Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, storage management

Managing virtual infrastructure

CalvinZ — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:59:00 GMT

By Nimish Shelat, Product Manager for HP Storage Essentials Storage Resource Management (SRM) software

Hi again,

I've been thinking about virtualization clouds, specifically as it relates to server-storage visibility. Here're some of my thoughts, would love to hear what you've experienced in the area as well.

It's true that server virtualization technologies (eg., VMware's ESX) bring several huge benefits to the enterprise; but let's not overlook that these technologies also create some challenging dynamics in the storage environment.

Specifically, vendors like VMware and Microsoft recommend that all hypervisors use shared storage (i.e. SAN) to take advantage of dynamic application scaling technologies like Vmotion, LiveMotion respectively. Virtualization has dramatically increased network based storage within the enterprise. In fact, several storage analysts predict that 50% of new storage purchases are driven by server virtualization initiatives.

Gone is the well understood "server - SAN - storage array" interrelationship; now we have additional virtual machine abstractions like VMFS (virtual machine files system), VMDK (virtual machine disks), virtual HBA's to add to the complexity of the server-storage dependency. This complexity makes it hard for the server and storage team to control and make changes to their infrastructure. It raises several difficult questions, such as:

How much of WHAT is used?
What is underutilized and what can be reclaimed?
Do I have virtual servers not-under-management in my environment ?
Are these servers consuming expensive storage resources?

Without good answers to these questions, your enterprise will not use its storage resources effectively and you'll inevitably see a dramatic increase in storage budgets and purchase needs.

Another challenge introduced by virtualization is around speed. The enhanced agility of virtualization demands faster storage automation. With virtualization in place, you can no longer accept long latencies in the storage provisioning process. Your customers expect storage provisioning to be done quickly and in a repeatable way; the visionary customers are in fact, expecting coordinated server and storage provisioning solutions.

Here's where HP Storage Essentials SRM software can help. It makes storage configurations and resources visible again, creating benefits such as:

Comprehensive visibility into VM - storage dependencies
Accurate storage resource capacity management
Best in class Reporting and Dashboard
Automated and error-free provisioning of storage resources to VMware server
Virtual Server to Storage Array performance management

HP Operations Orchestration is a run book automation technology that orchestrates end-to-end IT processes. It provides out-of-the-box integration with Storage Essentials. By providing the automation and the orchestration engine, Storage Essentials provides its customers to fully automate their virtual infrastructure management.

Learn more on how HP Storage Essentials can help better manage storage in a virtual environment here (white paper titled: Managing storage in the virtual data centre: A white paper on HP Storage Essentials support for VMware host virtualisation). .

www.hp.com/go/storageessentials and www.hp.com/go/SEPE

Tweet this!

Follow HP StorageWorks on Twitter

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!

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.

Storage Capacity Efficiency - Not Quite So Final

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:57:00 GMT

By Craig Simpson

EMC's Chuck Hollis recently posted quite a blog stream on storage capacity efficiency. His latest post concluded "it's time to step back a bit from the fray." It is quite a fray. But, my step back to look at the big picture uncovered some different thoughts from Chuck's. He started this with a case where a chosen interpretation of best practices could make CX look better than EVA. Of course, if one levels the playing field by letting EMC configure the CX (like Chuck did) and HP configure the EVA they both come out around 70% efficiency. I appreciate that EMC recognized some of our points. Here’s the rest.

However, since turnabout is fair play, I wondered if I could cook up a case to make EVA look lots better than CX. Sure enough. Put both a performance intensive workload (3000 IOPS, 1TB) and a non-performance intensive workload (300 IOPS, 1TB) on the array. The performance intensive workload uses RAID1 while the other uses RAID 5. Seems a reasonable mix of uses for an array. The EVA uses 30 disks compared to CX’s 41 making it 37% more efficient because CX can’t have RAID 1 and RAID 5 in the same RAID set. Now EMC could open the arguments about how their workload is better or I’m misusing their array or …

But the point is that anybody can find a way to make their array look good. EMC, why did you use RAID5 for “Exchange” when you recommend RAID 1? Digging into the numbers shows it was important to making your array look good. If you really want to show a meaningful comparison let’s agree on a third party to define and do the comparison. Let’s make it a challenge. Loser pays and we both put it on our websites. I know we can get plenty of volunteers to run it. But if you don’t, then this was just a colorful marketing show proving anybody can make their array look good.

Data Placement: Who’s Architecture is Really Broken?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:17:00 GMT

I just read a blog where Chuck Hollis (http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/07/the-great-data.html) of EMC launched an attack on storage virtualization. Called us all “spindle randomizers.” He based this attack on the idea that you can’t mange performance on virtualized arrays. Chuck seems to believe that you can’t make an array perform without manually placing every byte on every platter. That’s a misguided idea that’s got to be challenged. Unfortunately Chuck seems to be missing the bigger issues. Labor has become the largest cost in an IT organization. Not software. Not hardware. Not even power & cooling. Labor! The cost to manage all of that IT infrastructure. We recently asked storage managers what they need most. Did they say capacity? No. Did they say performance? Certainly not! Their top concern is administrative costs. With the amount of digital data doubling every 18 months the top issue is managing all of that data and the infrastructure that stores it. That kind of data growth drives complexity in a big, big hurry. We’ve got to fight that complexity with simplicity at every opportunity. Storage array virtualization is a critical foundation for fighting that complexity. With it 90%+ of the storage needs can be met with a simple create, present, and let it run. You don’t have to make a bunch of extra decisions that the machine could have made just as well. And you don’t have to come back and handle simple issues that the machine can manage just fine. You’re freed up to spend your time on the hard problems, be they performance, capacity utilization, or other, where a person really adds value. Without array virtualization the mind numbing details suck up the time and keep you from the interesting and important problems. There just aren’t enough hours in the day! But what about the cases where you do need to manage the performance? Go ahead! That’s why the EVA has disk groups and performance tools. There’s nothing in a virtualized array that prevents you from doing the tuning you need. You just don’t have to when you don’t need to. That’s critical. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be tuning every LUN!

Chuck tries to paint a vision where SSD’s make manually managing all the details a requirement. A wave of the future. But that’s a productivity killing tsunami. Nobody can afford all of that time! Virtualized arrays have been handling multiple drive speeds for years. We’ll do just fine with SSD’s. The issue Chuck’s trying to hide is that EMC’s CX architecture doesn’t include storage virtualization. They’ve got an inherent limiter that’s going to be very hard to overcome. We “spindle randomizers” aren’t going to be the ones that have to live with the consequences of our architecture. It’s Chuck and company. Good luck guys!

Storage Just got SASsy! VMware set free of the SAN.

jasontreu — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:24:00 GMT

By Lee Johns, director of marketing, StorageWorks Entry Storage and Storage Blades, HP

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Does not sound very exciting really does it? Many of you will know SAS as a class of disk drives found in servers and arrays but how many have ever though of using SAS as an interconnect for storage instead of Fibre Channel or iSCSI? Probably not many and with good reason. SAS is a point to point protocal that can not compete today with the sophistication of network storage toploogies like Fibre Channel and iSCSI for Enterprise Arrays.

But what if you just want to deliver a simple solution for shared boot, or a VMware infrastructure that enables Vmotion without a SAN, or you have an application that performs best with a direct attached storage architecture but you want better storage utilization. Now the cost and complexity of a SAN seems somewhat redundant. Why is there no way to provide the performance you need with the consolidation and utilization of a SAN without the overhead of an expensive fibre channel network infrastructure or leaving things as they are with existing direct attached storage (DAS)?

There is an answer. It is using SAS as a shared storage interconnect and with it you can build much simpler shared storage environments that can be managed by a server administrator. This saves you time, money and enables you to build the best architecture for any application. It is not a replacement for the traditional SAN but it is an enhancement to DAS that places the data and control where it should be and does not force fit a SAN as the answer to all storage problems.

Shared SAS solutions are available today and I encourage you to think where they could help you improve your Direct Attached Storage architectures and augment the SAN. SAS began as an internal server interconnect so maybe it is no surprise that dedicated storage vendors like EMC and NetApp are ignoring SAS as an interconnect. They feel it is threatening to them and that is exactly why you should be taking a serious look!

Doing More with Less…..A Better Way

BlogArchive — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:09:00 GMT

- by Brett Johnson

If you are anything like a “typical” storage data center manager, you are facing common challenges. Storage priorities such as disaster recovery planning, virtualization, data retention compliance, data security, and retaining the best people are key on the agenda. However, IT budgets are often not growing as fast as your data, or they may even be flat or declining from one year to the next. The challenge: How do you do more with less?

Management and administration are among the fastest growing costs in IT today and storage administration isn’t exempt from this trend. In fact, the cost to manage a storage system over the course of its life has been said to be as high as 3-4 times the cost of the initial purchase. That’s why easier storage array management is more than a nicety, it’s a necessity.

Think about it…where does your storage staff spend it’s time? How many steps does it take to accomplish a simple task, such as adding a new disk? How many common tasks are automated? How much time is spent “babysitting” your storage? Could an IT generalist, rather than a storage specialist, administer the array freeing up time for other key projects?

Is there a better way?

The answer is yes. The highly automated HP StorageWorks EVA was recently put to the test to see just how it stacked up to competitive arrays in terms of manageability and total cost of ownership (TCO).

The EVA’s simplified management streamlines storage maintenance and administration, which can save precious IT personnel hours. Analysis from research and technology firm the Edison Group uncovered that a storage administrator can perform a series of standard tasks in 70% fewer steps on an HP EVA than on a EMC CX3, and 82% fewer steps than on a similar NetApp FAS system. That means the EVA requires significantly less time to manage, in fact, 79% less time than EMC and 76% less time than NetApp. The study concluded that the HP EVA can provide up to five times the management efficiency of EMC and NetApp systems, depending on the operation performed.

We fully expect anyone to take test results promoted by a vendor with a grain of salt. The exciting thing is our customers are seeing the same benefits in the “real world”. From large customers like CitiStreet who expects cumulative benefit of $275,000 in productivity to the Rhode Island School of Design who saved $75,000 though scalable growth.

We challenge anyone to come and demo the EVA. See for yourself. Spend 20 minutes on the EVA and you will truly see how this solution can help you do more with less better than the competition.