The Storage Architect » Stephen Foskett

Enterprise Computing: HP Announces Converged Infrastructure Architecture

Chris M Evans — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:55:50 +0000

Barely a day has gone by since EMC, VMware and Cisco announced their partnership, and now we have a view on HP’s strategy. Today, HP announce their private cloud offering – Converged Infrastructure Architecture (CIA), putting them squarely head-to-head with the VCE coalition. So what’s it all about?

HP already offer server, storage and networking infrastructure. The CIA (nice acronym) brings those technologies together and leverages some of their recent acquisitions. There are four main “innovations”:

HP Infrastructure Operating Environment
HP FlexFabric
HP Virtual Resource Pools
HP Data Center Smart Grid

Looking specifically at the Virtual Resource Pools, there are three storage-related offerings:

StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage Systems Family. This is the technology acquired from IBRIX and is being sold in three flavors; X9300 gateway – essentially a NAS head; the X9320 appliance, using SAS/SATA drives; X9720, the high-scaling model. What’s nice here is that any and all of these offerings can all exist under the same namespace, with options to rebalance and move data dynamically between nodes.

StorageWorks SAN Virtualisation Services Platform. I have to admit I know little nothing about this product, however it looks like an IBM SAN Volume Controller equivalent, pooling and representing fibre channel storage resources. I first saw mention of it on Stephen Foskett’s blog about the HP Tech Day (had I been able to make the event, I’ve heard about it in person).

StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA Software For MS Hyper-V Live Migration. This feature provides support for Live Migration – the equivalent of VMware’s VMotion.

Opinion

HP is clearly setting out their position to compete head on with the VCE coalition. What’s interesting is that this first announcement discusses new storage technologies, rather than the existing XP and EVA ranges. I’d expect these are not going away, but it would be good to understand how they fit in the overall strategy. Even more telling is the lack of comment regarding integration at the hypervisor level. Does this mean HP will offer both VMware and Hyper-V? Note that the first O/S announcement related to Hyper-V support…

IT is moving to the converged model. We are seeing a ‘”land grab” for the customers hearts and minds and for the large players to entrench their solutions in the data centres of the future. What’s not clear is where some of the other big players sit. IBM can do stuff alone; but what about HDS and Netapp? At the moment they seem left out in the cold.

I look forward to finding out more on these products in the coming months as all the vendor strategies start to pan out.

Cloud Computing: Cloud Standardisation

Chris M Evans — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:57:14 +0000

Stephen Foskett has been posting some interesting commentary over the last week relating to cloud standards and today discussed the Zend API for PHP. In previous posts, he’s mentioned the SNIA initiative amongst others. Have a look at this great post he wrote on why standards aren’t needed.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m keen on the idea of Cloud Computing (and to be more precise, cloud storage in particular), so the concept of evolving standardisation is extremely exciting. Last year, I discussed RAIC (here and here) – the concept of using multiple clouds to form a redundant repository.

Too Early?

Whilst on the one hand I agree with Stephen that it may be too early for standards to be set, I would also contend that for certain pieces of the cloud storage infrastructure we do need standards, for example security and authentication. It would be useful to have a consistent authentication model to be applied across cloud storage infrastructures, especially if in the future the ultimate evolution of cloud storage (and for that matter cloud computing) is the ability to dynamically switch workloads and data locations based on service quality (i.e. cost and performance) and availability.

Of course, there will always be the eternal tradeoff between standardisation (which suits the customer) and proprietary interfaces and functionality (which suits the vendor). Get a customer hooked into proprietary technology and the inertia to change becomes much increased, so even if another vendor does offer a better solution, the cost and effort of change is too great to make the savings/benefits worthwhile.

New Business

Does this mean initiatives like Zend and Cloudloop offer an insight into new business opportunities? I think they do. Most, if not all of us will not interface directly with Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Atmos, Rackspace and the others that will spring up. These companies are infrastructure, not application, providers. Taking the UK as an example, do I care where or how my electricity is generated or where my gas comes from, as long as it is available when I need it? No. Whether the cloud storage infrastructure providers (CSIP) choose to standardise isn’t important. The future is how easily we can interface into the cloud, and how services such as the following can be easily delivered:

Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete (CRUD)
Search
Index
Migrate

and of course the influencing factors will be:

Cost
Availability
Performance

Today there are plenty of companies offering services based on cloud storage – exclusively targeting the consumer market or limited business features such as backup. As things evolve, we’ll see opportunities to move into the Enterprise space. These will take advantage of extending the data space into the cloud, giving us new and interesting ways of managing data. Here are some ideas I want to explore in upcoming posts:

Extending the Global Name Space into the Cloud
Block-based array tiering and the Storage Cloud
Using the Storage Cloud for data migration
Archive, Backup and the storage cloud

Anyone have their own ideas they want to share?

Job Losses: EMC Joins The Club

Chris M Evans — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:31:00 +0000

EMC have finally announced that they will be following the industry trend and cutting staff. Approximately 7% (2400) of the workforce will go. The cuts are widely reported (here for instance) and at their earliest were forecast by Stephen Foskett in his December post.

Have a look at this list of tech layoffs. Those storage related are Seagate, Dell, EMC, WD, Pillar Data, Sun, SanDisk, HP. Not on the list are Quantum and COPAN.

Do you know of any others?

2009 will be the year of rationalisation and optimisation. The only prediction to make for the next 12 months is that end-users will be looking to do more with less.