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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SVSP use case #1: Consolidation and centralized management

CalvinZ — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:50:00 GMT

By Edgardo Lopez, Product Marketing Manager

Recently, I talked about how the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) network-based storage virtualization solution forms a solid foundation for an adaptive storage infrastructure that can significantly boost storage asset utilization while simplifying operations and improving efficiency.

It has been true for many years, that the best way to drive cost out of any infrastructure solution is by implementing common methodologies, tools, standards and techniques. An SVSP based storage infrastructure offers such a common set of tools and methodologies that will enable organizations to address an important set of use cases to streamline operations and improve productivity. They include:

Storage Consolidation and Centralized Management
Non-disruptive Data Migrations
Dynamic Tiered Storage infrastructures
Rapid Application Recovery
Efficient Application Testing & Development
Cost Effective Disaster Recovery

Today, I'd like explore the "Storage Consolidation & Centralized Management" use case with the SVSP; review how it actually delivers value within the context of simplified storage management, and discover how to evaluate this Use Case, economically.

Many customers today have storage arrays from different vendors or at least different generations of arrays, and models from the same vendor. Except in very rare instances, the customer is forced to recall the capabilities of each type of storage and use a different set of management tools from each vendor, including data services options, in order to manage each array separately. As the number of servers (virtual and physical) and storage devices grows, hundreds or thousands of volumes must be individually monitored and managed by storage administrators--a daunting task to say the least. Complexity, cost and capacity utilization rates are all negatively impacted in these traditional deployments, particularly when server virtualization is introduced.

A better approach is to use the SVSP platform to develop a consolidated storage infrastructure (see figure 1) that drives better economics. The SVSP:

Aggregates capacity via network-based virtualization from HP and non-HP arrays, to form centrally managed pools of virtual storage
Dynamically provisions storage, reclaim unused space, maximize application uptime by expanding capacity on a "just-in-time" basis,
Centrally manages multiple arrays and multiple data services with a consistent set of tools
Creates storage tiers and easily migrates data among the tiers to optimize storage costs
Improves capacity utilization with thin provisioning for all capacity under management irrespective of the array type
Maintains unused capacity in pool for future requirements
Improves in some instances performance by striping LUNs across RAID arrays

Figure 1: Consolidation and Centralized Storage management with the HP SVSP

Consolidation and management of multiple arrays from various vendors is significantly simplified using the SVSP. According to IDC (See Footnote #1), solutions like the SVSP can increase storage utilization by as much as 300% when compared to typical SAN Deployments. It can also triple the amount of storage that a person can manage. Overall, an SVSP deployment as illustrated in figure #1, can have a significant customer impact in three areas: business, operational, and finacial impact. I've summarized these as follows:

Business impact:

Flexibility Storage Infrastructure enabling faster responses to changing business conditions, particularly when server virtualization is part of the deployment
Maximizes application availability for revenue-producing activity
Greater asset utilization

Operational Impact:

Prevents server downtime due to out-of-space conditions
Reduces the time needed to respond to support additional servers, applications, and users
Increases the amount of storage each administrator can manage
Reduces administrative errors by using one management console for all storage devices
Better performance due to volume striping across RAID arrays

Financial Impact:

Reduces storage costs
Reclaims unused storage
Greater storage utilization
Lower TCO, CAPEX and OPEX

For more details see: www.hp.com/go/svsp

Footnote #1: "The Business Value of Storage Virtualization: Scaling the Storage Solution; Leveraging the Storage Investments", IDC, Richard Villars & Randy Perry, Feb. 2009

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Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, consolidation

The complexity of choice

SVSP use case #1: Consolidation and centralized management