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DatacenterSoftwareStorage

TechEd Session Recap: The StorSimple Approach to Solving Issues Related to Growing Data Trends (DCIM-B310)

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Dealing with astronomical data growth is a problem that every business, small to large, is dealing with.  Data is expected to grow from about 4.4 trillion gigabytes to over 44 gigabytes by the end of this decade according to numbers reported by IDC this year.  But of all the data captured and created, most of it sits idle just a few days after its initial creation, never to be referred to again.  So, how do businesses combat this?

StorSimpleTiersMicrosoft’s Marc Farley offered one Microsoft solution during his session, The StorSimple Approach to Solving Issues Related to Growing Data Trends.  Utilizing StorSimple, a Microsoft owned company, businesses can implement a third tier of storage in the cloud.  But storing data in the cloud comes with its own set of challenges.  The folks behind StorSimple recognized that most data in the cloud is stored in objects – not file and block like traditional datacenter data.  Moving data back and forth between the cloud presents problems because you have to change the data type from file or block into objects going into the cloud and from objects back to file or block from the cloud.  StorSimple is a solution to that problem by natively storing the data in object stores locally and providing companies with the ability to transport these objects into the cloud for backup, archive and off-site storage all the while providing applications with fast access to the data on-premise.

StorSimple is an iSCSI storage appliance that combines traditional hard disks with solid state to offer fast storage performance for applications.  It uses a queuing technique to store all incoming data as quickly as possible and then uses a ‘spill-over’ technique to move them down to lower tiers of storage.  It keeps primary data on the HDD and SDD and then utilizes cloud object stores to create snapshots of the data for backup, archive and off-site retention.  StorSimple uses SSD to ingest the data a quickly as possible and then uses dedupe and compression to make better utilization of space on the hard drive and cloud tiers of storage.

Traditionally, businesses have utilized tape for the purposes of backup, archive and off-site storage, but tape comes with its own set of challenges.  Marc talked a bit about the challenges of backup and especially backup to tape in business environments – from tracking cartridges to operational challenges of locating and off-siting tapes.

But in addition to the backup, recovery and archive data, what happens when a company runs out of hard disk space in an array?  Interestingly, StorSimple utilizes the cloud as another layer of spill over for stale data that will likely never be recalled again.  That is a unique take to solving the increasing storage demands for businesses.

In terms of management, StorSimple brings all the functions of primary and backup storage into a single appliance and, more importantly, into a single management interface where all the functions are managed together – rather than in different silos by different administrators.  This allows for administrators to have an unified view of their storage.

Living up to the ‘simple’ part of its name, StorSimple is a straight forward solution that doesn’t necessarily offer some of the high availability features that other storage platforms include.  The hardware is fully redundant, but there aren’t clustering features built into the platform, although disaster recovery to another site is possible using the cloud transport between the two combined with policies that dictate the recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

Find out more at www.storsimple.com or get a copy of Marc Farley’s book Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybird Cloud Model.

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DatacenterSoftwareStorage

Elitebook Folio 1040 Challenge: Attending MS TechEd with a twist

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Tomorrow morning, I will depart for Microsoft TechEd in Houston, TX, and something will be missing from my bag when I go tomorrow.  I’m leaving my Macbook Pro at home and I’m calling the next week my Elitebook Challenge.   Instead of taking my Mac, I’m going to spend the next week running on an HP Elitebook Folio 1040 and attempting to use it exclusively for the week.  HP sent me an evaluation unit to test drive and how better to test it than making it my primary computer for the week.

This is going to be a challenge for me after spending a decade running on the Mac in personal life.  I gifted away my last personal PC back in 2003.   Granted, I run PC at work,  but this blog, web development and my personal computing has been Apple-centric for years – long before the Intel switch and before the Mac became mainstream again.

HP Elitebook Folio 1040For the next week, I really want to try and give the Elitebook Folio a good run through and the only way for me to do this for sure is to leave my Mac behind.  I’m writing this post on the new Elitebook and I can already feel many similarities between it and my Mac.  The keyboard is very familiar to a Mac user.  The display is great in terms of resolution and brightness.  The trackpad is different – enough so that HP packages a how-to video about the trackpad, but as a Mac user I do miss multi-touch jestures.    When I unpacked the Elitebook, I was very impressed with how lightweight but sturdy the hardware felt.  I promise a full review of the hardware after I’ve given it a solid test.

In terms of PC’s, I’ve been stuck in Dell hell for years with the devices I had been given for work – both with a lack of sex appeal and horse power.  So I was thrilled when I unpacked the Elitebook Folio 1040. The Elitebook oozes sex appeal in the same ways that the Macbook Air and other ultralight notebooks.  While its not as razor thin as an Air, but its not far from it weighing in at just 3.3 lbs.  As I’m using it for the first time, the thought crosses my mind – this is a PC I could actually see myself using long term.  I’ve tried a bunch of Windows tablets out for work while we’ve been looking at them and there has actually only been one that I ever thought I could use for myself – that made sense.  This Elitebook is on the same list as that tablet.

Windows 8.1 is by far my biggest challenge so far – its a different animal – and one I have no real experience using since my office refuses to upgrade [for good reason, I now say].  The new Start screen is pretty awful in my opinion and although its attractive, its lost lots of user-friendliness.  My biggest complaint is that you have icons to easily identify applications, but the live tile concept replaces the icon with other content making it hard to find the app I’m looking for.  Gladly, the Windows 8.1 operating system is not the default installed and HP is giving its users a choice with the Elitebook Folio 1040 – pre-installing Windows 7 instead of Windows 8.1 onto the device.

The biggest thing for a switcher has to be software.  I have a lot of software I adore on the Mac that is Mac-only – titles like OmniOutliner which I use extensively for blogging outlines that simply aren’t available for PC.  But most of my major vendor apps have gone to subscriptions – like Office 365 Home and Adobe Creative Cloud, which made adapting to the PC titles really easy for what I need.  I have OneNote, Word and Excel along with Photoshop and Illustrator all by virtue of subscription.  These make switching much easier.  The cloud has really enabled a user like me to do a platform switch while keeping many of the services I use the same.

So, I am committed to blogging another post within one week where I will chronicle my week with the Elitebook Folio 1040.  Off we go…

Disclaimer: HP provided the Elitebook Folio 1040 to me, free of charge, to evaluate, use and to blog about with no strings attached.  HP in no way has influence or editorial control over what I blog about the Elitebook they provided.  These viewpoints are my own.  

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DatacenterStorageTrends

Sustainability takes stage at HP Discovery

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

IMG_0053HP announced its Earth Insight project, this morning, in conjunction with Conservation International during a press conference at  HP Discover in Barcelona.  HP Earth Insights is an initiative based on HP’s Vertica software that has created the Wildlife Picture Index (WPI) Analytics System.  The WPI Analytics System interprets mass amount of photos the Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology and Assessment Monitoring (TEAM) network has received from its field cameras and makes the data usable by decision makers with the intent of driving sustainable practices.

Conservation International (CI) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that focuses on environmental challenges and biodiversity loss.  Although based in the US, the majority of its field work is done in other countries with a strong focus on protecting tropical biodiversity (the variation of life – both plants and animals).  The application of big data tools to the information collected through TEAM is aimed at helping scientists understand why areas are losing biodiversity and take actions to prevent further loss.  It helps scientists be able to analyze data from over 6,000 square kilometers of tropical forests.

“Sustainability is fundamentally about people’s relationship with nature,” Sandy Andelman, PhD, Conservation International’s Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President, said during today’s keynote onstage with CEO Meg Whitman.  “If you’re going to manage that relationship effectively, we have to measure.  And tropical forests are the part of the world with the biggest measurement gap.”

CI is trying to fill that information gap.

For CI, their system was previously a manual process of collecting, interpreting and analyzing the data from their TEAM camera traps.  Now, with Vertica, CI has near real-time analytics from its collection of photographs to identify and interpret biodiversity loss.  It changes both the pace and availability of that data needed to report.  And Andleman says she hopes that this partnership will yield the data that countries will need to report again in 2020 and in additional that CI will understand how to manage the relationship between people and nature because of the data.

This morning was one of those mornings when I wished my wife was with me for an announcement. My wife, a university sustainability coordinator, is constantly educating me on the topic of sustainability, so some points of the announcement certainly resonate.

First, the project gives scientists additional data that they have never been able to have in the past.  Although scientists previously had satellite imagery to observe loss of tropical forests and the loss of biodiversity within the forests, there has never been a tool for interpreting what’s going on under the canopy.

Second, the scientists of TEAM did not anticipate the overwhelming number of images that would be generated from the camera traps.  They have over 1.5 million images and adding about 200,000 images each year.  The manual process could not keep up – but the Vertica solution likely offers quick results as well as the ability to change how data is interpreted, sliced, grouped and summarized.

Third, from a sustainability practice, its all about understanding the human interaction with nature and once it is understood, then actions can be taken to minimize or lessen the impacts on nature to preserve the world and its resources for future generations.

For more information about the technical approach on the project, the WPI website has a great summary.   You can also explore the results of the Vertica analytics through this dashboard on the WPI website.  And lastly, HP launched a new HP Earth Insights website to provides a great overview and summary information from the project.

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ComputeDatacenterSoftwareStorage

HP Discover Barcelona: What to expect & how to follow online this week

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I am currently sitting in Myrtle Beach airport waiting for my first of three flights that will ultimate bring me to Barcelona, Spain.  I’ll be spending the next week attending HP Discover in Barcelona.  It is one of HP’s two major conferences each year and it will be first visit to HP Discover in Europe and on a personal note, my first trip to Europe in thirteen years.

So what to expect from HP Discover?

Some of the usual highlights are expected – the keynote from CEO Meg Whitman to address customers directly and general sessions for HP executives to unpack their vision and product lines for customers and highlight some of the successes the company is achieving.  There will be hundreds of breakout sessions for onsite attendees.  The Discovery Zone is the place to visit with hundreds of HP’s top technical staff available to answer questions and explain solutions in detail.  Unlike other conferences, HP staffs not just marketing folks in the booth, but also engineers and developers.  But if you’re not onsite, keep reading – you can still follow the conference.

What else is expected?

Storage: Last year’s HP Discover brought major news with the introduction of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 series arrays.  These ‘baby’ 3PAR arrays have been a big hit in the mid-market storage marketplace.  Their introduction converted me and my employer into HP 3PAR users.  I’ll be interested to hear what’s new in 3PAR.  In June at Discover, HP announced the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 array – an all flash variant of the already successful 3PAR StoreServ 7400.  But HP 3PAR is just part of the HP Storage story – and there will likely be other things going on around software-defined storage during the week.

Systems: HP created the HP Converged Systems group in May.  This August, during VMworld, HP held a reception for bloggers and media where we were briefed by the newly formed group and the Converged Systems group is responsible for full system solutions made out of HP intellectual property, similar to VirtualSystem, CloudSystem and AppSystem solutions we’ve seen delivered to date.  This will be their first chance to show fruit during the week.

Servers: HP Servers group was also announced in May as HP combined its Business Critical and Industry Standard Server groups.  It will also be the first show for this group since their combination this year, since June’s HP Discover happened immediately after the announcement.  In previous years, there have been a lot of bleedover between Business Critical and Industry Standard, back and forth.   From the industry standard server side, HP ProLiant Gen8 continues to roll out models to complete its refresh cycle and some ProLiants are now in their second revision.  HP Discover in June brought the announcement of the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 which I have since had a chance to review in depth.  Excited to see what’s new here…

Mobile: I’m also interested to see what more HP is doing in the mobile space.  In the past year, HP has been toying with Android based hardware, Windows 8 based tablets and has other groups working on enterprise mobility solutions.  One solution that I saw in June – called HP Anywhere – was in a early beta form.  It allowed developers to have a secure platform and SDK for developing rich HTML5 applications for Enterprise.  Mobile is a growing space and I am curious what HP has been developing in this space to help enterprise retain control of data, secure and enable users.

But I’m not there – how can I participate?

I know most people who read Techazine will not be on-site at HP Discover Barcelona.  But, that doesn’t mean you can’t participate.  Here are some opportunities for the next week for your to participate online:

  1. HP Storage Press Event – Monday, 9am EST – http://hpstorage.me/1buyzV4  – Register online and attend for free to watch the announcements from HP Storage live.
  2. HP Discover Opening Keynote featuring Meg Whitman, CEO, and Bill Veghte, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group – Tuesday, 8am EST – http://bit.ly/1bQrhNz
  3. HP Discover General Session featuring George Kadifa, Executive Vice President, HP Software; Mike Nefkens, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Services; and Dion Weisler, Executive Vice President, Printing and Personal Systems – Wednesday, 8am EST – http://bit.ly/1aLQfr9
  4. Live and on-demand videos all throughout the week on a variety of topics – http://bit.ly/1fa5lf3
  5. On Twitter, follow hashtag #HPDiscover
  6. Follow @HPStorageGuy – Calvin Zito’s HP Discover Barca Bloggers list on Twitter – https://twitter.com/HPStorageGuy/lists/discover-barca-bloggers and talk with us – ask questions and interact.

Hope to hear from you!

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware releases VSAN and the power of policies

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers
vsan

VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN)
Diagram by VMware

VMware is pushing back on storage vendors as it seeks to show the world the full power of software-defined storage.  A couple weeks ago, VMware announced the VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), a new software-defined storage platform tightly coupled with vCenter server.   The new platform requires both hard disks and solid state disks to create a pool of redundant, shared storage within a cluster.  The hard disks are the core of the storage and the SSD are used for buffering and read caching but do not contribute to the total amount of storage.  And although the name has SAN in it, the traditional SAN that is bread and butter of its parent company, EMC, could not be more different than VSAN.

In many ways, this is similar to the VMware Virtual Storage Appliance, but VSAN is much more integrated into vCenter and the vSphere platform.  The requirement of SSD is also new and will greatly contribute to overall responsiveness for the storage.  But more importantly, the new software defined storage platform is an example of the possibilities yet to come from tightly integrating storage with vSphere.

The real power of what VMware has released is not the storage technology itself or the simplicity that it can be deployed (single-click simplicity like HA and DRS).  The real power is the addition of Storage Policies completely throughout vSphere and VSAN.  The policies are the real capability that can be leveraged across multiple types of storage.  As I said earlier, I think VMware is simply showing all storage vendors this is what is possible.  The VSAN is certainly not a SAN replacement for most enterprise customers, but there are certainly remote office or small office use cases where this will fit nicely without the need of purchasing a purpose built storage array — use cases, by the way, where virtual storage appliances (VSA) currently fit.

But back to the policies.  Introduced in vSphere 5.0, Storage Policies allow administrators to tag and set classing of storage for different pools that are available within a vSphere cluster.  The Storage Policies allow an administrator to abstract the back-end storage and provide a list of capabilities to end-users or operators who are creating new virtual machines – and choose a policy during initial deployment to meet their needs.  You see, what VMware has discovered is that the end users don’t care if the back-end storage is a 3PAR or a VMAX – a Synology or a Drobo.  What they care about is a class of service provided, response times and how those translate to their application and its performance.  They also care about the cost of charge-back, if an organization has implemented those types of billing scenarios.  Policies are all a way of defining those attributes back to the end user and abstracting the actual storage from those decisions.

I am sure many VMware customers are like myself.  When I started the virtualization project, most systems ran on local storage.  The SAN was reserved for our most mission critical systems and most of those were clustered.  Today, however, vSphere has moved all of those workloads onto the SAN.  It has increased my resiliency and ability to survive a disaster, but its also driven storage costs up exponentially.  Yes, VMware is owned by EMC – goal to sell disks accomplished.

But the VSAN must run a bit counter to the EMC culture, so back to my original point.  In many ways, I think the VSAN is simply a proof of concept of what is possible with software defined storage.  It is a way for VMware to show the rest of the world what we can do.  VMware is very good at fostering its ecosystem and partner vendors, so I think this will spur new innovation.

And so, for a third time, back to policies.  With the introduction of VSAN, VMware is extending this capability of Storage Policies to allow administrators to assign a policy to a VM on creation and then the policy lives with the VM allowing policy based management of the VM over time.  Not only can it be setup initially with the VM, it can follow and adapt as the back-end storage changes over time.  With the addition of storage pools and maintenance mode for storage, VMware has automated a lot of the manual labor around managing storage.  By creating the pools of storage and moving datastores in and out of them, administrators and move or remove storage without interrupting service of virtual machines.  And also by applying tags and policy around those storage pools, it allows for the addition and removal of datastores as required to onramp or offramp storage as purchasing or lease cycles dictate.  All of this while maintaining service levels and agreements for customers and workloads – whether those customers are internal or external to your organization.

Beyond backend maintenance of storage, say the attributes of a particular application or VM changes over time.  Say it now requires a higher tier of storage – well thats an easy policy change as well on the VM and with the magic of storage vMotion and fully-automated storage DRS, the vSphere platform will perform the necessary moves to increase performance and move the workload onto the appropriate storage de jour.

In many ways, this is all done with the idea of reducing the menial tasks that an administrator has to perform.  Its mean to kill the tracking spreadsheets and other mechanisms we have traditionally relied upon for classing storage or moving workloads appropriately.  It all goes to making the storage layer of vSphere smarter and more automated.

Now, the last piece of policy that really sets VSAN apart from the competition.  Within VSAN, the vSphere administrator can dictate the type of RAID, the number of stripes and copies that are present for a particular VM or datastore.  For the first time, the core vSphere platform is controlling storage down the stack and automating how it operates.  vSphere policy now defines where and how replication occurs, how and where stripes of data are implemented, and on a per VM basis, quality of service attributes to prevent noisy neighbor problems.  And combining those together gives context and visibility up the stack in vSphere, too.  The two way communication of the policy and the storage implementation means that the administrator can more granularly dictate how the storage should act to support the requirements of the virtual workload.

So, I have to say, after a week in San Francisco at VMworld 2013, the VSAN is the one piece I am most excited to test and evaluate.  If for no other reason, you should sign up for the VSAN beta to see where the future of storage is going.  I think the writing is on the wall of every vendor is talking software-defined, the VSAN represents the first software-defined storage product with such a deep level of integration into vSphere.  I fully expect to see other vendors like Nexenta and HP StoreVirtual quickly adopting this paradigm – maybe even making it to market with product offerings around the same time that VSAN becomes generally available.  API calls and other integration points should be very simple for software storage implementations.  I’m excited to see where this next step takes us.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware unwraps vSphere 5.5 – What’s in it for your Datacenter?

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

IMG_6559Almost two weeks ago now, VMware unwrapped vSphere 5.5 to the public.  The release, which ships later this year, includes a lot of enhancements and some new features for the datacenter.  I won’t lie – 5.5 has a lot more in it for the datacenter than 5.1 enhancements.  And I left VMworld 2013 much more excited about the direction of the virtual datacenter than I did at the end of VMworld 2012.  So what are the things that sys admins will really care about in vSphere 5.5?

Expected enhancements – bigger maximums and more Web Client

As expected, the new release of vSphere increases maximums.  The ESXi host maximums were doubled from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5 in all cases, except for the maximum LUN size, which got a surprising 32X bump in limit to 64TB.  The number of logical CPU’s doubled to 320, the number of virtual CPU’s doubled to 4096 and the amount of RAM has doubled to 4TB per host.  Those represent some pretty incredible numbers.  vSphere 5.5 also introduces Virtual Hardware version 10.  The new hardware version is introduced to support newer CPU architectures as well as a new virtual-SATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) with up to 4 controllers and 30 devices per controller.  So, the new AHCI supports 120 total devices connected to a single VM.

Also expected, vSphere 5.5 drives users more towards into the vSphere Web Client for management.  All new capabilities are controlled from the vSphere Web Client.  This follows suit with vSphere 5.1, whose new capabilities like shared-nothing vMotion, were available only in the Web Client.  One thing I am hearing repeatedly on social media is that the vSphere 5.5 Web Client is noticeably more responsive, which is great.  I am also hearing the new Virtual Hardware 10 VMs can only be managed through the Web Client, which could cause heartburn for stand-alone hosts, but the final release may change this functionality.  The beta version of the Windows VI Client throws an error if you try to edit a Virtual Hardware 10 VM.  The error says the version 10 VM must be managed through the Web Client. This just means that resiliency of the vCenter servers continue to be critical parts of virtual deployments as it is a required part of managing the infrastructure.

And speaking of vCenter Server, the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCSA) continues to become a more capable alternative to a Windows server deployment of vCenter.  With vSphere 5.5, the VCSA has a retooled embedded Postgres database capable of supporting 100 hosts and 3000 VMs, although those numbers may actually change for better or worse.  During one Ask the Expert session during the week, a member of the VMware Labs team said they were using a single VCSA to support as many as 500 hosts, but mileage my vary.  This is one of those numbers that may change during final release.

I’ll file SSO enhancements under expected as well.  While most people outside of VMware did not know what VMware intended to do with SSO, one session at VMworld pretty much summed it up by saying that the new version of vSphere SSO releasing with vSphere 5.5 will be what should have been released the first time.  To many adminstrators, myself included, the version of SSO introduced with vSphere 5.1 just didn’t seem up to VMware standards.  It seemed to be a third party tool that was included but not fully streamlined into the vSphere implementation.

The vSphere 5.5 SSO version includes a number of streamlined improvements.  AD integration is much improved and includes the ability to tie it to multiple forests, which is needed for many larger environments – or anywhere a merger has occurred.  There is no longer a need for an external database.  And there is a multi-master replication model built into this new version.

Storage improvements

There are many storage improvements included in vSphere 5.5.  One that I am very happy about is the streamlined and scriptable UNMAP process used to identify and clear out free space on a VMFS datastore so that your storage array can re-thin and free the space on the back-end.  This is a big one for me with 3PAR.  I want to keep my LUNs on a diet and this new ESXCLI command will go a long way towards helping me do that.  In addition to the new command line, the back-end functionality has changed with UNMAP, hopefully making it more acceptable to run during production hours and moving towards a time when automatic UNMAP during deletes might return to default functionality.  UNMAP can now stagger the reclamation process so that it doesn’t saturate a backend array with IO.

Another nice feature, from an administrative standpoint, is the automatic removal of permanent device loss (PDL) state feature.  This is especially handy in the event of array failures, which have been known to happen.  In the event of a failure, automatically clearing a LUN in PDL will keep the administrator from having to perform rolling reboots to completely clean up the mess.   The handling of PDL conditions has improved greatly over the versions I have used from 3.0 forward.  There as a time that a PDL could completely hose an ESX host and a reboot was the only way to recover.

vSphere 5.5 also features enhancements around SSD and Flash storage.  The ESXi hosts now have the ability to work with add-add and removal of SSD devices, allowing a graceful handling of SSD storage as it becomes increasingly more common.  In the world of Flash, a new read cache feature is introduced allowing for the aggregation of Flash storage into a pool that can be consumed by VMs for the purpose of accelerating read intensive workloads.   Last, but not least, 16Gb Fiber Channel support, end to end,  is available in vSphere 5.5.

Network enhancements

In the networking world, vSphere Distributed Switches just got a needed boost of capabilities.  Traffic filtering has been added allowing administrators to filter the types of traffic.  QOS has been added to the mis allowing for prioritization of traffic from the vSwitch up to the physical switch layer.  Security officers and admins troubleshooting will both be happy to see the addition of a host level packet capturing tool that is the equivalent of tcpdump to Linux admins.   40Gb NIC support is also being introduced with vSphere 5.5.

Mission critical workloads

One of the message points from VMware during VMworld 2013 was about making vSphere a platform that can run any mission critical workload.  The maximum enhancements and other resiliency features are all targeted towards that goal, but in particular one additional capability was introduced with vSphere 5.5 that is meant to assist with virtualizing latency sensitive workloads, like VOIP.   A new Latency Sensitivity setting is now available on VMs which help reduce latency for necessary virtual workloads.  When set to a ‘high’ setting, the hypervisor actively tries to reduce latency by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and disabling network feature prone to latency.

Tying it all together…

There is really so much more in vSphere 5.5 – a couple great places to get more detail is available from Kyle Gleed in his A Summary of What’s New in vSphere 5.5 post and in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 document on the VMware website.

All in all, I left the Monday morning keynote of VMworld 2013 feeling a little let down.  Many of the enhancements that will really improve the admin’s life didn’t get any stage time or mention during the keynote – one reason for the delay in posting details – I had to find details…  Two of the big deals that were given stage time this year were the VMware VSAN, a software defined virtual storage implementation baked heavily into vSphere, and NSX, the network virtualization platform that VMware acquired with Nicira.  I hope to post on these two in depth in the coming weeks.

I was very happy to see a bit of a return by VMware to its core audience and products – centered around datacenter virtualization.  I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of other bloggers and industry folks while I was at the conference and I found several who shared my view that VMware had strayed from its roots in years past chasing the cloudy dream — a dream that we felt was a bit beyond the masses.  And while cloud adoption is growing, most enterprise datacenters are still reliant upon VMware and its vSphere platform to running daily operations.  Its good to see that VMware did not abandon us all and that they are are still working very hard to build the best and most resilient datacenter platform available.

Questionable decisions in years past – like the nasty 4 letter word – VRAM – can now be jokes and chuckles.  With so much attention given to vCloud and programming layers in the past couple years, it was welcoming to see things added to vSphere, where I live and work.  In my opinion, this year VMware had to deliver something valuable to all of its customers to starve off competition and justify the continued spend for Service and Subscription (SnS) contracts.  In many ways, I think they delivered.  I’ll save my thoughts on where they still miss for another post.

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DatacenterStorage

HP’s Tom Joyce talks converged infrastructure and HP’s new Converged Systems Group

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Like most things, IT concepts tend to be cyclical.  Many years ago, Windows and Linux on x86 hardware changed the course of purpose-built solutions, moving customers to what became industry standard servers.  Before them, customers bought proprietary hardware with proprietary storage and proprietary software. Now, the complexities of deploying industry standard servers are moving customers back to optimized, purpose-built solutions for particular problems to streamline deployment time and optimize performance.

IT professionals agree that anything done in a purpose-built converged system can also be accomplished with off-the-shelf components, but HP says customers want converged systems for two critical reasons – speed and agility.  HP’s converged solutions are targeted to help customers deploying specific software packages get a very tailored hardware solution to run their software package on a very short timeline with high performance.

Last month, Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Systems, stopped by the bloggers lounge at HP Discover to talk with us about future directions in converged systems.  Convergence is a topic that HP has been talking about for the last 5 years, but HP is also realigning its business practices behind the converged system, announcing in April that it was forming the Converged Systems Group.

So, what makes a converged system?  According to Joyce, Converged Solutions include four components:

  • Server
  • Storage
  • Networking
  • Integrated Management

HP is seeing a lot of opportunity in the mid-market around converged systems.  A lot of mid-market customers still have silos where virtualization can really benefit them, but the typical mid-market customers do not have the benefit of a lot of staffing according to Joyce, so  HP is working to integrate solutions to make the solution easier to use, manage and maintain.  And while some converged systems are created around single products, some of HP’s portfolio has been created around customer choice – with HP VirtualSystem being a prime example.  HP has created the VirtualSystem platform to accommodate multiple hypervisors, allowing the customer to choose what’s best for their business.

A lot of discussion in the lounge centered around what makes converged solutions different from off-the-shelf components – and the consensus from both bloggers and Joyce is that the integrated management component is critical to the converged solution.  In HP’s case its Insight Control and Insight Management are the key tools in the portfolio today, but Joyce says the management solutions are definitely going towards ‘a much richer experience.’

HP’s Factory Express seems to be a competitive differentiator when it comes to converged solutions, as well.  Joyce talked with the bloggers about First Data Corporation, a financial services company that writes software for banking.  First Data utilized HP and specifically the Factory Express capabilities to create a package system that includes a customer load of software for First Data’s customers.  Rather than the company having to become infrastructure experts and order, assemble and then ship and deliver infrastructure solutions to their customers, they work with HP to create a converged solution with their custom software to deliver to customers, relying on HP to assemble the solution.

Much of the focus with creating converged systems within HP is centered around an optimized configuration of hardware and software around a software solution – whether its Microsoft Exchange, a hypervisor, or a high-end solution like SAP HANA.  These optimized solutions are created with the use-case in mind.  They also come with some sort of enabling software from HP to streamline the deployment process and decrease the time of deployment for the customer.

When talking about the support organization at HP, Joyce admitted there is some work to be done there.  From personal experiences with converged solutions, HP’s support group can be cumbersome to navigate – resulting in the customer being bounced from group to group before finding the proper resource to fix a solution.  This is disheartening to a customer who has been presented a sales presentation of a unified solution only to find its supported piecemeal.

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DatacenterStorage

HP enhances 3PAR StoreServ Peer Persistence with automatic failover

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

VMware Metro Storage Clusters running on top of 3PAR StoreServ storage have gotten an added boost of automation.  HP announced 3PAR OS 3.1.2 MU2 during HP Discover two weeks back and one of the features that it introduced is a quorum witness node to assist in Peer Persistence installations.  Peer Persistence is the HP 3PAR StoreServ’s version of metro clustered storage for VMware, providing transparent failover of storage from one array to another.  With the introduction of the quorum witness, the administrator no longer has to start the failover manually and the witness server adds monitoring and remediation in the event of an outage.

The quorum witness is a separate virtual or physical machine that monitors the availability of both arrays in each site.  In most configurations, it should sit in a third site monitoring the two 3PAR arrays.  If one of the sites goes down or offline, it detects the status and begins failover on the remaining 3PAR StoreServ array. Because the 3PAR StoreServ uses ALUA to block and open the active IO paths, the failover is seamless to the VMware workloads.  All of this is accomplished by using the same virtual volume world wide name on both arrays and by blocking IO to the secondary copy.

Source: HP

Source: HP

During HP Discover, I was able to talk with several HP engineers about the new feature and one of my initial concerns was whether this is an all or nothing configuration for automated failover.  Fellow blogger, Justin Vashisht, confirmed that each virtual volume or group of virtual volumes can be controlled automatically or manually – the administrator has the choice when configuring the volumes.

When we  purchased our 3PAR StoreServ arrays earlier this year, our sales team confirmed that the automated failover would be forthcoming and so, as a customer, this is a feature we are happy to see delivered quickly.  One of the unknowns to us was how HP would architect the quorum witness, but in talking with Siamak Nazari, an HP Fellow and chief software architect of HP Storage division, HP adapted the 3PAR Storage Processors to also do the duty of quorum witness.  This means the new feature is based upon what should be solid and field-tested code.

Nazari and David Scott, HP Storage Senior Vice President and General Manager, stopped by the bloggers area at HP Discover for a coffeetalk with a large group of us.  One of the things that I found most interesting from the talk is that HP has somewhat future-proofed the 3PAR StoreServ arrays it is already shipping – by baking in additional capabilities into the ASIC and by activating those with software at later time.  That leaves hope that there will be other new capabilities introduced for existing customers, although nothing specific was revealed to us.

When I first discussed the Peer Persistence feature on my blog earlier this year, I praised the simplicity of the solution both from an architectural and administrative standpoint.  While advancing the features in the new release, I think that HP has also made a wise choice to keep things simple even with the quorum witness added to the mix.  As an administrator, I appreciate the straight forward and easy to understand (and troubleshoot) approach of the solution.

Another welcome feature for GUI fans, HP has introduced control of Peer Persistence under the Remote Copy tools within the 3PAR Management Console GUI.  This means that administrators now have the choice of configuring and initiating failover from within the GUI, though I think I still prefer the single command-line command.

And as of the time of writing, HP reports that 3PAR Peer Persistence is VMware Metro Storage Clustering certified, although I do not see it in the VMware compatibility matrix yet.  Lots of great incremental improvements to the 3PAR StoreServ line with this new OS revision.

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show.  The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own. 

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ComputeDatacenterTrends

HP’s Moonshot powering its corporate website, web farms

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP’s Proliant Moonshot servers are powering its website, serving up 300,000 visits per month on less than it takes to power 12, 60-watt light bulbs, says executives, including Meg Whitman, during their keynotes this week at HP Discover.  The Proliant Moonshot platform was officially launched to the public in April and first ships with cartridges with low-power Intel Atom processors.

According to HP Fellow Dwight Barron, they saw the next wave of low energy processors and thought how do we leverage those processors for the next wave of server computing.  With Moonshot the intent is really to go after highly specialized hardware optimized for specific applications.  Cartridges for Moonshot go after solutions that do one thing very well.

Barron, who serves as the Chief Technologist for HP Servers Hyperscale, also said that the market is very new and there are many possibilities that can be explored with the systems.  What Moonshot allows for the company is to take new silicon and turn it into an actual cartridge product within a few weeks.  The Moonshot design allows the cartridges to interface with the global management inside of the Moonshot chassis.  Each new cartridge design goes through HP’s normal checks and quality assurance before being released, but it really increases the flexibility of releasing an entirely new product and keeping current with industry changes for hyperscale systems.

Asked about use cases for Moonshot and uptake, John Gromala, Director of HP Hyperscale Server Product Marketing, says that orders for Moonshot within its first few weeks on the market are already exceeding HP’s expectations.  The target markets of the product are really hosting and static web server farms.  Within the hosting market, Moonshot with x86 processor cartridges would provide a path to dedicated servers at the price point similar to a virtual server instance.

At the present time, the cartridges inside of a chassis are all uniform and mean to be for scale out solutions.  One example that was given was around the banking industry – with many banks moving to mobile check deposits, banks may also want to include facial recognition along with the check to be deposited, but the facial recognition could be greatly improved with special silicon made onto a front-end web server.  The special silicon in an industry stand server could be accomplished with a PCI expansion card, but in Moonshot, you can buckle the GPU with a low-power CPU’s in order to achieve long-term cost savings across mass scale.

While not for mass enterprise adoption, Moonshot hits the mark for large hosting providers, where energy savings and increased density have an appeal for mass deployments.  Moonshot, as it evolves, is a new innovation to watch.

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show.  The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own. 

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Datacenter

Whitman looks to assure customers and partners of HP’s future

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP CEO Meg Whitman used the first keynote of this week’s HP Discover to assure customers and partners that HP is returning to health and is here to stay for the long term.

Kevin Bacon at HP Discover 2013The hour long keynote kicked off with special guest Kevin Bacon playing up his 6 degree’s notoriety and talking about the connectedness of people.  He talked about how the simple college game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon turned into a phenomenon and how he parlayed that name into a charity called sixdegrees.org.  The experiences with this charity and website opened his eyes to the possibilities of big data and how information could be harnessed for good.  It was an interesting opening to what we knew would be more on the topic of big data.

Whitman took the stage and moved right into business by highlighting some of the success stories that she had to share from HP customers whose IT has been transformed including Nationwide and United Airlines.  But to highlight the big data topic of the year, Whitman showed off a system that HP developed with NASCAR to collect and analyze fan’s reactions and topics of conversation.  The project is known as NASCAR’s Fan and Media Engagement Center.

DSC00148Joined on stage by NASCAR Chief Marketing Officer Steve Phelps, Whitman asked how the project has been changing NASCAR’s live broadcast.  Phelps shared a story about how during a rain delay, that a new “Air Titan” dryer system used at Daytona was getting a lot of attention from fans online and that NASCAR and the on-air broadcasters were able to realize and adapt to this interest during the live broadcast.  This sort of collection and analysis of real-time data is certainly a cool, if not slightly scary, application of big data tools. HP is also using the technology to spot trends and what people are talking about online from the Discover show this week.

But the remainder of the time was used by Whitman to assure everyone attending that HP has improved it bottom line and cash flow, both signs of financial health, its increased investment into research and development, returning to its historical position on the matter and that its going to be in business for the long haul.  All three are welcome points to nervous customers who’ve endured the rocky transitions from Hurd to Apotheker to Whitman.

Meg Whitman at Discover 2013

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show.  The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own. 

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