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Dell Storage Forum 2011 – A Walk Though the Hands on Labs

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

I did some Video of the hands on labs dell had at the Dell Storage Forums. I tweeted these, but wanted my subscribers to get a chance to check what was going on at dell storage forum, if you missed the event.

I got in so early, they were still setting these labs up, so I just walked through by memory, some basic operations like creating volumes inside the compellent lab. More info here

Next, I garbed a Dell expert to talk and walk us though a couple of the dell equallogic labs.
more info here

Finnaly, I had Dell, Commvault, and Symantec show of the Dell DX Object Based storage
More info here

Enjoy

Roger L

P.S you’ll see a post on vbrainstorm on the lab design in the future.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Dell Storage Forum – My Tweet, storageswiss write up – EqualLogic vs. Compellent – Where is the Line?

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

I asked the Hard Question during the Keynotes Q&A on Monday “If your a dell partner, where is the equallogic and compellet line drawn? #dellsf11” Below is a cut from storageswiss story, please check out of the full story.

“The first question that boiled up was tweeted by @rogerlund. I’ve been a fan of Roger’s blog for a while and I thought his question got right to the heart of the matter; “What is the line between EqualLogic vs. Compellent?” In other words when do you buy a Compellent Storage System and when do you buy a EqualLogic? There were of course the quick responses of a few of Dell’s competitors of “don’t buy either” but I thought the question certainly had merit and I was curious to see the executive teams response.

The response from the Dell Storage executives was what you would have expected, “it depends”, although I expected it to be a little sharper since they had to know that question was coming. Let’s face it, these two products overlap. EqualLogic has some very large installations and Compellent has been successful in the small to medium market. Trying to pigeonhole either product does neither product any good. Different people need to accomplish different things and are going to be attracted to different kinds of solutions.

” Click here for the full story

Thanks to Storageswiss George Bio

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ComputeDatacenterStorage

Insight Control for vCenter (Recap HP Discover #4718)

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

A couple years ago at VMworld, HP announced a new plugin for vCenter, called Insight Control for vCenter, which pulled from HP System Insight Manager and on-board intelligence of ESX host Proliant servers and displayed system status within vCenter.  Since the introduction, the Insight Control for vCenter package has grown to include a second plugin for storage, introduced in May of 2010.

The two plugins are separate and users have the choice of installing one or the other on the vCenter server when running the installation.  As far as licensing is concerned, the good news is that the storage plugin is completely free of charge, but the server plugin is licensed as part of the Insight Control package, though there is no license check.  The server plugin is a separate package not included with the other Insight Control installation.  To obtain the installation media, go to http://www.hp.com/go/icvcenter.

The goal of Insight Control for vCenter is to enable vCenter administrators a single pane of glass, which administrators are already using to manage vCenter.  By integrating the server and storage components, HP is delivering a package which also adds its own alerts to the normal vCenter alarms framework.  The plugin is very vCenter centric and uses the same user and permissions, adding its own permission groups which can be given to users.

The latest version of Insight Control for vCenter includes the ability to look into Virtual Connect Ethernet on BladeSystem and allows you to visually see how VM’s map back within the Virtual Connect area and to the external ports on the interconnect bay.  This is a big improvement for customers running Virtual Connect and ESX together, which has been a bit of smoke and magic which we couldn’t peer into very much.

The plugin also provides administrators with hooks into the other management software for HP.  Within the server module, there are links for additional information into HP System Insight Manager (SIM), to the iLO card and to the OA from different locations to gain full visibility.  The plugin does not try and replicate all functionality of these other management interfaces.  The same is true for the storage plugin, which includes hooks into CommandView EVA (and I assume other management interfaces, although I have to say I have only seen it demoed on EVA).

The storage plugin includes the ability to provision storage (if allowed by security permission within the plugin and vCenter) directly within vCenter.  It allows the ability to create clones and offload the work of creating the clone to the array instead of ESX.  In addition, the storage plugin also reports paths and references LUNs back to their VMFS datastores and correlates data which was previously difficult to correlate between the storage management and vCenter.

Insight Control Storage for vCenter currently supports all of the current generation of P2000 MSA, P4000 Lefthand, P6000 EVA, XP and P9500 series storage arrays.  Many previous generation EVA products are also supported.  HP is working to integrate support for 3PAR arrays into the storage plugin.

To setup and configure the Insight Control for vCenter, the plugin adds a new icon to the home screen in vCenter where all the passwords and integration can be setup.  Configuration for the storage plugin is configured from within the storage tabs on the ESX hosts.  Once configured against the array or array management software (CommandView EVA, in our demo and our shop), the list of disk groups is presented and the administrator can allow or disallow write access and provisioning to the arrays from within the vCenter plugin.  Save that configuration and the plugin is ready to begin querying the management servers.  Once it populates a view of the storage environment, the tabs populate with a good amount of data.  Data is a cached local copy of data retrieved from the storage management, so a refresh button exists in the storage plugin to pull updated information if changes are made outside of the Insight Control for vCenter plugin.

Of note with the plugin, the system information pulls from both the iLO card on the servers, from HP System Insight Manager (SIM), and with the Onboard Administrators of BladeSystems.  Without HP SIM, some information is not populated.  If you have a host without the Insight Agents loaded, you will only get a partial view of the server and some details will not populate.  For ESXi hosts, the Insight Control plugins use CIM (Common Information Model) to pull the system information.  HP also releases a custom release of ESXi which includes all the Insight functionality baked into the ESXi distribution.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover.  Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

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DatacenterStorage

Brief chat with David Scott, SVP of HP Storage

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

I had the opportunity to speak, unexpectedly, with David Scott, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Storage, in the bloggers lounge today at HP Discover.  Scott is the former president and chief executive office of 3PAR and assumed the role of SVP and General Manager of HP StorageWorks Division, now HP Storage, back in October.  Fresh off of his keynote this afternoon on the direction of Converged Storage for HP, I asked him about the ways that HP is integrating the 3PAR arrays, when we can expect better EVA performance tools and about the new 10 Million firmware code for the EVA arrays.

EVA customers will be seeing a lot of the 3PAR intellectual property integrated into EVA’s in the years to come.  New features like the thin-provisioning and the data LUN migration features are already visible examples of this cross over.

One big difference between EVA and 3PAR storage arrays is the ability to monitor performance.  3PAR is excellent at it, EVA is not.  I asked about the forthcoming EVA performance package which is supposed to be available this fall, and he said it is on schedule.  Currently, EVA customers are forced to use EVAPerf data to view performance, but there are no tools to take this raw data and interpret it.  Customers must send this to HP for analysis.  There isn’t a real time monitoring/management package from HP and the final reports produced by HP support are cumbersome and hard to interpret or correlate.

Scott and I also discussed the new 10 Million firmware code for the EVA platform.  My company has been fortunate to get early access to the firmware for two new arrays in our environment and it appears to be rock solid.  Scott confirmed that he is hearing the same from other customers.  He thinks that many of the earlier issues with the EVA firmware for the x400 series have been resolved and customers can expect better reliability from these new arrays.  The 10 Million code is the code that has been touted all weeks in Las Vegas that powers the new P6000 EVA series.  Although the P6000 has some hardware changes, all of the software features are available to customers with previous generation EVA arrays if they have active maintenance contracts.

All very positive news for HP EVA customers.  This week, we have seen a extended commitment to the EVA platform moving forward from HP.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover.  Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

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ComputeDatacenterSoftwareStorage

HP’s Livermore, Donatelli dive deeper into converged solutions

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

Today’s keynote stressed the ways in which HP is helping your business to become more agile in the market and react to the external forces on business through the use of integrated software and hardware solutions powered by HP technology.

Ann Livermore was up first stressing the point of HP making your IT business more agile, more able to react in an instant.  To illustrate the point, Livermore used a slide to show the power of an instant – in an instant, 12,000,000 texts will be sent, $323,400 worth of mobile payments will be made, 97,000 tweets will be tweeted, 20,000 mobile apps will be downloaded and 2600 mobile phones will be sold.  In short terms, a lot happens in an instant – and how can you capitalize will count a great deal in the future for continued success in business.

Without saying, she pointed out how inflexible and rigid IT has been in the past in relation to making changes and implementing new technology.  Her talk related to what Dan Tapscott relayed yesterday.  With a coming generation of consumers and workers, their expectations are different as we move into the time of instant-on.  The coming generation of workers are ‘digital natives’ and expect speed as a primary component.  Livermore went on to discuss three mega-trends in business today – evolving business models, technology advancements and a changing workforce.

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DatacenterStorage

HP makes converged infrastructure announcements

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

Prior to my arrival in Las Vegas, HP held a press conference to make some major converged infrastructure announcements to the public and press.  Because I was not able to attend the event live, I am going to link to some additional coverage below from those who were on site, but I also wanted to provide a recap of what was discussed:

  • New Storage Hardware announcements – the P6000 EVA and the X9000 Ibrix
  • HP is moving three storage platforms to a common Store360 software platform.  The Ibrix, Lefthand and StoreOnce systems will all be based on the Store360 scale-out software.
  • HP is building out purpose built solutions for software applications to enable customers to implement the software in hours and not months.  An example of this is the E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange 2010.  Yesterday, HP also announced the X5000 NAS solution for file sharing running Windows Storage Server.
  • The P6000 EVA was unveiled, representing the fifth generation of EVA.  This EVA introduces iSCSI direct from the array for the first time and both SAS and Fibre Channel drives available.  Thin-provisioning and dynamic LUN migration is part of the software enhancements.  The software will be available to all HP EVA customers with active maintenance.

Additional coverage:

Channel Register – HP erects common storage platform
Calvin Zito/HP – Converged Infrastructure Announcement for HP DISCOVER
Calvin Zito/HP – Say Hello to the new P6000 EVA
Dana Gardner/ZDNet – HP at Discover releases converged infrastructure products and services aimed at helping IT migrate rapidly to the future
eChannel Online – HP announced new converged infrastructure solutions
ComputerWorld – HP announces converged storage strategy, products

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover.  Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

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