The Storage Architect » lefthand

VIDEO: HP Discover 2011 – P4800

Chris M Evans — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:56:58 +0000

Here’s another video from HP Discover 2011 last week. In this one I talk to Kate Davis about the P4800. I’ve been pretty much all in on commodity storage hardware these days and the P4800 is another example of this. You’ll see in the video that the two blades run a clustered P4000 system, with storage provided via MDS600 drive enclosures. The flexibility of this solution is that both server and storage can be encompassed within the same blade chassis, eliminating the need for a separate SAN switch infrastructure; so things operate within chassis much faster. Although this is a simpler self-contained solution, the only proviso I can add is that you need ensure the cost of using blades rather than dedicated servers is right for your environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Disclaimer: As a blogger/attendee, HP paid for my flights, hotel and most meals. I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog on the event. All the opinions are my personal views.

HP Challenges Dell for 3Par

Chris M Evans — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:57:54 +0000

So there we have it. A week after Dell announce their intention to acquire 3Par, HP put their cards on the table and trump the Dell bid with an updated offer of $24 a share. This represents a 1/3 increase over the Dell $18/share offer.

HP have been pretty acquisitive in the storage arena over the last few years, acquiring LeftHand, Ibrix and others. Why now would they want to acquire 3Par?

Defensive positioning – 3Par being acquired by any of the major vendors could weaken HP’s position in the mid-to-enterprise market. EVA is a fading product and unlikely to be the first choice for many organisations when choosing a mid-tier storage array (unless you’re an out and out HP shop of course). Maybe HP felt they had to protect their existing mid-market position.
Technology Replacement - As I just mentioned, the EVA looks long in the tooth. Should HP replace or upgrade it? Acquiring 3Par could be the answer to that problem – use InServ as the EVA replacement. Goodbye EVA. Alternatively, 3Par could be a replacement for the XP range of devices that HP OEM from Hitachi. HDS are being brought closer to the Hitachi family (and making acquisitions of their own) so perhaps this is another defensive move on HP’s part, in case the Hitachi deal unravels.

Whatever the reason, HP & 3Par would create a large overlapping portfolio of similar products. I’m not sure where the clear strategy would be, or what the marketing message would say; which product is best for enterprise, mid, SME and so on.

Final thought: Will Dell rebid at a higher price? Will anyone else come into the bidding? Storage is clearly still hot acquisition territory.

Enterprise Computing: New HP Arrays – Updated

Chris M Evans — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:32:35 +0000

Today HP will announce two new storage arrays. Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years.

P2000 G3 MSA (Modular Smart Array) System

P2000 Large Form Factor

I’ve not been a particular fan of the MSA devices, as I’ve worked mainly in large organisations where scalability isn’t delivered by point solutions. However for SMEs, the new P2000 MSA seems to offer a lot of features for a small price point. The new device provides 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1Gb iSCSI, up to 64 snapshots plus the option to replicate to another similar P2000 array. Both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives are supported, by Small Form Factor and Large Form Factor models respectively. Arrays can scale up to 57.6TB with SAS drives and 192TB with SATA.

Surely I could replace my existing storage arrays with this kind of scalability I hear you say! Well yes and no; low cost may appear to mean high value, however it depends on whether this kind of array provides the specific features you require. Whilst the P2000 offers hardware RAID, and component redundancy, the additional features of the P4000 may be more appropriate. features you care about, for example, component redundancy, RAID, automated drive sparing, multi-pathing and so on. If these options aren’t high on your list, then the P2000 could be for you.

P4000 G2 SAN Solutions

P4300 G2

The P4000 devices are rebranded LeftHand networks hardware, technology acquired by HP in October 2008. Probably the most interesting feature of this release is something called Network RAID. Rather than offer simply RAID within the controller, multiple controllers can be connected together and offer continuous access in the event of a single device loss. While this isn’t a new feature, the difference in this release is a move on from simply offering RAID-1 protection to another device to providing RAID-5 availability. This means if you’ve planned a sensible configuration, loss of a single array wouldn’t be an issue. However you’ll need to purchase 5 arrays to get you started.

Clearly the P4000 is a step up from the P2000 MSA array, by offering RAID protection and component redundancy. You get what you pay for in this world, so the P4000 comes in at a higher price point than the MSA device.

It’s good to see some standardisation of the technology HP have acquired over recent years. Key to this though, is the ability to offer consistent management and where possible keep terminology consistent too. For those customers purchasing one or two similar devices from the range, then consistent management may not be an issue, however if you’re looking to deploy multiple tiers of storage across your organisation, even the ability to report consistently across all devices is a must.

I look forward to getting a chance to see this technology close-up and to provide more in-depth reviews if possible.

** Note this post has been amended after it was highlighted that the P2000 does in fact offer redundancy and RAID protection as standard. Thanks to HP and others who pointed this out **

Enterprise Computing: Is There Any Point Buying From EMC?

Chris M Evans — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:02:05 +0000

Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis. However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms. This to me sends a message loud and clear that despite continuing to sell it, the DMX3/4 legacy monolithic hardware is dead. If that’s the case, why bother buying from EMC any more?

Discounting EMC in the storage array market may seem like a naive and perhaps foolish comment to make. After all, recent IDC numbers show EMC top of the pile at nearly a quarter of all external storage arrays sold, depending on which figure you choose to use. However, take a moment to look at the EMC briefing pages on FAST (you can find them here). There you will see Intel co-branded with EMC, highlighting many previous messages that monolithic architectures are dead and commodity modular boxes are the way of the future. We’ve seen that this year already with the release of Atmos.

To my knowledge, FAST is the first “innovation” of the new V-Max product line, but it isn’t unique. In fact, I don’t think any features of V-Max are unique; the architecture is found in many other products. There’s a whole raft of mid-range storage arrays from IBM (XIV), 3Par, Compellent, Pillar, Dell/Equallogic and HP (Lefthand) with the last two being acquisitions of successful companies. I expect in the next 12 months we’ll see enterprise modular releases from Hitachi/HP and a revamped EVA. Most of the products mentioned here have been designed from scratch to remove the legacy encumberances of the past that products such as V-Max still retain.

So what’s my point? Well, simply this; EMC have legitimised the enterprise modular architecture characterised by V-Max. This accepts that the future is commodity-based hardware with differentiation in software. However, EMC are no longer the leaders in this field and are having to play catch up.

There’s never been a better time to look wider than the Big 4 (EMC/Hitachi/HP/IBM) and see if the features you need can be found elsewhere.

LeftHand – a case for a new application category

Chris M Evans — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 +0000

HP announced today their intention to acquire LeftHand networks, an iSCSI and virtualised SAN player.

Now, I doubt HP needed to buy LeftHand for their iSCSI technology. I suspect the bigger play here is the virtualised SAN technology they have – also known as the Virtual SAN Appliance. This allows a SAN to be created in a VMware guest, utilising the storage of the underlying VMware server itself.

I think we have a new technology sector starting to mature; virtual storage appliances.

At first glance you might ask why virtualise the SAN and initially I was skeptical until I gave it some thought (especially with reference to a client I’m dealing with at the moment). Imagine you have lots of branch offices. Previously you may have deployed a DNS/Active Directory server, perhaps a file server and some storage, the amount of storage being dependent on demand within the branch. Deploying the storage becomes a scalability and support nightmare if you have lots of branches. But how does a virtual SAN help?

Well, it allows you to provide SAN capability out of the resilient architecture you’ve already deployed in that location. Chances are you’ve deployed more than one physical server for failure purposes. You may also not need a large amount storage, but want advanced features like replication, snapshots etc. Deploying a virtual SAN lets you utilise these features but leverage both the hardware and storage of the ESX infrastructure you’ve deployed. The crucial point here is that you’ve benefited from getting the functionality you require without deploying bespoke hardware.

So you reduce costs, still maintaining a resilient infrastructure provide scalable support for small and medium branches. The challenge moves from supporting hardware (which has become a commodity) to supporting software as part of a virtual infrastructure and that’s a different issue. What you’ve gained is a consistent set of functional SAN operations which can be overlaid on different hardware – hardware which can be changed and upgraded without impacting the virtual SAN configuration.

I’ve downloaded VSA to test as I now have a resilient VMware environment. I’m looking forward to discovering more.