Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, LeftHand SAN

Video summary of HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions

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

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

(Please visit the site to view this media)

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

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

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

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

StorageWorks Tech Day starting now

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

By Calvin Zito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HP LeftHand on the VMware Community Podcast

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

By Calvin Zito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Special VMworld Podcast #1

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

By Calvin Zito

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

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VMworld is almost here!

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

By Calvin Zito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mike Moroze, HP LeftHand Usability Corner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CM:

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

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

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

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

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

UC: Thanks Chris!

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HP LeftHand capacity

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

By Jasen Baker, Storage Architect

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

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

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

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

Image "courtesy" of NetApp

There's that word again, always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Making virtualization easy

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

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

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

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

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

Allow me to elaborate...

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

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

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

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

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

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The complexity of choice

CalvinZ — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:44:00 GMT

Editor's note: The last three posts have focused on the storage consolidation for SMB announcement we did last week. We have posts from Carol Kemp, Lee Johns, and Charles Vallhonrat. Here are links to those posts if you want to read today's post in context:

New Storage Consolidation Solutions for SMB by Carol Kemp - An overview of the announcement
Tales of cold dead fish by Lee Johns - discusses the new HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems
Why all storage isn't in a SAN by Charles Vallhonrat - talks about shared SAS storage with the new MSA2000sa G2

So with that context, here's today's wrap up on the announcement, focusing on the new HP Virtualization Bundles.

The Complexity of Choice

By Lee Johns

Last week before going on a business trip to the Middle East, I wanted to get a small digital camera. My wife said those immortal words "That should be easy - there is so much choice today". Two days of web research and 4 store visits later I had it narrowed down to 6 possibilities from 4 different manufacturers and none had all the features I now wanted having seen all of the different specifications.

Why am I writing about this here? Well I was thinking how tough the IT industry makes it for customers, with all of the choice we offer. It's not just that we have so many different makes and models from so many manufacturers but in addition to that you have to make them all work together in support of your business goals. With that said I do see a move toward converging different elements of the infrastructure to deliver IT infrastructure solutions that are easier to consume. Last week, HP took another step in this direction with the announcement of HP Virtualization Bundles for SMB customers starting out with virtualization. The solutions bring together networking, servers, storage and both server and storage virtualization software into pre-tested configurations that can scale with additional building blocks as their businesses grow.

SMB's don't always choose the elements of the solutions they deploy. A reseller partner or integrator will recommend configurations to them. Regardless, anything that makes it easier for a reseller to recommend or a customer to buy fully featured solutions with built in investment protection is a step in the right direction. There may be other features available if you want to spend the time doing work on integration and configuration but ,believe me, the HP solutions are well rounded, have unique features, you will be happy with the solution, and save some time and money.

By the way I ended up buying the first camera I was drawn to. I could have saved a lot of my own time If I had just purchased the product that met my top three criteria (size, price and battery life). I'm sure I will get great pictures and I doubt I will miss having blink recognition.

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But I can't afford a Fibre Channel SAN

CalvinZ — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:22:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I just saw a customer comment on an article we have on hp.com. The article is titled The secret to successful virtualization: Unlock server virtualization potential with efficient storage. Here is what the customer comment said, "We still haven't been able to afford a SAN, but with this kind of functionality, we might be able to justify it sooner."

That really cuts to the heart of what our HP LeftHand solutions are about - delivering the benefits of networked storage with iSCSI-based SAN. If you haven't checked out the article yet and your trying to figure out how to be more effecient with your storage but can't afford a Fibre Channel SAN, you need to read it!

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Learn more about HP LeftHand

CalvinZ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:21:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I wanted to follow-up on John Spiers previous blog post about our HP LeftHand announcement on Monday. I'd like to point you to a few different things around our hp.com web pages to help you learn more about the problems our HP LeftHand solutions are solving, product details, and point you to some customers who are using HP LeftHand today. So here we go:

First is a feature article that talks about the customer problems HP LeftHand helps you to solve. It's titled The secret to successful virtualization.
Next is a video that provides a good introduction to HP LeftHand. It features Bill and Dave (no, not Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard but Bill Chambers and Dave Roberson). The video talks about how the HP StorageWorks LeftHand SAN delivers low-cost storage that is optimized for virtualized computing environments.
I found another video that gives a quick tour of the LeftHand P4000 SAN solution.
If you want to dig deeper into our LeftHand solutions, you can check out the product pages:
- HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solution page. Be sure to check out the Flash-based product demo and click on the Resource Library link to get a look at all of the collateral available.
- HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) Software page and again, be sure to click on the Resource Library link (which for all of our products is always on the top right-hand side of the product page).
Lastly, I'll point you to our customer case studies where you can read how others are using HP LeftHand solutions:
- BlueLock, a technology service provider running VMware ESX, Windows and Linux OS's
- Gaylor, a construction services company running VMware ESX Exchange, and SQL
- Litigation Management, a litigation support services business running VMware ESX and SQL.
- Mojave Water Agency, a public utility running SQL, Visual Studio, Exchange, and ESRI GIS
- Florida Municipal Power Agency, a public utility running VMware ESX, Dynamics SL, Lotus Notes, Maximo Asset Management
- Los Angeles Mission College, an educational institution running Exchange, SQL, and ImageNow document imaging
- University of Florida, an educational institution running VMware ESX, Exchange and SQL
- Jackson Energy Authority, a public utility running Windows Hyper-V, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, System Center

I know I've given you a lot of links today but if you're looking for an iSCSI based storage solution, it will be worth your time.

I also wanted to remind you that you can follow HP StorageWorks on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy.

Have a great weekend!