete Day 3 summary in the next couple of days as I am traveling back home tomorrow to celebrate my son's 10th Birthday.

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