Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, EVA

Converged Infrastructure: Block based storage virtualization podcast

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

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

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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StorageWorks Tech Day starting now

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

By Calvin Zito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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StorageWorks EVA wins best hardware at Microsoft Tech Ed 2009!

CalvinZ — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:10:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Last week I had heard that the HP StorageWorks EVA was selected as a finalist at Microsoft Tech Ed 2009 for the category of best hardware, networking, or storage. I just learned that the EVA has won! (See this article on IT Windows Pro website). Congratulations to the EVA team.

My question after seeing this was what is the criteria for this award. Here's what I found out from the program overview:

These awards recognize the innovative products and services showcased at Microsoft Tech·Ed North America 2009. All Microsoft partners exhibiting or sponsoring at Tech·Ed North America 2009 were eligible to submit nominations for their products/services. The winners were selected by a judging panel of editors from Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine, and are evaluated based on each finalist's strategic importance, competitive advantage, and value to customers.

Since we're on the subject of the EVA and Microsoft, I wanted to follow-up on yesterday's post about the EVA in VMware environments, today focusing on the EVA in a Microsoft Hyper-V environment. This video has our Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP StorageWorks Dave Roberson and Jim Schwartz and Jeff Woolsey of Microsoft talking about how the StorageWorks EVA storage solution delivers best-in-class performance when customers use Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

A great day for the HP StorageWorks EVA!

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Optimizing infrastructure with VMware and the EVA

CalvinZ — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:24:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

In early March, we announced the new EVA6400 and EVA8400 - we talked about that on this blog (see my post titled Storage Virtualization and the new EVA). The EVA is really a great match for virtual server environments. Here's a video that includes our Senior VP and GM of HP StorageWorks Dave Roberson and Parag Patel, VP of Alliances, ISV and Storage Ecosystem at VMware.

There's also a video I've seen with Paul Maritz (President and CEO of VMware) talking about the HP BladeSystem Matrix and our HP LeftHand Network products - unfortunately, I can only find it on a server inside the firewall . As soon as I can get a version that for you to check out, I'll add it too.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

And have I mentioned lately that the EVA has solid state storage technology... and that's about 12 months sooner than some of the FUD a certain competitor was spreading in their blogs.

Don't forget you can follow me on Twitter. Go to http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy. I won't ever tell you what I had for breakfast!

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EVA Simplicity Challenge

CalvinZ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Back in early March, I talked about our storage virtualization announcement and pointed you to a video we did on the EVA. Well, I think I finally figured out how to embedded video in the blog (at least from YouTube), so I wanted to mention it it again and embedded the video. But first, here's a bit about the video.

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we were just wrapping up some work with the Edison Group where we measured the time it took to perform specific storage administrative tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX, and NetApp FAS array. As a follow-up to the EVA4400 announcement, we brought some IT administrators to HP and asked them to perform a number of tasks on an EVA and Clariion array. The video was pretty good and was well received. So as we were getting ready to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400 this year, we wanted to do another video to show just how easy the EVA with it's unique virtualization is to manage compared to competitive traditional arrays.

My original idea was to use either high school or college students; we'd have two groups - one a few football players and the other students taking high-tech classes. I was very confident that if we asked the football players to configure the EVA's and the tech students to work on the competitve arrays, the EVA would win hands down. A few folks on my team thought this could be a bit offensive, suggesting you really don't have to be educated to be an IT administrator. I saw it very differently - if HP StorageWorks can make products that simplify the time it takes to administrate their storage, that's really what our customers need - make it simple! I think the idea we used works just as well - we had three teams of high school students who each were asked to perform the same tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX4, and NetApp FAS array. As you'll see in the video, it appears as though the NetApp results are close but this is a bit misleading as we had to tell the students to skip some tasks on the FAS because no one could figure out how to do them.

With that background, there's the video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Come on - is the EVA really that easy to manage?

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:31:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

As I mentioned in my post titled Storage virtualization and the new EVA, the StorageWorks EVA is proving itself to be far easier to manage than competitive traditional disk arrays. Let me give you some of the back story here.

Last year, we commissioned an analyst team (The Edison Group) to measure the steps, clicks, and time it took to perform the most common array administrative tasks on several midrange arrays. They wrote a paper about those findings called "TCO White Paper: EMC, NetApp, and HP Midrange Storage Arrays". To be blunt, the paper never really measured TCO and in the end I thought it was the wrong title but it was still a good thing to see the time savings that we get with the EVA versus other arrays.

As I discussed in my post titled "Must See TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp Go Head to Head" we brought customers to Houston to run some testing for us. You can find the video in the Must See TV post but there was also a white paper titled "Competitive Testing of Common Administrative Tasks" that gave more details on what happened through that testing. Again, interesting but still didn't give me what I wanted to see - how much can a customer save.

Fast forward to pulling together our announcement for the new EVA6400 and EVA8400. The thought was to do a survey of storage administrators on how they spend their day - meaning how often do they perform these different administrative tasks on their storage arrays. It seemed to me that if we had that data, we could then get to a time or cost savings when managing an EVA. This approach hit paydirt! Because the Edison Group had done the original testing, we turned to them again to survey administrators and calculate the savings. The paper based on this research is called "Comparative Management Cost Survey" Let me briefing summarize the results:

The total workday savings of an organization using an EVA as compared to EMC is 36 percent. When compared to NetApp, the savings are 50 percent. Workday savings is a term Edison uses to describe the value of an employee's daily work averaged over a year.

So when you hear us say the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays, you know now why we can confidently say that. If you aren't using EVA's today, can you really afford to spend 2X managing the other guys' arrays, especially in today's economy?

One last point - I'm sure the competition will try to come up with 30 different reasons why our conclusions are wrong. EMC already tried to debunk the original Edison report by having an EMC engineer perform the same tasks on a Clariion and time the results they got. Well, duh! If I have an EVA engineer do the same tasks that Edison did I'm sure they'd complete them faster too. I would love to put all of these products to a joint test - have the best and brighest engineers from each company perform these tasks on their own storage array and everyone posts the results to their website. Somehow I don't get the sense that this is a challenge that either EMC or NetApp will want to touch.

Have a great weekend!

Must see TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp go head to head

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:03:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we brought some customers and partners to Houston who were not familiar with the management of either the EVA or EMC Clariion CX array. We gave them a list of tasks to complete and then created a video of that. It was one of the most popular videos of the last year on hp.com. The test showed that for the tasks these customers were asked to accomplish, they clearly thought the EVA was far easier to manage.

As we were preparing to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400, we wanted to create an interesting video that would again make the point of how easy the EVA is to manage compared to competitive disk arrays. So the idea that we came up with was to have some high school students who are taking technical classes at their local high school (e.i. technology saavy) but not SAN or disk array experts put the EVA and competitive arrays to the test. The result is the HP StorageWorks EVA Simplicity Challenge. I don't want to spoil the fun for you but I'll make one comment about the results - the only reason the NetApp FAS system was even close was because no one could figure out how to do a snapshot on the NetApp system. So while the results look close, I personally thought we should have elimimated them from the results all together but we decided to keep their results in the video and note that doing the snapshots was beyond the scope of the test (in other words, was way too hard to figure out).

By the way, I wonder if my EMC blogger buddies have noticed that the EVA now has SSD drives - about a year a sooner than they predicted because to paraphrase their point of view, HP is a server company and can't innovate in storage. Of course, EMC doesn't have a virtualized storage array so what else can they say!

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.

EVA Disk Groups: The Fewer the Better

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:12:00 GMT

EMC, in a recent blog on array capacity efficiency, admittedly included some inaccuracies about the EVA. They've said they'll rerun their EVA tests and expect more favorable results. Good enough on that point. But they continue to think that EVA users wanting to run multiple applications are encouraged to use multiple disk groups. We've said it before and we'll say it again. NO! EVA users are encouraged to configure as few disk groups as possible. EMC makes claims about HP's product related to performance and availability isolation. EVA customers know that this isn't a concern (and we'll review that in just a minute). And with all due respect, we think we are the experts at configuring and developing best practices for the EVA. We'd politely suggest that EMC should stick to doing the same for their products.

Before we dive into EMC's claims about the EVA, a couple of points to note:

An EVA properly configured to service a set of high demand applications with a few appropriately sized disk groups doesn't experience the issues that Chuck mentions. The EVA also provides a much more cost-effective solution than traditional arrays that use "LUN" groups. This greater cost effectiveness results from reduced management and performance tuning overhead combined with excellent capacity efficiency; the EVA does not suffer from a traditional array's built-in inefficiency coming from the effort required to get several small "LUN" groups and spindle counts to match both capacity and performance requirements. In fact, such a manual process applied to traditional LUN groups typically trades off capacity efficiency for performance or vice versa.

EVA solves this dilemma by spreading all of the data across all the disks in a disk group and allowing the mixture of VRAID types on the same spindles. This simplifies the problem of simultaneously meeting performance and capacity requirements across the same set of spindles while providing greater capacity savings than mentioned in the EMC blog.

Now for the details. EMC talks about the concept of "performance isolation", e.g. minimizing contention between demanding applications. In a traditional array, this concept creates the problem that each small LUN group has to satisfy the maximum performance requirements of the application, even if that maximum performance is sustained only a fraction of the time. This, when combined with the limited set of disk sizes available, often results in over-provisioning of capacity, leading to wasted/stranded capacity.

Another issue that can result from using several LUN groups on a traditional array is that it increases the likelihood of hotspots. By using a few large disk groups enabled by EVA virtualization, occurrences of hotspots become virtually unknown.

EMC admits that EVA's approach of creating fewer disk groups offers greater performance. But that the array needs enough spindles. HP provides sizing tools that help our customers and partners KNOW that they have enough spindles to satisfy their requirements. And the EVA architecture allows for the simple insertion of more disks to increase the size of the disk group if (or when) requirements change over time.

Chuck goes on in his blog to tell EVA users that "if you plan to load up your EVA with several performance-intensive applications, and you don't want them stepping on each other, there's a case that can be made (unofficially confirmed) that you'll want more than the 1 or 2 disk groups that HP is offering up." Again, we believe that HP is in a better position to make best practice recommendation to our users. And our message is consistent with the other responses Chuck's heard from the HP community. Generally a large disk group will service all of the applications more effectively when considering the combined goals of performance and capacity efficiency. This results from the ability of a large disk group with more spindles to be able to adapt to the variable demand of all the applications while simultaneously being able to provide better system throughput and response times.

One more inaccuracy. Chuck claims that if a disk fails in an EVA (configured with a single disk group) that every application can have a problem and need to be recovered. This is true of any array. The CX and other traditional arrays have the same problem if they are unable to recover a failed disk. This was one of the reasons for the introduction of RAID technology in the first place and why the EVA is designed to ensure that it will recover the failed disk as long as the data is not stored in RAID 0. (Note: the exception for RAID 0 applies to ANY array.)

Finally, Chuck specifically asks "What are the recommended number of disk groups for an EVA with 120 usable disks where the customer has 6 or 7 demanding applications, and desires a significant degree of performance isolation and availability isolation?" Thanks for asking! Our answer is simple. A single large disk group would be best. If the separation of logs is a requirement, a user could create a large disk group for applications and a small disk group for logs.

Now let's summarize. EVA virtualization and its ability to use a few large disk groups solve several problems created by traditional arrays using several small LUN groups.

It eliminates the likelihood of hot spots.

It significantly improves capacity efficiency by eliminating the primary cause of capacity inefficiency in traditional arrays, which is using several small LUN groups. It does this by solving the problem of providing enough spindles for performance, while at the same time eliminating the stranding of storage in LUN groups sized for performance efficiency and not capacity efficiency.

EVA provides a simpler/cost effective performance tuning/management model that ends up being substantially more capacity efficient, while providing better throughput and response times for multiple high demand applications. The EVA does this by providing an architecture the meets these demands via larger/fewer disk groups as opposed to traditional arrays that chop up their resources and capabilities due to the need to carve an array up into several small LUN groups.

The result is efficient use of capacity and array performance that is substantially easier to manage than a traditional array.

No, this isn’t your typical Pepsi taste test challenge

BlogArchive — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:06:00 GMT

-- Buzz Kaas, director of IT, Pattillo Construction

I participated in a HP vs. EMC “taste test” challenge at the HP facility in Houston this past January where we compared the usability of the EVA4400 and the EMC CX3-10.

Working side by side with a SE for each product, we ran through a typical setup of: creating disk groups, selecting RAID levels, creating LUNS, assigning to hosts, several types of virtual cloning routines and tearing it all back out.

Without a doubt, the EVA4400 was easier to use and each task was accomplished in a fraction of the time compared to the EMC CX3-10.

But, more important than ease-of-use is the unique architecture of the EVA. For example, when making a disk group, the controller can auto select the drives for the group. All RAID types (0, 1, 5) are spanned across all spindles in the group. No more hot spots and maximum IOPS for all RAID types. All LUNS are shared across all drives in the group, so all spare disk capacity is pooled together. This makes for a very efficient use of disc space, because you don’t have to have spare capacity designated for each LUN. Expanding a LUN was as simple as typing in the number of GB you want to expand or contract to.

Finally, why risk your data, when you can work on an offline copy in just two minutes? Making clones requires just a few mouse clicks and I can definitely see how we would use cloning for all of our test environments when it’s this easy.

There were three flavors of cloning for the EVA4400:

1) Vsnap: Instantaneous copy using pointers then deltas are accumulated with each page change.

2) SnapClone: Instantaneous copy, but allocating an identical LUN size. SnapClone starts out like a Vsnap, but then records blocks over time to create an exact copy.

3) Mirror Clone: Dynamic copy for DR, takes time for availability, but clone can be fractured, used then reattached.

While EMC does have a lot of granularity, the EVA was far more user-friendly. It enabled me to be more proficient at network storage operations, which we normally farm out, because of staffing constraints. The HP vs. EMC challenge was a great opportunity to really compare the products head-to-head and showed me the value of an easy to use SAN solution.