Network-based storage virtualization

CalvinZ — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:02:00 GMT

By Edgardo Lopez

In these hard economic times, so many articles are already out there about how to bring down the costs of storage infrastructures, but few of them actually describe how to design a flexible and adaptive infrastructure that facilitates these potential savings and streamline operations to improve productivity

A recently published research paper by IDC titled "The Business Value of Storage Virtualization: Scaling the Storage Solution; Leveraging the Storage Investments" offers a refreshing new perspective. The authors present an IT evolution framework, describing how organization can evolve their infrastructure to enable them get more out of the infrastructure they already have. They show how by integrating server and storage virtualization technologies, IT organizations can significantly boost storage asset utilization while simplifying operations and improving efficiency. Findings show that asset utilization can be increased by up to 70%, cost of future system purchases can be decreased by as much as 50% and how provisioning and capacity expansion across heterogeneous systems can be significantly simplified

Today, I would like to begin a discussion how the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform or SVSP can be used to implement a storage infrastructure that produces the benefits described in the paper.

The SVSP is a network-based storage virtualization solution that aggregates capacity from multiple SAN attached FC arrays (HP or non-HP), and creates pools of virtual storage that can now be easily provisioned to satisfy the dynamic demands of virtual and physical servers. In addition, the SVSP provide a comprehensive set of data services that help firms streamline operation, and improve efficiency including: volume management, thin provisioning, non-disruptive data migration, copy services (clones and snapshots) and local and remote mirroring. They are the key to address a set of important use cases that we will describe in more detail in future postings. They are:

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

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

(Editor's note: Edgardo is the Product Marketing Manager for the SVSP. He will be talking about the HP StorageWorks SVSP and it's use cases in several upcoming posts. Don't forget that you can follow HP StorageWorks on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy).

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.

Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, thin provisioning

Network-based storage virtualization

Changing the economics of storage infrastructure with virtualization