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Archiving Solutions: StoreOnce + Tape (Recap HP Discover #3839)

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

During the introduction to session 3839, we were all given a disclaimer by the presenter – a disclaimer that this sessions would be a very tape heavy session.  Sadly, I was hoping for some good information about the StoreOnce product.  But I should have keyed in on the word archiving in the title, because the session’s core was about utilizing tape for archival and not backup purposes.

Even while disk-to-disk backup has been making huge strides for backup in recent years, tape has continued to advanced and still offers the most economical media for large data stores.  Traditionally tape has not been a readily readable media since it is linear and moving from place to place takes a lot of time as tape has the wind in the cartridge, but as we found out on Friday morning, HP has not relegated tape to being past its prime.  

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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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DatacenterStorage

HP Discover 2011 coverage from other blogs

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

I am on site now and gearing up to begin covering HP Discover.  Our general session kick off is in a little over an hour.  I cannot begin to describe the size of this conference.  Being a first time participant, I cannot speak to previous years of HP Discover, but the buzz that I am hearing is that it is larger and more focused this year.  No one blogger could begin to hit everything that will be covered in the hundreds of sessions this week, so I wanted to provide you with some other great blogs who are on site with me here this week and will be posting content about the conference.  Below are links to their twitter and their blogs (Thanks to Chris Evans for the original list compilation).

Blog Roll

 

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DatacenterStorage

Coverage highlights for HP Discover next week

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP Discover 2011 Give Away

Next week, I will be traveling for Tech Talk to the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas.  I have my agenda for the event in front of me now and I wanted to highlight some of the coverage that I’ll be providing from the event.

Live Blogging

Monday, June 6
10:00 am PDT – Live blogging the Converged Infrastructure Press Conference featuring David Donatelli
4:00 pm PDT – Live blogging the Opening General Session for HP Discover; Léo Apotheker & Bill McDermott speaking

Tuesday, June 7
8:00 am PDT – Live blogging the General Session with Ann Livermore, Bill Veghte & David Donatelli
4:30 pm PDT – Hopefully live blogging the Keynote, Extending HP Converged Infrastructure with HP’s new Virtualization Solutions with Tom Joyce; otherwise check my Twitter for updates

Thursday, June 9
2:00 pm PDT – Live blogging the General Session with Prith Banerjee & Tom Hogan

Other Sessions

Although I doubt that coverage will be real-time, I have a full schedule so sessions focused on Blade hardware, EVA storage and VMware for the week.  I also have a scheduled session to investigate HP StoreOnce along with tape archival strategies (Session 3839) and how to integrate the two together, as well as learning more about how HP StoreOnce works (Session 3501).

Converged infrastructure appears to be the buzzword for HP Discover this year.  As a whole, the industry appears to be moving to packaged solutions.  See Oracle’s Sun aquisition and packaging of their databases with Oracle hardware and the VCE (VMware Cisco EMC) alliance vBlocks.  It will be interesting to see what HP has created for integrated solutions.  HP has the E5000 enterprise messaging solution as part of its converged infrastructure portfolio and I expect to see more of the same announced during the conference.

I am VMware heavy in my day-to-day jobs, so my scheduled sessions reflect this as well.  Specific sessions of interest for me are concerning vSphere 4.1 running on Virtual Connect Flex-10 (Session 3996) and Tips and Tricks for building VMware ESX 4.1 on HP c-Class Blades (Session 3968).

One of the perks of attending the conference as a blogger is the access to the exclusive Bloggers Lounge.  HP has scheduled some informal coffee talks during the week for bloggers to pick the minds and find out more information from HP staff.

All in all, I’m looking forward to a great week learning more about HP’s direction and solutions.

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DatacenterStorage

Join HP to learn about major breakthroughs in Converged Infrastructure

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Next Monday begins an exciting week for HP as its hosts its Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas.  I will be onsite and blogging from keynotes and sessions but you can participate too on Monday morning, live from wherever you are.   Join HP’s Dave Donatelli as he presents some major breakthroughs in Converged Infrastructure.  The event will begin at 10:30 am, Pacific.  For more information or to register for the webcast online, see the release below from HP.

Are you ready for the age of the Instant-On Enterprise?

In the age of the Instant-On Enterprise, IT agility is essential. Your organization must be poised to react immediately to new customer expectations, new market opportunities, and new competitive threats. That can be a tough assignment when you consider today’s IT realities: Data center sprawl. Rigid, complex IT silos. An influx of mountains of data.

Consider these examples:
• 68 percent of IT project initiatives fail by being late, over budget, or lacking in important functionality.
• The typical construction timeline to build a traditional brick-and-mortar data center is 24-months.
• With skyrocketing demand for digital storage, the number of network-hosted storage subscribers in the U.S. will rise from 6.6 million in 2009 to 21.5 million in 2014.

Points like these underscore the need for new approaches to the data center—which brings us to the upcoming announcements. We hope you will join us June 6 for a firsthand look at HP Converged Infrastructure innovations that solve some of today’s most pressing IT challenges.

To reserve your seat, register today at www.hp.com/go/agileIT to attend our live webcast, or plan to catch a replay of the event announcement on hp.com.

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