Around the Storage Block Blog : Solid State Disk

Storage virtualization and the new EVA

CalvinZ — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:04:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

In my first post, I gave an overview of the March 10 announcement we did. In part 2, I gave a bit more color to the StorageWorks piece of the announcement. Today, I want to talk about the new EVA6400 and EVA8400 that were announced. If you're already familiar with the EVA and it's virtualizated pool of disk drives, you can skip down to my heading titled "What's New"?

The EVA was first announced in 2001. We've shipped nearly 70,000 EVAs and nearly half of that has been in the last few years. Why so many more over the recent past - because we've been able to substantiate the ease of use benefits of the EVA and with the growth of data, I think more and more customers understand that the EVA is the easiest mid-range array to manage in the industry.

So as a short primer for those of you that maybe don't understand EVA virtualization, I'll briefly summarize it here. At it's core, virtualization is a logical abstraction of the underlying physical widgets (whether your talking servers, storage, network, etc). With the EVA, we are virtualizing at the storage system level to hide the underlying physical disk drives so that what you manage is a pool of capacity. These pools of virtual capacity can be configured as virtual disks and presented to any or all connected hosts. The EVA capitalizes on virtualization to provide optimal performance, ease of management, improved capacity utilization, powerful data replication tools, and faster rebuild times, while simplifying the management of the virtualized storage capacity. There's a lot more that we could talk about here on the EVA's virtualization capabilities but for now, I'll point you to the white paper titled Storage virtualization and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array. It is a good resource to get you going on the EVA and virtualization.

What's New?

So that brings me to a discussion on what's new. There are two new EVA models - the EVA6400 and EVA8400. They join the EVA4400 that we announced about a year ago when we refreshed the low end of our portfolio; this announcement refreshes the rest of the EVA family.

Here's a summary of what's new:

Support for Vraid 6 providing double the parity of Vraid5 while providing the virtualizations benefits to grow and shrink the Vraid set. Vraid6 is unique to the EVA compared to traditional arrays that deliver only RAID6.
Increased maximum LUN size up to 22TB to support applications needing larger LUNs like Microsoft and Oracle and we have also increased the number of LUNs supported (NOTE: updated this as I had a typo here in the original post. The EVA8400 supports either 14TB or 22TB of cache)
Introducing 72GB solid state drives (SSD) to support high I/O low latency applications. The EVA supports up to 8 SSD's in an array.
The EVA8400 scales to 324 disks and 324TB while the EVA6400 scales to 216 drives and 216TB. With support for the same disk drive enclosure that's supported in the EVA4400, the new EVA's offer increased performance density---more performance in the same footprint
Increased cache up to 32GB for improved application read and write performance
Increased our snapshots from 16 to 64 for increased flexibility in data mining and restores

Here are a few things you can play with to learn more about the new EVAs. The first one is a very cool 3D interactive virtual product tour. This allows you to see a 3D view of the EVA, zoom in, turn it around and really "play" with what the EVA looks like. There are two of these 3D tours, one for the EVA6400 and one for the EVA8400. Here is also a Flash-based product demo that gives a high level picture of the new EVA models. The demo has a tab titled "see it in action" - this is a simple description of how virtualization in the EVA works. Check these out and let me know what you think.

One of the main benefits we highlighted in the announcement was that the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays. I'll discuss this more in my next post.

Changing the economics of storage infrastructure with virtualization

CalvinZ — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:30:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Yesterday I talked about the announcement that our Technology Solutions Group did and briefly mentioned the part HP StorageWorks had in that announcement. Today, I'll drill down a bit more into the StorageWorks news.

The current economic conditions are affecting everyone but we all know that the information explosion that we've all been talking about for over a decade doesn't seem to care much about the economy. Many customers are attempting to take costs out to free up capital for their core business processes but the continued information explosion creates specific challenges for IT to efficiently store, protect, optimize and manage data. Adding to this, many data centers are not optimized for agility; a good portion of the IT budget is spent in maintenance and operations. IT is expected to help the business take advantage of opportunities that arise in this new economic era by reacting quickly to deliver new services that help drive growth. Really nothing new here, but I wanted to set the context.

We believe that the next generation data center is core to meeting these challenges. We call this the Adaptive Infrastructure. One of the core tenants of the Adaptive Infrastructure is helping customers move from their current state of high cost IT islands and siloed people resources to low cost pooled assets with more predictable service levels. Virtualization is key to that. Many customers have already virtualized their servers and as a result there's been improvements in utilization, service provisioning and disaster recovery/availability of those servers. If the rest of your infrastructure (e.g. storage, network, etc) isn't virtualized, then you still have limited flexibility. I just saw a post by my colleague in BladeSystem Jason Newton diving deeper on this topic and it's worth a read.

These virtual server environments have unique storage challenges around capacity management, storage provisioning, and data protection/management. And that gets me to the heart of what the announcement this week is about.

Our goal is to reduce the complexities and inhibitors of virtual server environments through the intelligent use of storage virtualization. We're making investments in this technology to optimize capacity, simplify storage provisioning and improve data management across virtual IT environments.

This week's announcement was focused on Fibre Channel storage networks. But we're not suggesting this is the answer for every application or customer environment. We have a very deep (and I know at times confusing) portfolio of products and solutions. But you really don't need an infrastructure vendor who only has a hammer because then every problem looks like a nail. You need an infrastructure vendor who has the breadth of portfolio to match the solution to your specific problem and data types at the lowest cost possible. So again, this announcement is focused on Fibre Channel based solutions - as we continue to integrate LeftHand Networks into our portfolio, we'll have more to say about storage virtualization with other storage networks (Shared SAS, iSCSI, etc.).

So that brings me to the news. There were three new or updated solutions we announced:

HP StorageWorks EVA6400 and EVA8400 virtual storage arrays helps customers save up to 50% in storage management costs for common storage administrative tasks compared to competitive traditional arrays
HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) can lower TCO by pooling and sharing of heterogeneous storage resources. You can improve your capacity utilization by 300% and manage 3X the storage capacity per administrator.
The new Data Protector 6.1 software combined with the EVA offers the industry's best (and we think only) replication based Zero Downtime Backup and recovery for VMware environments and is up to 70% less expensive than other enterprise backup products.

I'll go into more details over the next several days but let me leave you with a pointer to a video by our VP of Marketing, Stephan Schmitt. Stephan is at FOSE this week and was interviewed at the event just yesterday. This video is a nice overview of the announcement.

One last footnote I have to make as I can't wait until tomorrow's post where I'll drill down on the EVA6400 and EVA8400. One of our competitors has tried to make their pre-announcement of solid state drives a year ago as a proof point of their innovation. The funny thing is that we source those drives from the same OEM partner. This competitor had made bold and frankly ridiculous predictions that we would not have SSD drives until late this year or maybe in 2010. Well, I've got news for you Chuck - we have SSD drives in the EVA now and have had them in the XP Disk Array for a few months and in our BladeSystem for even longer.

HP's New Solid State Storage Web Page

jim hankins — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:35:00 GMT

Hi folks,

If you're keeping abreast of the developments in Solid State Storage Technology for PCs, Servers and Storage Arrays, HP has a new web page devoted to the subject. You can find it at: www.hp.com/go/solidstate

Take a look today and come back on a regular basis for more updates.

Regards,

Jim Hankins

Enterprise Solid State Technology Today: Hype or Reality (Part 1)

jasontreu — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:55:00 GMT

By Jieming Zhu

Almost every emerging technology suffers from the reality and expectation mismatch as a consequence of over-hyping. In the enterprise storage industry, it tends to be further amplified many times. Nobody should treat data, the life blood of business, lightly. Therefore, the more fundamental changes in a technology, the longer it takes to be qualified for mainstream adoption.

Unfortunately, the way some vendors market the SSD technology in the enterprise space gave me an uneasy feeling that we are in over-drive mode hyping it and as an industry over all, we may suffer again. In particular, three types of claims (or shall we say, myths?) are worth examination:

Claim #1: SSD will replace XYZ (type) Hard Drive by 2010 (or fill in with your favorite year, the earlier the better!)

To which, I have only one simple question: has tape gone away?

It seems every year, for the last 20 years or (at least), multi-giga bytes worth of text has been written about why and when tape could, should and would be "replaced" by disks. It's safe to say that many of those gigabytes are still backed up in tapes today and will be for the foreseeable future.

This myth also reminds me of another predication made many years ago: iSCSI will replace Fibre Channel. Not only did Fibre Channel not die, it has been enjoying a healthy growth year after year. It is also evolving into (yet another technology hype candidate?) FCoE.

The point is enterprise storage users rarely rip and replace. The industry always evolves, often times slower than that we expected or hoped, for the right reasons. First, we can not throw data away. Secondly, it's the application needs that ultimately determine customers' infrastructure/device choices. Finally, when it comes to data storage, proven reliability always matters most.

Claim #2: SSD will save you X amount of $dollars$, reduce Y kilo-watts of power consumption, and cut Z square footage of rack space (usually comes with a nice table comparing the total cost and performance of using SSD+HDD vs. HDD alone to achieve some predetermined service level objectives. Again, the bigger the deltas, the better!)

The problem is, whoever presents this nice comparison always conveniently omits such important details as: what application was used for testing? what's the I/O access pattern (e.g. sequential vs. random)? what's the actual useable configuration? etc.

The sad reality is, by the time we have integrated with SSDs in the hybrid environment, upon which the vast majority of enterprise storage subsystem solutions will be based , to make it sufficiently reliable, useful and practical for general purpose storage, we would have easily triple the cost and cut the meaningful performance by multiple factors. With the same configuration listed in those tables, one can also easily come up with opposite cost and performance numbers that bias towards sequential access.

It all depends on the applications! Citing theoretical numbers or contrived testing results can only give misleading expectations.

Part 2 will continue the discussion!

In the meantime, please share your thoughts on SSD/SST. Are you planning to implement and wny? Any challenges you see with SSD/SST? When do you see solid state taking off?

Have a good day.

Data Placement: Who’s Architecture is Really Broken?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:17:00 GMT

I just read a blog where Chuck Hollis (http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/07/the-great-data.html) of EMC launched an attack on storage virtualization. Called us all “spindle randomizers.” He based this attack on the idea that you can’t mange performance on virtualized arrays. Chuck seems to believe that you can’t make an array perform without manually placing every byte on every platter. That’s a misguided idea that’s got to be challenged. Unfortunately Chuck seems to be missing the bigger issues. Labor has become the largest cost in an IT organization. Not software. Not hardware. Not even power & cooling. Labor! The cost to manage all of that IT infrastructure. We recently asked storage managers what they need most. Did they say capacity? No. Did they say performance? Certainly not! Their top concern is administrative costs. With the amount of digital data doubling every 18 months the top issue is managing all of that data and the infrastructure that stores it. That kind of data growth drives complexity in a big, big hurry. We’ve got to fight that complexity with simplicity at every opportunity. Storage array virtualization is a critical foundation for fighting that complexity. With it 90%+ of the storage needs can be met with a simple create, present, and let it run. You don’t have to make a bunch of extra decisions that the machine could have made just as well. And you don’t have to come back and handle simple issues that the machine can manage just fine. You’re freed up to spend your time on the hard problems, be they performance, capacity utilization, or other, where a person really adds value. Without array virtualization the mind numbing details suck up the time and keep you from the interesting and important problems. There just aren’t enough hours in the day! But what about the cases where you do need to manage the performance? Go ahead! That’s why the EVA has disk groups and performance tools. There’s nothing in a virtualized array that prevents you from doing the tuning you need. You just don’t have to when you don’t need to. That’s critical. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be tuning every LUN!

Chuck tries to paint a vision where SSD’s make manually managing all the details a requirement. A wave of the future. But that’s a productivity killing tsunami. Nobody can afford all of that time! Virtualized arrays have been handling multiple drive speeds for years. We’ll do just fine with SSD’s. The issue Chuck’s trying to hide is that EMC’s CX architecture doesn’t include storage virtualization. They’ve got an inherent limiter that’s going to be very hard to overcome. We “spindle randomizers” aren’t going to be the ones that have to live with the consequences of our architecture. It’s Chuck and company. Good luck guys!

IDC suggests SSD not quite baked for the Enterprise

jim hankins — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:32:00 GMT

by Jim Hankins

Saw this article "Enterprise systems may need redesign to benefit from solid state disks" at SearchStorage.com.

This paragraph from the article echos what I said in the Bottom Line on my previous Part 2 post on our position on SSD:

"...All of this suggests SSDs are at least a generation away from full usability, especially in the enterprise. However, IDC is sticking with its earlier forecast that deployment of SSDs in enterprise computing will pick up by 2010 and that enterprise computing applications will grow from 12% of SSD revenue in 2007 to more than 50% by 2011, Reinsel said. ..."

Solid State Disks – Sorry EMC, Fibre Channel Disks aren’t dead yet! (Part 2)

jim hankins — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:42:00 GMT

By Jim Hankins

Our view of Solid State Disks (SSDs), borne out by lab tests, is that some of the workloads that use 15K RPM drives today could take advantage of and cost-justify SSDs. Even then, not all 15K RPM drives are expected to be displaced. Rather, we expect SSD to be used as a premium performance tier in well designed, balanced storage deployments. We expect 10K and 7.2K RPM disk drives will continue to be popular in disk arrays, along with virtualization of external storage devices, as customers consolidate data storage and implement multiple tiers of storage capacity for their business needs.

While SSD offers significantly improved performance and lower energy consumption compared with HDD, SSDs also bear a huge cost premium. Today's average SSD costs many times more than the equivalent capacity and grade of HDD. While the cost difference may close, we expect it to remain significant for several years into the future. These differences means that SSDs will be relegated to applications that require extremely high performance, need relatively little capacity and can justify a very large cost premium.

The trend of decreasing HDD shipment volumes-particularly FC drives-has been underway for quite some time, but it has very little to do with the potential of SSD drives. It is largely due to the rapidly improving performance/capacity/reliability of SAS/FATA/SATA drives. In the past few years, we have witnessed SAS and SATA drives establishing their presence in tier 2 and tier 3 storage environments, then gradually moving up into the primary storage space. We expect that SAS/SATA drives will replace FC/xATA over the next few years for many of the applications that use FC drives today. We view this as a natural evolution of disk drive technology similar to what was seen in the past.

BOTTOM LINE

High-end HDDs will remain around for many years to come. We don't see SSD drives having major market penetration until 2012, and then less than 1/3 of the high-end HDDs shipped. SSD has been very successful with consumers, but it will take many years to be ready for the enterprise and gain adoption. Currently, we ship more than 45% of the disk drives in the market today (according to IDC) and are constantly monitor disk drive market conditions and trends. We have been investing R&D in SSD across our complete portfolio for some time now; it's not something we just recently added on our roadmaps due to competitor's movement in this space.

With all that being said, I sure would like to hear from you if you recently deployed an SSD in your disk array and whether or not it met your expectations. Or let me if know you are considering SSD in the very near future, too.

And don't hold your breath EMC, your prediction for SSD drives in 2010 will just be like "Tape is Dead" - Wrong!

Solid State Disks – Sorry EMC, Fibre Channel Disks aren’t dead yet! (Part 1)

jim hankins — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:20:00 GMT

By Jim Hankins

Recently, EMC and Sun made some high profile announcements on their Solid State Disk (SSD) products, touting SSD's immediate adoption in enterprise server and storage applications. Dave Donatelli, a senior exec at EMC, went so far as to predict that high-end flash drives will replace high-end hard drives in 2 years. Is this "The End For Disk Drives?" So will disk drives turn into dinosaurs?

While I'm skeptical on Dave's claims (didn't EMC also claim that tape is dead), I am confident that we will out ship EMC in both revenue and units on SSD in the coming years. We are bullish on SSD technology for certain workloads and applications, but don't expect it to replace high end disk drives in the enterprise any time soon. And I'll make a video of all the Around the Storage Block bloggers singing several choruses of "EMC is right about SSD" and post it to the HP Storage Blog if the above prediction does comes true by the end of 2010.

In addition to standard disk drive interfaces, solid state technology is available in PCIe bus interfaces as well as memory interfaces. This makes solid state technology a much more attractive application for servers at the moment. Uses such as fast booting, capacity limited SSD for Non-volatile RAM, and other options will lead to server integration of SSD in the enterprise market a lot quicker than that of storage arrays.

Here are some additional opinions you might consider on market adoption rate of SSDs in the enterprise.

Opinion: Solid-state disk: Revolution or flash in the pan?

Q&A: Fujitsu Exec says solid-state disk doesn't measure up

As is the case with many new technologies, caution must be exercised to distill the underlying value out of the propaganda. It is common to see bold claims backed up by specially chosen "real world" examples. Customers should really look for standards-based testing that clearly validates claims of benefits from SSD use.

SSD devices have complex firmware that is designed to ensure both endurance and performance. In our experience, these devices must be rigorously tested and often require several iterations of refinement to make them sufficiently robust to satisfy enterprise application requirements. This, coupled with interconnects, protocols and the relative immaturity of the underlying flash technology gives rise to the real potential for growing pains common with emerging technologies.

We're also concerned that customers may be disappointed with the actual performance improvements experienced with SSDs. Remember; all components along the entire data path affect subsystem performance. SSDs virtually eliminate mechanical latency of the disk drive, but overall performance will continue to be impacted by things like internal bus speeds, read/write electronics, host port speeds and so on.

In part 2, I'll look at a few more details on our view of SSD and how we see SSD market adoption for enterprise storage shaping up.