Around the Storage Block Blog : extreme data storage

Extreme storage for media and entertainment

CalvinZ — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:42:00 GMT

By Pete Brey, HP StorageWorks ExDS9100 Product Marketing Manager

As I'm sitting enjoying a cappuccino at the HQ of the 2009 HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas, I'm reflecting on how many changes have occurred since HPTF 2008. In that time, we started shipping the 9100 Extreme Data Storage System, one of the industry's most scalable, manageable, and affordable storage systems. We also introduced numerous innovations in our BladeSystem and StorageWorks portfolio to deliver greater simplicity and better TCO. And just last week, we introduced our HP Extreme Scale-out portfolio.

If you follow the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry, you already know that they face some of the most serious challenges when it comes to dealing with explosive content. In "The Digital Dilemma" report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you get a clear glimpse into the long-term issues the industry is facing. While you might think Hollywood's biggest challenge is building systems big enough to support their archiving needs, "The Digital Dilemma" lays out a myriad of other issues which in many ways are much more concerning. A great read...I strongly suggest it. http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/

Through HP's work with DreamWorks (see the press release here) and other M&E customers, we are collaborating to develop leading end-to-end solutions to address these challenges. And because HP's storage systems are open-ended leveraging industry-standard technology, these customers can sleep at night knowing they will have long-term access to innovative technology without worrying about being locked into a specific vendor's technology.

(Editor's note: You can stop by the Extreme Data Storage demo at HP Tech Forum to see it for yourself as well as attend session 4026 with Pete and DreamWorks co-presenting).

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Children, Socks and Words

CalvinZ — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:34:00 GMT

By Ian Duncan

You almost certainly shouldn't have a favorite child - that can't end well.

At some point in your life you may well find yourself having a favorite pair of socks - this is a normal sign of aging. Don't fight it - it's inevitable.

You can (in fact I may argue you should) have favorite words - I find myself utilizing some words in conversations more often than perhaps I should simply because I like the way that they sound. Rambunctious, Panacea and Diametric all fit into this category - If I can find a way to fit them into a sentence I will.

I spent a lot of time thinking about diametric forces last week - we had one of our regular customer councils where about 40 or so customers from across the country were good enough to come and spend some time telling us about their experiences with our products. These are some of our most loyal customers and so there's little to no attempt at selling in this forum - we really just want to get a deeper insight into what their day to day lives are like and how we can make sure our product marketing and development teams really understand the issues and opportunities that they live with every day.

The diametric forces that many of them talked about can be summarized (fairly) briefly:

On the one hand everyone continues to experience dramatic information growth - the trajectory varied between 50% and 200% per year but there were some common themes - most of the content was file based, much of it related to static or streaming media, collaboration tools or replicated data.
On the other hand no one was claiming that their IT budget was growing at anywhere near these levels - in many cases folks believed they'd have to deal with a budget reduction.

This puts them in a challenging position - data keeps growing yet budgets don't keep pace - something has to change and whilst technologies like file optimization, deduplication and smart snapshots can help reduce the amount of content stored many in the room believed that the biggest opportunity is aligning data with the most appropriate storage system.

Since we announced the 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) back in May (and incidentally it started shipping recently) one of the most interesting aspects of talking to customers about it has been how quickly the conversation turns to price - I've sold hardware and software for a number of years and typically price is a part of the conversation that you try to keep away from for as long as possible. With the ExDS9100 we're very open about the price (under $2/GB since you're asking) and we're finding that it's becoming a more prominent component of the customer evaluation process.

It's understandable with the world economies collapsing around us that price is high on many people's agenda but there's more to it than just acquisition cost. The fact is that people are staying in roles for a shorter amount of time right now - the average CIO tenure is around 3 years and so people are looking for a Return-On-Investment that is front-end loaded. Why should they sign off on a piece of infrastructure that will only benefit their successor? Customers have every right to expect storage vendors to apply innovation to reduce storage costs as much as increasing levels of performance or protection - we think that the ExDS9100 is targeted at a very clear customer issue today - those that need high scalability AND petabyte administration AND ridiculously low acquisition costs. Data Mobility Group recently undertook a study to look at how the ExDS9100 improves the economics of large scale storage - it's well worth a read - http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA2-3467ENW.pdf.

Ian Duncan, Director of Scalable NAS

NPI Day

CalvinZ — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:32:00 GMT

No, it's not the Norwegian Polar Institute Day or No Pun Intended Day - it's our new product introduction day. NPI at StorageWorks is an internal process to have our products available for customers and channel. We focus on areas like services, internal configuration tools and systems, supply chain readiness, pricing, and marketing (e.g. hp.com page, brochures, photography, and other marketing content). Our NPI's generally have somewhere between 20 to 30 products. Each NPI is generally a mix of updates to an existing products and brand new products. Here are a few highlights of today's new product introduction:

Overview page of today's NPI: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/highlights/11172008.html. Here you'll see links to all of the products, solutions, and services that are either new or updated today.
One of the significant parts of today's NPI is the new 3Gb SAS switch. This was included in a BladeSystem press release today. Here's a link to the press release: HP Launches Breakthrough Virtualization Technologies That Cut Networking Costs by 55 Percent. There's a good blog post on ZDNet by James Staten from Forrester Research talking about the Flex-10 Virtual Connect module coming from our BladeSystem team. Don't expect to see innovation like this from storage-only vendors like EMC. Here's a link to the SAS switch product page: HP StorageWorks 3Gb SAS BL Switch.
My list is getting long so I'll highlight one more: the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System that we've discussed many times here. I'm really excited about leveraging a 3-dimensional interactive demo (that we have used at trade shows) on hp.com. This is pretty cool stuff that allows you to "play" with the ExDS9100. If you don't look at anything else, you have to check this out: ExDS9100 3-d interactive tour. You can check out other ExDS9100 info at www.hp.com/go/ExtremeStorage.

There are some other enhancements in today's NPI that I'll point to in part 2 later today.

Further "day 1" thoughts on Atmos / Maui

CalvinZ — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:09:00 GMT

By Michael Callahan

As my colleague Calvin Zito mentioned earlier today, I wanted to make a few comments on EMC's announcement of the EMC Atmos (nee Maui).

Since we first started talking publically about the ExDS9100 system in May, I've been struck by the incredible diversity of the software layers that people want to build on top of it. In fact, quite a bit of this has been a surprise. Much of the ExDS design grew out of our many years experience delivering software into environments very much like those which Atmos seems to target: Web 2.0 companies, telcos and service providers. Based on that experience, we put a lot of emphasis on building something that could easily fit into existing environments (with standard racks!), be extremely simple to manage and, of course, be very cost-effective-while still offering a lot of flexibility in both hardware and software. On the hardware front, a single ExDS9100 node scales from four blades to sixteen, and from roughly a quarter petabyte to over three-quarters (in just two floor tiles) -- and a customer can choose whatever combination of performance and capacity is desired, and even change the configuration of a running system by adding blades or capacity blocks.

But, as I said, what's particularly surprising to me is what has been happening on the software front -- how valuable it has been to offer flexibility there. We know that EMC with Atmos is taking a proprietary, monolithic approach to the software layer that provides distributed replication, location services, and so on, on top of the basic building-block of local high-density storage -- but we think that's a mistake, and not what the market is looking for. The last thing our customers want is to be locked in by a proprietary software layer that limits their technical options and ties them to one vendor.

We have a whole set of customers-admittedly, the ones in the vanguard of these next-generation cloud applications -- who already have commitments to existing software that perform functions like these, whether built in-house, open source or commercial third party. But even apart from these leading customers, we're finding that in other verticals, such as bioinformatics, oil and gas, and media, customers see tremendous value in the density, manageability and scalability of the ExDS system but are looking for very specific solutions with software stacks that are customized for their particular application needs.

For example, Calvin mentioned our partner Ocarina Networks. With Ocarina, we've built a media archiving solution for a major film studio that allows it to maintain an online archive of its digital assets, using Ocarina's advanced content compression and optimization algorithms that include specific tuning for the data formats used in the industry. Similarly, we've seen bioinformatics and oil and gas customers looking to bring parts of the software stack down into the storage layer, in ways that provide specific value to their applications.

Now, there are customers looking to adopt something in this space for the first time, and we'll work with them, including offering an HP-provided option -- but the key point is that our approach is based on supporting the customer's desire at once to have a market-leading storage system that provides unparalleled terabyte density, power efficiency and operational and acquisition cost effectiveness and at the same time let them retain the flexibility to build an appropriate software stack on top of that, that doesn't lock them in to one vendor.

We'll be talking more about how other customers are using the ExDS9100 in the coming months, but for now I'll just say that I think this emerging market for capacity-optimized storage is one where there will be more diversity and innovation, rather than less, and where customers will have more ability to customize their environments for their own needs -- and will not have to place all their data into some vendor's opaque cloud.

Michael Callahan, Chief Technologist
HP StorageWorks Scalable NAS Division

Pie in the Sky with Atmos?

CalvinZ — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:49:00 GMT

Welcome to the party, EMC (Thanks Chuck for the preannouncement the other day and to all the other Twitter messages that made it clear what was happening). I'm glad after Joe Tucci promised this to be available in May and then again by the end of summer, you are finally announcing your product. But alas, we're still short on details. How much will you charge? We already announced pricing back in May, under $2GB. The HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) will be shipping product around the end of November. EMC claimed general availability in June, but customers tell us it is not ready for prime time. Every single deal we have been in with EMC, we have won.

Now let us explore a few shortcomings in EMC's product (based on the few details we have) compared with the ExDS9100:

To compare with our ExDS9100 Max Config: it takes 3 racks of EMC's WS1 product (see hardware brochure) which includes 20 servers and 840 disks. This totals 6,452 lbs and 21 sq ft of floor space, compared to our 4,442 lbs and 12sqft. Almost double the floor space and 50% heavier. Better set aside some budget for that.
Hardware is: Less storage, less CPU, less dense, fixed server/disk ratios, and in 2 of 3 rack options, EMC is using non-standard oversized cabinets. Can you feel your total cost of ownership increasing?
EMC speaks to scalability, but storage appears to only be packaged in fixed rack increments with fixed CPU ratios. From what is shared the only expansion path is buying another rack. That's not helpful to customers. Pour more money into your TCO budget.
Where is EMC getting the hardware? HP has industry standard components and the leading server/drive vendor in the market. EMC has to cobble together the hardware and software into a nice vendor lock-in proprietary bag of tricks. Cha-ching.
HP has a 3^rd-party partner program. First vendor to announce an offering is Ocarina Networks. They will provide software data reduction (compression and de-duplication). EMC is going down the proprietary software route. (More on this in a follow-up post from my colleague Michael Callahan).
Is Maui shipping? Nothing in the release or on the web site actually says it is available. Details?

EMC is famous for marketing-hype and spin without details. Does anyone else remember their WideSky initiative? I can't help but think this is the same old story. I wonder if the relationship between names is any indication to where EMC's head is at?

We are happy to go toe-to-toe with Atmos (Maui...Hulk...or whatever the name is) and continue to win deals.

Michael Callahan, Chief Technologist from our Enterprise NAS team will add his thoughts about the EMC software in another post later today.

P.S. I noticed a very interesting take on this from Stephen Foskett on his blog - take a look here. His post got me wondering if the positioning conflict between VMware and Maui is why Diane Greene, the former VMware CEO left EMC.

Where is Maui? A follow-up

CalvinZ — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:00 GMT

I had a couple of previous post asking about EMC's Hulk and Maui and noticed that Chris Mellor, a storage reporter for The Register, has an article asking many of the same questions I asked. Here's a link to his story: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/11/04/emc_maui_another_invista/.

A couple of observations:

The title of Chris' story says a lot: "Is EMC's Maui another Invista? Biting off more than it can chew". I thought about discussing this in my first post but didn't as it wasn't core to the points I wanted to make. However, since Chris brought it up in his story, I'll mention it here. EMC has had a history of turning up the hype meter but not delivering on their promises. As Chris points out, Invista is an example; EMC's claim of being the "ILM company" is another. Another recent example of this is EMC's hyping of solid state technology. They know they will be at a huge disadvantage to HP with our desktop to data center capabilities and took an overselling communications approach with solid state. From their soapbox, they've claimed to be the market leader. When it's all said and done, I think history will bear out that this is another overcommitment and EMC's hype machine turned up the volume on this. They have a soapbox as the leading storage-only vendor and customers listen -- it's unfortuate that customers listen to so much of what EMC promises and their hype. Contrast that with the HP brand - we don't hype, we do our best to not over-promise - we do everything we can to be trustworthy.

Chris concludes his article by saying "...EMC will have undershot terribly the expectations it has set. Without the infrastructure Maui will be in danger of becoming another Invista (EMC's SAN director-hosted storage virtualisation and management software): a worthy idea oversold and under-delivered". My response is so what else is new - not much has changed with EMC over the years.

ExDS9100 is real, we have orders, and it will be shipping soon. That's exactly what we said in May, nothing oversold, no under-delivering. And imagine Chuck, all this from a "server/storage vendor"!

Where in the world is Maui or Hulk for that matter? Part 2

CalvinZ — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:46:00 GMT

In my previous post, we talked about EMC's Hulk/Maui and its conspicuous absence after early hyping by EMC management. Today I want to focus on the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System or ExDS9100. We announced it in May and at that time gave a lot of details about the product, saying it would ship by Q4. You can see the hp.com page that we created for that announcement by clicking here. Unlike EMC, everything is on track and we are delivering ExDS9100 as promised.

The ExDS9100 is a system that includes storage, servers, and software. The easiest way to think about Extreme Data Storage is file serving on steroids. The system starts at 246TB and scales to 820TB. You can scale the performance or storage capacity independently. HP has a distinct advantage over storage only vendors like EMC and here's why:

ExDS9100 uses our industry leading BladeSystem c-Class - we call the increments of performance a performance block. The system starts with 4 performance blocks and can scale up to 16 performance blocks . If you want to increase the file serving performance of ExDS9100, you just add a performance block. EMC doesn't have the systems expertise or the market leadership in server blades to build a system like this. They also don't have the economies of scale that HP does to drive to the lowest possible price. A few years ago, EMC exited the Windows based NAS business for exactly this reason - they could not compete with HP.
Storage capacity is added in what we call a capacity block and each is 82TB of capacity. The base system is three capacity blocks and can scale to 10 capacity blocks.
ExDS9100 is a system with a single management interface. Another advantage of a solution like this from HP is managing it as a system. EMC seems to like to build solutions like this with a Legos mentality -- their building blocks come from many different partners making the management of their solutions very complex. One of the design objectives of the ExDS9100 was to make it easy to manage and easy to deploy. You can't do that with a cobbled together solution.
We developed new technologies to address the customer needs we are addressing with ExDS9100. The new capacity blocks were built using BladeSystem technology and are space efficient by taking the full depth of an industry standard rack.

We're excited to ship ExDS9100 and is proof positive that we have an advantage over storage only vendors -- engineering and delivering solutions that leverage our industry leading portfolio. I'm sure we'll continue to see rants from EMC trying to convince customers that HP isn't a good storage partner because we are not focused on storage. Rubbish. I think EMC sees the huge advantage that we have by leveraging our portfolio and are trying their best to create FUD where they have no response.

Have a great weekend!

Where in the world is Maui or Hulk for that matter?

CalvinZ — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:18:00 GMT

Where in the world is Maui? If I was talking geography, that's an easy question to answer. But since we're talking storage, the whereabouts of Maui remains a mystery. Hulk/ Maui were pre-announced by EMC CEO Joe Tucci at last November's Innovation Day. Not a lot of details were given but the audience was told that Hulk/ Maui would be shipping by May 2008. It was a hot topic of discussion by attendees at EMC World but basically all EMC would say publicly is that it would be announced by the summer 2008.

Well, we've already had snow in Boise and my calendar says summer 2008 has come and gone yet still no sign of Hulk/Maui. There was an ever so brief sighting on an EMC blog that "demonstrated" their offering via a video but that post was quickly pulled off the blog with no explanation (see the SearchStorage blog about this here). I find this interesting given the chest thumping we continually hear from EMC about how server/storage vendors don't make good storage vendors.

Enter the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100). HP is actively working with customers that are evaluating both ExDS9100 and Hulk/Maui. I'll let you in on a few details that are coming in from those customers:

HP has not lost an ExDS9100 deal to Hulk/Maui
I know of at least a few customers that have said Maui isn't ready for prime time and have stopped their evaluation
HP is taking orders on the ExDS9100 and it will be shipping VERY soon

In the next post I'll talk more about the ExDS9100 and why it's a solution that a storage only vendor like EMC would struggle to bring to market.

P.S: Chuck, we look forward to your response but not really expecting anything.

See the latest Hulk/Maui rumor de jour from StorageTopics blog: http://www.storagetopics.com/2008/10/notes-from-rumor-mill-infiniflex-10000.html (Advice - don't hold your breath waiting for Hulk & Maui)

Extreme Data Storage

CalvinZ — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:23:00 GMT

I just came across an article today on Government Computer News discussing a presentation given by Lincoln Tidwell, an HP Storage Architect focused on our Scalable NAS portfolio. Lincoln spoke at the High Performance Computing Technology Forum in near Washington, DC about the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100). This is a product we're very excited about. Here is a link to the article: http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/47104-1.html.

We announced the ExDS9100 in May this year and said it would be shipping later this year. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it in the near future.

Where is EMC's Maui? Did it get whacked?

CalvinZ — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:03:00 GMT

Last November, the CEO of EMC gave a glimpse of products code named Hulk and Maui. He told the EMC Innovation Day audience that his company would deliver these to the market by May. Then came EMC World in late May. There was little to no public mention of Maui (the software component of a cloud-based storage product) but by some accounts that I heard, the EMC CEO again promised to deliver Maui by this summer. Well, here we are and it's the end of summer and still no Maui.

So why am I writing about it today? Because an EMC employee's blog had a curious disappearance today. There was a post on the Storagezilla blog site with a link to demonstrate Maui. The blogger, named Mark Twomey, had a post earlier today complaining a bit about his CEO talking about code names in public but then went on to include a link where one could download a Flash video titled "CloudFellas" -- playing off of the movie title "Good Fellas" -- presumably from some Maui-based storage. The blog entry has mysteriously disappeared and even the cached version on Google is gone.

In addition, SearchStorage reported Hulk/Maui aren't what they thought or will it be? Who knows? Hopefully Mark Twomey hasn't been whacked. I don't know him personally but compared to some of the other EMC bloggers we've interacted with, he seems like a nice guy.

As for HP, we announced our Extreme Data Storage System in May and committed to deliver it this fall. You won't find any disappearing web pages or waffling from HP on what we said we'd deliver and when. Bada Bing.

I think I'll make some pasta sauce for dinner tonight!

Calvin

Miley Cyrus and storage

CalvinZ — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:16:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I live in Boise Idaho and over the Fourth of July I took my kids to see Miley Cyrus in Provo, Utah at the annual Stadium of Fire. Since it was a six hour drive each way, I had a lot of time to think. One of the things I found myself contemplating was where storage was 15 years ago - that's how old Miley is now and it was only natural for me to reflect on the last 15 years. Putting my thoughts in order around the state of storage was an interesting exercise.

Fifteen years ago I was just returning from a 6 month working assignment in the HP European Marketing Center in Boeblingen, Germany. I helped introduce the first disk array for HP-UX based systems. If I remember correctly, it supported 5 or 6 1.3GB drives - basically the amount data we can put on a DVD today. We were also putting the finishing touches on one of the first virtualized disk arrays - something we called HP AutoRAID. It first shipped in 1995 and was a 24GB disk array. In May 1999, we announced our first XP platform - the XP256. It scaled up to 9TB. Jumping forward to now, we just recently announced the Extreme Data Storage System and that will scale to 820TB split between two racks. Wow - things sure have changed A LOT in fifteen short years!

I went back a bit further in my mind to when I started working for HP as a "Customer Engineer" working for Rick Kontur in Fullerton, California. In 1983, I was trained on the most recent HP disk drives - does anyone beside me remember the HP 7925 - a removable platter disk drive with a whopping 125 MB's in the footprint of an apartment size washing machine. It's amazing to me to think about the physical size of that disk drive and the amount of storage we can pack into that same amount of space today. Here's a picture of a HP 7925 that I found with a Google search:

Today with 1 TB drives becoming common, I wonder what storage will look like 15 years from now. Miley will only be 30 years old - while she certainly will grow and mature, I hope she doesn't change as much as storage will over the next fifteen years (and as a few other recent teen pop stars have dramatically changed).

Do any of you have any recollections about storage over the years? Where do you think storage is going? I'd love to hear from you.

I hope you had a great Fourth of July weekend.

Extreme storage follow up

CalvinZ — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:32:00 GMT

-by Michael J. Callahan (Note: reposted to fix formatting problems)

I've received a few questions following a recent blog about our new Extreme Data Storage solution and since they might be of general interest I thought I'd follow up for the general audience.

1). You mention PolyServe as part of the solution--what exactly is PolyServe and what does it do?

PolyServe is a shared data clustering software product that runs on Linux or Windows. It provides three key capabilities:

Cluster-wide storage access: a symmetric cluster file system and cluster volume manager that allows all the servers in the cluster to access files in a single shared pool of storage directly
High-availability: automatic monitoring of hardware and software health, and failover in the event of problems, based on administrator-specified policies
Cluster-wide administration of storage resources and software services

These core capabilities provide the foundation for the ExDS platform. The cluster file system allows all 4 to 16 blades in the system to access the data stored in all storage blocks simultaneously; this means there's no need to partition data manually among blades, makes it possible to scale out performance across multiple blades, and is the basis for fast fail-over. The high-availability and cluster-wide administration infrastructure make it easy to provide services such as NFS, CIFS or HTTP across the blades and to do so in a way that is resilient against hardware or software failure.

In fact, while I mention services such as NFS, CIFS and HTTP, PolyServe can support many different kinds of applications running on top of it. In the past, we've built solutions on top of the core PolyServe technology for building consolidated, scalable, highly-available file servers -- (which ExDS will incorporate) and consolidated, easily-managed, mission critical database clusters.

However, it's also possible for users to put their own applications on top of a PolyServe environment. The PolyServe file system looks just like any other file system from the application perspective and uses the same APIs. For ExDS, this means it is possible to run user-provided applications on the blades within the system. These applications can easily be made highly-available using the mechanisms I mention above. I'll talk more about this capability in a future post.

2) Why does the ExDS use Linux as its operating system, rather than Windows Storage Server?

As I described above, the PolyServe software itself runs on both Linux and Windows. In fact, we've done a lot of work specifically targeting the Windows environment, with a particular focus on supporting Microsoft SQL Server about which I also hope to blog in more depth in future. However, we've found that the majority of customers seeking very large-scale storage solutions like ExDS are deploying services on Linux, so that's the platform we've used for ExDS.

3) Why does ExDS use new 'storage blocks' rather than traditional arrays like MSA or EVA?

As I mentioned in my first post, one of the key design principles for ExDS is to be as cost-, space- and power-efficient as possible while delivering a very large amount of storage. The hardware we're using for the storage block is strongly optimized for these attributes: for example, each storage block provides 82 1TB drives in only 7 rack units of space, which is far denser than traditional arrays.

Thanks for the questions!
Michael Callahan, Chief Technologist
HP StorageWorks Scalable NAS Division

Massively Scalable NAS: “Hard to Get It Right”

The Data Storage Experts — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:42:00 GMT

-by Pete Brey

In last week’s blog, you heard from our Chief Technologist on the HP Highly Scalable NAS team. I work closely with Michael and am the World Wide Marketing Manager for our recently announced Extreme Data Storage product. When I joined HP’s Network Attached Storage group several years ago, I was responsible for bringing to market HP’s Enterprise File Services product line which is based upon the PolyServe scalable file system. In the time since we brought those products to market, we have experienced incredible success growing that business by rolling up our sleeves and helping customers build their next generation file serving environments. To be certain, our new Scalable NAS products are deployed in a wide array of customer scenarios – some small, and some very mind-bogglingly large. We’ve been working on perfecting our product for years and ExDS is a culmination of our experience serving the large end of the NAS market.

When you step back and you look at what the industry players are saying about this space – whether they call it Cloud Storage, Clustered Storage, or what have you – there are a few things we at HP think are going to drive the overall direction of the market. First and foremost, these environments are very complex and people are fundamentally looking for simpler and better approaches. At HP, we’ve had many years of experience working closely with these types of customers to build these kinds of solutions. We know the fundamental components inside and out – the scalable file system, the hardware to run it on, and the storage to house the content. From our continued investments in PolyServe to our industry-leading BladeSystem to some cool new storage technology we’ve developed in-house, we are innovating and we will deliver a complete “baked” end-to-end solution. So while some are approaching this market as a “science project” with cobbled-together software and hardware, HP will be harnessing all of the knowledge and power of its portfolio to deliver what customers are demanding. Others are approaching this market with proprietary close-ended solutions, which we also think is the wrong long-term approach because it locks customers in with few long-term options and fundamentally higher cost structures. HP’s Extreme Data Storage System encompasses our vision that customers should demand these types of systems be industry standard and open.

But don’t take my word for it – here is what others are saying about HP’s approach:

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23254

And here are some other recent industry articles:

http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/05/20/the-maui-mystery/

http://storagemojo.com/2008/05/19/wheres-maui/

Excited about ExDS

BlogArchive — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:40:00 GMT

-by Michael J. Callahan

Since this is my first posting here, I thought I should introduce myself. I am the Chief Technologist for the HP StorageWorks Scalable NAS Division. HP is very serious about broadening its offerings in file-based storage, and the creation of this division was a reflection of that. A significant part of the division--though by no means all of it--came to HP through the acquisition about a year ago of PolyServe, a shared data clustering software company where I was CTO and cofounder. HP had long partnered with PolyServe to deliver NAS solutions using HP servers and storage and PolyServe software, so it was natural for us to find a home here.

It's been a tremendously exciting first year: being part of HP has allowed us to deepen our investment in PolyServe's clustering technology dramatically and also to leverage HP's great strengths in servers, blades, storage hardware, and storage and management software. Last week we announced some of the first fruits of the work we've been doing--the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data System--and so for my first post I'd like to discuss why I'm so excited about this product.

The ExDS solution builds on PolyServe's experience working with customers who are building new business models based on having vast amounts of data, from hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes, available on-line at low cost; for example, web digital media and social networking services, and some kinds of scientific and technical applications.

It's worth acknowledging up front that this isn't everyone. We have customers using our software in a wide variety of ways, from financial institutions running mission-critical applications handling millions of transactions a day, through enterprises building scalable, easily-managed NAS services out of industry-standard servers and consolidating their Microsoft SQL Server databases into highly-available, efficient clusters. For these customers, integration with traditional data center storage infrastructure, like our MSA, EVA and XP storage arrays, is key. We've covered those needs for the past few years with several offerings: the HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway, which includes everything you need to build scalable, highly-available file services on top of traditional enterprise storage; the HP StorageWorks EVA-FS, which adds EVA storage to the EFS-CG; and finally various software-only options, where you add your own servers and storage. ExDS is not a replacement for these products.

In our experience, however, petabyte-scale deployments have a distinct set of requirements, and that's what ExDS is designed to address. Typically, we've found that customers in this space are very concerned about issues of cost, physical density, power efficiency, and manageability/operational efficiency:

If you're buying such large amounts of storage, obviously cost per gigabyte becomes a major concern. One way of looking at this is: what solution delivers the thousands of drives you'll need for petabytes of data with as little cost overhead per drive as possible?
Besides cost efficiency, customers are looking for solutions that are physically dense and power-efficient, to make economical use of data center space, power and cooling. Again, you can view this as asking, per drive, how much physical space and power overhead does the system impose?
Whereas in enterprise environments, it's typical to have storage administrators' responsibilities measured in tens or hundreds of terabytes, in petabyte-scale deployments this would clearly be uneconomical. It must be possible for an individual administrator to handle petabytes of storage.

The ExDS contains a lot of new engineering to provide a complete solution addressing these concerns, building on our experience working with customers who have constructed petabyte-scale environments using PolyServe software. These customers have typically combined PolyServe software with storage hardware of their own choice, in many cases making a significant investment in custom integration to put the whole solution together.

To achieve excellent cost-, space- and power-efficiency, ExDS is based on HP c-Class BladeSystem blades and new storage hardware, different from anything in the existing StorageWorks product portfolio, which we're calling 'storage blocks'.

Blades run storage services for the outside world, and an ExDS can be configured with anywhere from 4 to 16 blades, based on the level of application performance required.
Storage blocks contain disks in a very space- and power-efficient package. Each block consists of 82 drives in 7 rack units of space, for a density of nearly 12 terabytes/U with the 1TB drives we'll have. An ExDS can contain from 3 to 10 storage blocks, for up to a total of 820 drives.

Note that performance and footprint can be scaled independently--it's perfectly legitimate to have an ExDS system with 4 blades and 10 storage blocks, or 16 blades and 3 storage blocks. This in itself can be a major source of savings, since you don't have to pay for (and power, and cool) CPUs you don't need.

To address the operational issues entailed by operating at such a large scale, ExDS contains new appliance management software that permits the entire system to be provisioned, configured, monitored and optimized from a single console. Blades and storage blocks can easily be added to an ExDS system using the console, and any failures (drives in particular, in a system of this scale, are bound to fail) are surfaced to the administrator with direct information about what FRU to replace to solve the problem.

Of course, ExDS also includes the PolyServe software, which includes a cluster file system allowing all blades to access all storage in the system simultaneously, provides complete high-availability, and allows standard software--even the customer's own application--to run on the blades within the ExDS system .

I have a lot more to say about all of these elements in future posts, but for now let me just close by saying again how pleased I am to be able to start talking, finally, about some of what we've been working on. From a PolyServe perspective, ExDS does a great job providing a complete, simple, out-of-the-box solution to a big challenge--whereas, in the past, we've seen customers have to invest a significant effort to build similar environments themselves. It also shows why being a part of HP is such an advantage. I mentioned above that the StorageWorks Scalable NAS division, although it includes PolyServe, is far more than just PolyServe. In fact, the ExDS solution has been built principally by a part of our team that was not formerly from PolyServe, and it includes a lot of work, and indeed IP, from other parts of HP. I think it's a great start, and I expect to have a lot more to say about it, and other things we're doing, in future.

I'd love to hear your feedback on ExDS or other aspects of our technology!

Michael J. Callahan

StorageWorks NAS Division Chief Technologist