Around the Storage Block Blog : storage

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!

XP Disk Array and HP's relationship with Hitachi, LTD of Japan

CalvinZ — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:43:00 GMT

By James R. Wilson, XP Disk Array Product Manager

Recently Chris Mellor, a widely read columnist and blogger, wrote an article speculating on the possible next step of HP with respect to the HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array, HP's enterprise storage offering, and the possibility of HP acquiring another product in this market space. With respect to that article on XP and Hitachi, let me make a couple of important distinctions. HP has no business or technical relationship with HDS. By contrast, HP has both an Engineering partnership and an OEM sales relationship with Hitachi, LTD of Japan .

This distinction is significant to a key premise of Chris Mellors' article that HP prefers to have control over the technology it ships. HP participates very actively in the design and core technology of the XP product family. We do not control the technology per se, but we have a very active involvement in the design and creation of the products through our engineering partnership. This engineering relationship has existed from the begining of the XP product introduction by HP, and was in fact a key component of our decision to form a relationship with Hitachi. The engineering relationship is directly with Hitachi Japan, the creators and owners of the technology, not through HDS. Sun, by contrast, is simply a reseller of the HDS technology and has no such input or connection with Hitachi Japan.

(Editor's note: You can follow HP StorageWorks on Twitter by clicking here)

Tech Ed Days 4 & 5

CalvinZ — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:03:00 GMT

By Ian Selway, WW Solution Marketing Manager

So as day 5 is really only a short day, I’ve waited to send my day 4 comments and I’m combining the summary of days 4 and 5 here at TechEd Berlin. Overnight the Wednesday to the Thursday, our stand designers added a whole bunch of balloons to celebrate the 20th anniversary of HP’s ProLiant range of servers. All day we also had cupcakes on the stand that not only reminded delegates of the occasion but also helped attract folks to the stand. I’ve attached a picture of the HP stand all decked out with balloons. Of course the other big news from overnight was the announcement of HP’s intention to acquire 3Com. We had expected a lot of questions from those attending. I’m not sure what the experience of others was, but I don’t think (aside from HP folks asking) that I had a single question asked. I guess everyone is so busy focusing on the bigger things happening between Microsoft and HP.

A lot of our customers who came out with us last night stopped by to tell us what a great time they had and we even found customers who had been pure server customers who came across to the storage section to look at the MDS 600. It seems word has spread about the flexibility, scalability and cost of these units and I spent a lot of time on Thursday talking about zoned storage for HP BladeSystem. When we were talking about deploying MDS 600 for Exchange Server 2010 mailboxes at under $2/GB, customers again told us how great this would be for deploying larger mailboxes. Several customers told us that they liked the idea that HP could offer a choice of storage and that we weren’t tied to only offering DAS or SAN but could offer both. I spent a lot of time directing our visitors to our eco-friendly collateral site so they could download the whitepapers, best practice guides and sizer information. The other great thing about being here at TechEd is the ability to meet with the key developers from Microsoft. I had three really good interactions with Microsoft on Thursday and I think when I get back to the US our engineering and marketing teams can really start demonstrating why Microsoft is going to be so good deployed on HP’s Converged Infrastructure.

Day 5 at TechEd was a lot shorter, and that was very welcome given what an active week it had been so far. A number of us from the StorageWorks team again supported the Microsoft virtualization kiosk over in their hall. For anyone who’s visited these types of shows, you’ll know the last day seems spent handing out all those trinkets the vendors bring to these shows, swapping your ‘swag’ for other vendors swag, and making sure you don’t have to carry any of it back. It never ceases to amaze me what delegates want to take home or back to the office. We did a huge trade in ‘Magic 8-Ball’ key rings. As soon as they went up on the booth, they disappeared as if by magic…. That said, it did enable us to engage in conversation as we attempted to address any of those last minute questions. Just after lunch, TechEd Berlin 2009 closed and it was time to close the booth, dismantle the demonstration and take time to reflect on the past week.

Everyone I spoke with from HP agreed we had a great week. I think we managed to register well over 1,000 attendees or 13% of the total registered visitors. We took a significant number of customers through our NDA room, and most importantly, we demonstrated just how HP Converged Infrastructure comes together to be such an impressive platform for deploying and running Microsoft applications such as Exchange Server 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2. We presented our StorageWorks integration capabilities with Hyper-V to over 600 people and demonstrated our broader storage offering to a significant number of delegates. Thanks must go to the European organizers including John Stewardson, Till Stimberg and others too numerous to mention, employees from the worldwide business groups who helped support and to De Umphry from the events team. Here’s looking forward to TechEd EMEA 2010… May it be as successful as this year.

Response to comments from EMC on podcast

CalvinZ — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:57:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

On the latest StorageMonkeys.com podcast, the hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley had Greg Shultz of StorageIO and Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC as their guests to talk about the Acadia announcement. In that podcast, around the 34 minute mark, Greg asked Chad a question about Dave Donatelli, EVP of Enterprise Servers and Networking, and that launched a 10 minute discussion about HP and what Chad described as a lack of integration between HP StorageWorks and VMware. Those chararacterizations were completely inaacuate and in today's podcast, I respond to those inaccurate statements. Here's the podcast:

If you browser doesn't play the embedded player, click here to listen to the podcast or right-click here and save the MP3 file.

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")

HP StorageWorks at Microsoft Tech Ed

CalvinZ — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:04:00 GMT

By Ian Selway, Worldwide StorageWorks Solution Manager

Heading off to the airport at San Francisco to begin my trip to Microsoft TechEd in Berlin..... 20 years after the fall of wall and right after this week's superb U2 concert, it'll be interesting to visit a city with such rich history. Oh and of course there's TechEd as well. Really looking forward to seeing some great HP storage demonstrations around Exchange server 2010 and our direct attached storage (DAS) offering. There's also going to be a really cool capability with our storage and the new Live Migration capability in Windows Server 2008 R2, though Calvin talked about that a bit in his previous post. I really think visitors will be amazed when they see what HP StorageWorks can offer with Hyper-V. Now all that's between me and Berlin, is the small matter of a 15 hour flight and layover......

So if you're at TechEd, be sure to come by and say hello at the HP booth (# P1), or on Wednesday 11th we'll be at the Microsoft Virtualization Solutions Kiosk.

Couple of ways to learn more about HP StorageWorks at TechEd:

SVR212 Deploying Microsoft Applications on HP Converge Infrastructure: A Look under the Covers. Wed 11th Room: New York 2 - Hall 7-1a at 17:30
SVR213 Best Practices to Implement Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP ProLiant Servers. Monday 9th London 1 - Hall 7-1b at 13:30
HP Cluster Extension for EVA - MS clustering and Hyper-V Live Migration extended to Storage on BladeSystem. In the demo theatre Thurs 12th. (this will be cool!!!)

And of course look out for a post or two coming from the show.

(Editor's note: Ian is now at TechEd - we hope to hear more from him this week).

Converged Infrastructure: Block based storage virtualization podcast

CalvinZ — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:55:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

This is the third in a series of three podcasts focusing on our HP Converged Infrastructure announcement. In part 1, I spoke with Sr. VP and GM of HP StorageWorks Dave Roberson. In part 2, I talked to the former CEO of IBRIX Milan Shetti and Marketing Director Lee Johns about the new X9000.

In today's podcast, we talk about block-based storage virtualization. Storage virtualization is often a confusing topic because there are different types of storage virtualization. Today's podcast discusses two types of block-based storage virtualization: within an controller array (like our HP StorageWorks EVA) and network or SAN based (our StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform or SVSP). Each of these products had enhancements that were announced with the November 4th Converged Infrastructure announcement.

With the SVSP (link goes to the hp.com product page), we announced a "new" management tool - Command View SVSP. This will be very familiar tool to EVA customers as Command View SVSP is very consistent with Command View EVA. But it also simplifies and automates the task of provisioning a LUN. For the details, listen to the podcast.

The advancement with the StorageWorks EVA (link goes to EVA family page) is with our Cluster Extension EVA. This software manages the failover and failback between EVAs in a cluster. What's new with the software is support for Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration. We are the first array to support the new capabilities and again, there's more about this in the podcast. I also have a guest blog from one of our engineers below that goes into more details.

So with that, here's the podcast:

If you're browser has issues using the embedded player, click here to listen to the podcast with a different player. Here's a link to download the MP3 (right click and save the file).

By Matthias Popp, HP StorageWorks Architect, Storage Systems Integration

Migrating a running server across data centers, servers and storage?

Are you tired of planning weekend downtime for storage system upgrades, server patches or network changes in your data center? Are you getting the same "Not this weekend ..." response from your business managers and users?

HP worked with Microsoft to enable Live Migration of virtual machines (VMs) in Hyper-V R2 - not just between servers but also between your storage systems and hence between your data centers!

The latest release of HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA orchestrates the interaction between Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Failover Clustering and Hyper-V Live Migration to move running Server VMs between servers and storage in one single step.

The newest version of Cluster Extension checks the disk array replication process and prepares for a Live Migration and swaps the replication direction when the VM's target server is connected to the remote disk array. All automatic with no further administrator interaction. You decide when to Live Migrate and Cluster Extension makes sure the data can be accessed. Simple as that.

Since your servers and storage are distributed between data centers, the same configuration and software is used for disaster protection. No need to learn additional tools. Use the ones you have!

Finally a simple solution to proactive maintenance with no downtime!

The new Live Migration support in Cluster Extension configurations will make a radical impact on your IT and business teams. Clustering software manages unexpected failures at any time and Live Migration enables maintenance during the work day. The IT team can now do server and storage maintenance during working hours. They no longer have to plan for downtime way ahead of a change. The IT management doesn't have to budget for expensive weekend and night working hours. Get your server and storage patched now, because you can!

The following paper explains the configuration and will soon be updated for Windows 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 Live Migration support: Disaster Tolerant Virtualization Architecture with HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension and Microsoft Hyper-V^TMwhite paper

Visit the HP booth at Microsoft's Tech·Ed Europe in Berlin next week for a demonstration and visit Microsoft's blog for more info about the webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization

Converged Infrastructure: the new X9000 podcast

CalvinZ — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:18:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

On Wednesday, I did the first of three podcasts talking about our HP Converged Infrastructure announcement. If you missed that one, I highly recommend that you listen to it. My guest was with our Senior VP and General Manager of StorageWorks Dave Roberson. Today in part 2, I talk with Milan Shetti, former CEO of IBRIX and Lee Johns, Director of Product Marketing about the HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage Systems family. As you might have guessed, the X9000 is based on IBRIX. Because the discussion was longer than my normal podcasts, I split it into two parts. In part one, Milan talks about the integration of IBRIX into HP StorageWorks and Lee and Milan give an overview of the X9000 family. Note that the volume on both of these is a bit low but since these were already a day late, I didn't want to make you wait longer to hear these. So turn your volume up a bit higher than usual. Here it is:

If you have difficulty with the embedded player in your browser, click here to listen to the podcast.

In part 2, I continue the conversation with Milan and Lee. In this part, we answer the question what's happening PolyServe, how the X9000 fits into the HP Converged Infrastructure, and discuss the strategic implications of the X9000.

If you have difficulty with the embedded player in your browser, click here to listen to part 2.

Here are a couple of things that can help you learn more about the X9000:

Visit the X9000 product page
Attend an IDC webcast next week on 12 November at 2 PM EST/11 AM PST.

In the next podcast in the series, we'll discuss what's new with the HP StorageWorks EVA and SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP).

Converged Infrastructure podcast with Sr. VP and GM of StorageWorks Dave Roberson

CalvinZ — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:01:00 GMT

A podcast with Sr VP and General Manager of HP StorageWorks Dave Roberson discussing how StorageWorks will help power the HP Converged Infrastructure.

...(read more)

What will EVA customers benefit from new NetApp program be? Zip! Zilch

CalvinZ — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:51:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

In my last post, I included a couple of summary videos from our recent HP StorageWorks Tech Day. The hands-on lab really stirred up a few folks over at NetApp. The week after our Tech Day, they did a WebEx session to try to address some of the comments made by the bloggers about how difficult the management of their FAS system was. I won't go into details about that but I counted at least three different GUIs that they showed during that demo. The HP StorageWorks EVA has one - Command View. But, that's not the topic I want to cover today.

The old "switch-a-roonie"

During their online demo, Vaughn Stewart from NetApp also discussed the NetApp vSeries - a network based storage virtualization product - and suggested that HP and NetApp were partnering to help EVA customers. Vaughn thanked me for attending the demo and talked about partnering with HP. I thought he was trying to connect the fact that I attended as being an HP endorsement of the vSeries. It wasn't. I made it very clear that HP wasn't working with NetApp to put vSeries products in front of our EVA's. I told the demo audience that HP has our own network-based SAN virtualization product called the SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) that competes with the vSeries and in no way do we recommend EVA customers use the vSeries to virtualize a pool of EVAs. We have talked about the SVSP several times on this blog and it will be discussed in a podcast later this week.

I initially didn't understand why Vaughn brought the vSeries into the demo. But a week or two after the NetApp demo, they announced a new marketing program targeting EMC CX series and HP EVA installed base customers with their vSeries. Now it's pretty clear to me what was going on then. This new NetApp marketing program asks customers to consider putting a vSeries in front of an EVA or CX.

So I want to spend a few minutes now discussing why I think it would be a bad decision for any EVA customer to consider such a thing. It's my belief that the benefits to an EVA customer would be zip (and interestingly that is the name of NetApp's program).

Improve storage efficiency at what price?

The claim NetApp is making is that EVA customers are not efficiently using their storage capacity. That's a bit laughable given that with an EVA, every spindle is used for data and unless using tiering, we recommend a single disk group which gives incredible storage capacity efficiency. To be in the program, NetApp has to approve the customers' application. The customer is basically signing up to purchase the vSeries in 90 days if it delivers what NetApp will stipulate. Be sure NetApp also stipulates the peformance hit you'll take - but I'm ahead of myself on that one.

My guess is the number of customers that actually get into the program will be rather small and maybe that's a NetApp objective of their marketing program. I suspect that NetApp's real motive is to develop a list of CX and EVA customers that they can continue to call on.

The NetApp claims of improved storage efficiency will come from a couple of categories of services that the vSeries provides for the arrays attached to it.

Thin provisioning
Data replication (snapshot, clones, etc)
Deduplication

The EVA customer already enjoys capacity efficiencies with the first two categories of thin provisioning and data replication. (Note that the EVA doesn't use traditional thin provisioning today but uses a product called Dynamic Capacity Manager that accomplishes similar results by integrating with the OS).

For that matter, if customers wanted to pool their capacity of multiple EVAs and manage it as one pool, the SVSP offers thin provisioning and replication services too. What we don't offer today is primary LUN deduplication. But should customers running an EVA rush to deduplication their block-based mission critical storage? I think the answer is absolutely not and here's a few things to consider:

NetApp has recently claimed 37,000 deployments of deduplication (via their PR department) but in a recent earnings call, their executives said 37,000 downloads. I don't know about you but there's a big difference between the number of customers who download some free software versus who are actually using it, especially in production environments.
There's a trade-off to implementing deduplication with primary, block based storage - and that trade-off is performance. Data that I've seen from a few different sources has said that a top customer concern in a virtualized environment is performance. I've seen throughput testing results that say the performance degradation on a FAS system with dedup can be as high as 65%. Their own recommendations say to run it during low activity and not all of the time. NetApp also makes you sign a waiver stating you understand the risks of lower performance.
We haven't tested to see what the actual deduplication capacity savings would be and frankly there are a lot of factors that would play into that. Since the controllers in the vSeries are the same controllers in the FAS system, it's worth noting that we have found that the percentage of capacity savings is roughly equal to the percent of slowdown.
And that performance hit from deduplication doesn't include any other latencies that the vSeries introduces because of their in-line architecture.

So should an EVA customer put their arrays behind a NetApp vSeries for a potential small capacity savings when the potential performance penalty is high? And keep in mind the vSeries is based on the FAS controller. We've shown in a recent blog post that based on our testing, the performance of that degrades rapidly.

There are some good reasons to implement SAN-based virtualization with a product like the StorageWorks SVSP or the NetApp vSeries. However, for an EVA customer, NetApp's value proposition of getting better capacity efficiency of the physical storage just isn't one of them. A far better answer for the EVA customer is the StorageWorks SVSP. We'll cover this topic in podcast later this week so stay tuned for that.

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HP StorageWorks Tech Day Videos

CalvinZ — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:13:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I've been a bit busy over the last few weeks and haven't been able to post anything - for that I apologize. I've got several things swimming around in my head that I want to talk about and I'll get to those over the next several weeks.

Today, I want to revisit our HP StorageWorks Tech Day that we held earlier this month and share with you a couple of summary videos that we did at the event. If you missed it, I have two posts on the Tech Day, first was "StorageWorks Tech Day starting now" and the other, "StorageWorks Tech Day - in their words so far...". There's been many more blog posts on from the bloggers who attended and I'll have another post soon pointing to those.

So now to the videos. First up was a video we did around the hands-on sessions we did with the EVA, HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solution, and our SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP). The video speaks for itself so here it is.

(NOTE: In case you have problems with your browser and the embedded video, click on this link)

At the conclusion of the event, we were able to catch several of our guests before they ran to the airport to return home, to get their overall reaction to the event. This needs little set up other than to say we did host the event at the SNIA facility in Colorado Springs which is co-located with our HP site in the Springs. So you that's why you see a SNIA logo in the background and there were people doing their job that a few times were walking behind someone talking on camera.

(NOTE: And again, in case you have problems with your browser and the embedded video, click on this link)

That's it for now - thanks for stopping by to watch the videos. I wanted to remind you that you can follow me on Twitter as @HPstorageGuy.

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Is it time for you to consider storage automation?

CalvinZ — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:47:00 GMT

By Jack Hughes, Storage Automation Product Manager

For what seems like years, the trades have been touting storage automation as the next big thing to improve data center efficiency. No doubt, there is vast potential for automation to help streamline SAN and NAS management. Storage provisioning, back-up, capacity reclamation and configuration management are a few examples of storage services typically requiring lots of repetitive, time consuming manual processes. So why are enterprise organizations, even those who have made the leap into server and network automation, reluctant to bring automation to storage operations?

Perhaps the answer lies in the history and culture of storage administration which has been somewhat shrouded in secrecy and segregated from the rest of the IT community by security measures. Whatever the reason, storage administrators often substitute home-grown scripts for true automation, relegating themselves to endless updates in order to stay current with the ever changing storage infrastructure.

This set-up worked just fine over the years until the disruptive force of virtualization changed everything. The virtualization revolution forced most organizations to re-think the way they’re doing business, and SAN and NAS management is no exception.

What we’re hearing now from customers is that the virtual revolution and its indisputable benefits also comes with a dark side manifesting itself in VM sprawl, over-provisioned storage, and underutilized capacity leading to application performance bottlenecks. Data center and NOC managers are concluding that the old ways of managing storage are no longer viable. Transparency of information about the storage infrastructure including capacity utilization, compliance, and performance is a must. In addition, more and more organizations are considering adding storage to self-service portals to more effectively meet the demands of growing and constantly changing virtual host infrastructure.

The virtualization revolution has provided the impetus to finally make storage automation essential for successful enterprise IT management. But to effectively meet the challenge, you need the right tools. HP Business Service Automation (BSA) is a good place to start. HP Operations Orchestration (OO) is the industry leader in run book automation and is tightly integrated with HP Storage Essentials. Together, these tools provide out-of-the box storage automation flows for rapid deployment of a variety of storage services. In addition, custom flows are easily created with the OO Studio using a simple drag, drop, and wire interface to quickly automate storage services and routines.

In upcoming editions of this blog I’ll talk more about specific use cases for automating storage services, but in the mean time I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject of storage automation and its relevance in today’s virtual data centers.

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Podcast - new X3000 HA Bundles

CalvinZ — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:25:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

During our very successful HP StorageWorks Tech Day, we also did an announcement. I've already done a podcast on one of the products we announced, the X510 Data Vault - it's time for me to give some love to the other product we announced - the X3000 Network Storage Systems High Availability Bundles. Here's a link to the product page if you want to learn more about the X3000 family.

So without further a do, here's the podcast (about 6 minutes short):

(NOTE: Just in case the embedded player doesn't work with your browser, click here to go to our Enterprise TV page and listen to the podcast)

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