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HPE

HPE unleashes monster sized SSD drives for its 3PAR StoreServ arrays

by Philip Sellers June 11, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

HPE announced massive new SSD drive offerings for its 3PAR StoreServ arrays — a 7.68TB and 15.36TB drive in size. The new drives double and quadruple the former 3.84TB high-end drive. And with these new drive offerings, HPE has leapfrogged the spinning disk capacities with this new generation of SSD drives with incomparable performance.

Sizing

The first thing you may notice is the odd sizing on these drives, but those sizes are the product of taking industry standard SSD drives and applying the 3PAR method of sparing to them. The previous large capacity SSD for a 3PAR StoreServ was 3.84TB in size, also an odd size. Truth be told, these are the same enterprise drives that the SSD vendors sell as a 3.2TB drive. The 3PAR arrays don’t actually use a special type of SSD drive – these are the same standard SSD drives available to other vendors. So how do you get this odd increase in size?

With the 3PAR StoreServ architecture, it has always allocated spare space at the array level, reserving space for failures. This goes back to the origins of the 3PAR’s design on spinning disks. Because 3PAR has a sparing technique called Adaptive Sparing at the array level, HPE went to the SSD vendors and asked them to allow HPE the reserved space on the SSD normally used as spare blocks. By combining Adaptive Sparing across a much larger set of disks, HPE is able to unlock access to to more of the capacity you’re already paying for and let you get real use out of that. HPE is able to do this without introducing new risk because it is already handling sparing at the array level. Where HPE could have been at a disadvantage due to it’s sparing technique [taking away space from a 3.2TB, 6.4TB or 12.8TB disk], this becomes a benefit to the customer. HPE also stands behind its SSD technology with a 5 year, unconditional warranty on its SSD drives.

Now, this year, another thing has happened. Since HPE went to the drive vendors and asked to tap into the spare space, the drive vendors themselves are sizing the enterprise SSD’s at the newly unleashed larger sizes and other storage vendors are following the HPE lead in handling sparing at the array level. So, in this case, you’ll see Samsung advertising the 7.68TB and 15.36TB drive sizes – instead of 6.4TB and 12.8TB drives with full fixed overprovisioning space. I talked to a Samsung marketing manager while at HPE Discover and he confirmed these sizes. (That’s a whole lot of spare space as we keep sizing up, isn’t it!?)

The Real Story Isn’t the Sizes

Folks I talked to at HPE Discover in Las Vegas last week insist that the real story isn’t the increased drive sizes. The real story is around a new technique in Adaptive Sparing – something HPE is calling Adaptive Sparing 2.0. To really understand the benefits of the new technique, its important to know that SSD’s work on a ‘erase before write’ principal, explained in the graphic below. Adaptive Sparing 2.0 opens up more free space to accelerate writes on each drive.

WhatsNew_Page_12

Adaptive Sparing 2.0

The Adaptive Sparing 2.0 technique combines free space, spare space and the fixed overprovisioning space on the SSD together to further increase the effective overprovisioning space of the array. Fixed overprovisioning space is the fancy term for that spare space the SSD vendors reserve on SSD drives.

3PAR StoreServ arrays also combine other features like system-wide striping and express layout to allow for greater performance and endurance of the drives. These features allow for even use across your SSD drives which prolongs the life of the drive wearing the same few drives out prematurely. These same features that boosted performance by spreading data across a larger number of spindles on spinning disk is also benefiting you in the SSD world today.

The full active/active nature of the 3PAR architecture also allows increased performance – with active/active host connections for optimal performance host to array, mesh-active controllers where all controllers can access all the drives in the array for even wear and balance of data, and for SSD drives, each drive is dual-ported, allowing active/active SSD access from each node in the node pair. Dual-ported SSD drives doubles the available bandwidth to and from each SSD – allowing for full duplex speeds for every IO transaction.

Whether by incredible luck or very strategic planning or most likely a little of both – the truth is customers are still benefiting from the architecture choices made well over a decade ago when the 3PAR arrays were first being designed.

HPE has a slide deck with more details that I’ve embedded below:

HPE 3PAR 7.68&15.36 TB SSDs from Ivan Iannaccone

June 11, 2016 0 comments

HPE Discover: What’s new in Storage at a Glance

by Philip Sellers June 8, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

WhatsNew_Page_01

Notes of interest from the HPE Storage keynote and announcements:

Massive new drives – 7.68TB and 15.36TB drives for the 3PAR StoreServ arrays. The new drives are enabled by the 3D SSD technology pioneered by Samsung. The drives also benefit from Adaptive Sparing in the 3PAR OS that allows for additional spare capacity to be tapped for sparing by the array, rather than being reserved.

The massive new drives allow amazing density in the 3PAR arrays. Each disk shelf can accommodate 368 TB of RAW capacity and HP is saying with the magic of thin provisioning and thin dedupe, the density is 563TB of usable capacity per rack unit.

StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central 3.0 – The new release will allow application consistent protection for Oracle and for 3PAR File Personal. Recovery Manager Central leverages snapshots on the 3PAR array and then protects the snapshot data onto StoreOnce arrays. Once the initial snapshot/backup is protected, future backups only need to move difference blocks in between snapshots. All of this occurs directly between 3PAR and StoreOnce without third party software. A simple virtual appliance is deployed to drive this integration and can be tapped into by third party (or HPE) backup solutions.

3PAR File Persona Enhancements – HPE has added features like File Lock and NTFS Security mode to address specific needs of customers with file services. The File Provisioning Group limits have been increased to 64TB in size to accommodate much larger file space on a 3PAR array.

Native Container Integration – HPE has announced storage drivers for Docker to be able to natively talk to 3PAR and StoreVirtual over iSCSI. This will allow Docker to tap directly into storage and present it to containers and persist the storage over time.

June 8, 2016 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

What drives HPE Synergy and makes it Composable?

by Philip Sellers May 31, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last week, I posted about HPE’s Synergy Platform – their vision of Composable Infrastructure. My post had a hard slant towards the hardware components of the solution because that is the world that I generally live in. I received some comments about the post and I always appreciate that kind of feedback. I don’t always get it correct when I write and this is less about being right or wrong than not painting the complete picture. And in full disclosure, the two people I was talking with are not HPE employees – both were industry folks at other companies.

So, what did I miss in post one? Primarily, I shortchanged the software component of the solution and one friend pointed out, the hardware alone does not make this a composable or even software-defined solution. So, let’s dig a little deeper into what HPE has laid out during my briefings and see if I can’t paint a fuller picture.

Composable, driven by Software

The software that drives Synergy Platform is two pronged. I covered the Synergy Composer and the Synergy Image Streamer to some degree in the first post. The software is installed as a physical hardware module. Each module has a specific job and a specific application running on it, but they also work together.

As a recap, Composer is the management interface. Composer is able to manage a large pool of Synergy Frames [up to 21] and their connected resources. It is based on HPE OneView – also a management software – but it has been customized and extended for the Synergy Platform. Utilizing OneView as the base for the system gives Synergy an API to build upon.

HPE-Synergy

OneView is a strong management system built around server profiles. In OneView, you create a definition – a server profile – that includes all of the settings that get instantiated on the hardware. This metadata can include server settings down the BIOS, the network definitions, the storage definition, and firmware/driver levels. Profiles can be cloned and as of OneView 2.0, the idea of profile templates was added. Templates allow you to set definitions and then clone out individual profiles with different IP and names, but they retain the tie to the template. With templates, you may change a setting, like the networking configuration or firmware level, and then push out that change across all the profiles created from it. During the next reboot, these settings are applied. This is great for firmware and driver patching or for adding a new network uplink to a cluster of ESXi hosts, for example. All of these features are great for IT operations working with traditional IT infrastructure.

Synergy Platform, however, has goals beyond easing management of traditional IT. It is targeted at new-style IT or cloud-centric IT. So, building upon the base of server profiles, Synergy Composer takes the server profiles and adds some additional personality – and VMware administrators may see a lot of similarities between what Composer does and how Virtual Appliances work in vSphere. You can set IP and naming conventions for deploying systems in mass with Synergy – so Composer has to adopt these functions into its toolset – but it also adopts the ability to pass that configuration to the booting OS. So, what’s I’m rambling and trying to explain is that Synergy Composer encompasses the OS personality, in addition to the hardware personality. When I think of the OS personality – it is the ‘what makes each node different’ versus the hardware personality as the ‘what makes them the same.’

API & a different audience

One of HPE’s major goals with Synergy Platform was to expose everything available in the GUI management interface as an API, also. And beyond that, they wanted it to be as simple as possible to create and deploy an instance of compute. HPE’s focus here – I’ll admit – almost seems obsessive to allow compute to be created or torn down with a single line of code. Another major goal was to allow developers to call and create compute instances in their own language – in code – where they feel most comfortable. It is an appeal to a very different audience than the IT operations staff that HPE is normally catering to with their hardware solutions.

All of that said, the API makes it possible for forward-thinking administrators to automate and extend their processes into other systems. The API makes it possible to tie and automate server creation into the ticketing system, regardless of which vendor created the ticketing. It makes it possible to include these processes into scripted processes in enterprise batch solutions or anywhere else. It opens up an endless set of possibilities.

Streaming the OS

The OS personality is handled in conjunction with the Image Streamer. The streamer holds the golden master images of the OS that will run on the server profiles when they are deployed to compute nodes and powered on. The Image Streamer takes an OS image, presents it over iSCSI to the host, and then boots the system. While Image Streamer could do this for traditional OSes, it is not targeted there. The Image Streamer is intended to be used with stateless OS deployments – like ESXi hosts or container hosts. This means that the boot process needs to include a scripted process to fully configure the host. The settings for each instance is provided from Composer and the individual profile. vSphere offers very similar stateless ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy. The difference here is that you’re using iSCSI to boot instead of PXE.

Cattle versus Pets

Very similar to how you view applications deployed on Docker, to realize the maximum benefit of Synergy, your compute nodes should be viewed as cattle and not as pets. For anyone not familiar with this analogy, here’s how it goes. In traditional IT, you view your servers as pets – your cat or dog. You know your pet by name and when they get sick, you take them to vet and you’ve have surgery to get them well again. But, if you were a cattle farmer with thousands of cows, you treat each cow differently. You don’t name them, though they might be assigned a number for tracking. And while you might give them medicine, you wouldn’t carry it to vet and give it surgery to make it well again. You’d likely shoot a sick cow and move on. Harsh, I know, but that’s reality.

The same thing is true when you change from traditional virtual machines to containers. With our traditional virtual machines, each one may start as a template, but once it is deployed, it deviates from that template and there is no relationship to it. If you need patches, you install the same update on each VM. On the other hand, containers have a limited lifetime. They exist to do a single thing. If it gets sick, you kill the process and restart new. If you need an upgrade, you don’t do those update steps against 1000 containers. You restart them from a new master image with the updates integrated once.

OS in the Synergy Platform will adopt the cattle mentality to realize the maximum benefit of the platform. The combination of the Composer and Image Streamer will allow IT departments to use the same mentality and benefits of scale that exist with containers at the physical hardware level with the container hosts, virtual hosts and with individual OS deployments.

Composer and Image Streamer gives IT the necessary workflow tools to achieve the vision of becoming a cattle farmer in the IT operations.

Traditional IT, too

Even though the vision and maximum benefit of Synergy Platform requires a change in how you view and operate your IT hardware, everyone in the industry realizes that all traditional IT is not going away anytime soon. The trick is finding a flexible solution that can provide you infrastructure for both traditional IT and cloud-centric IT. According to HPE, Synergy Platform can do this for IT.

Even though a lot of what makes Synergy different and composable is the Synergy Composer and Synergy Image Streamer, these two components can continue to run traditional IT systems side-by-side with the new-style IT.

Companies that adopt Synergy Platform will need to be somewhere down the transformation pathway for the solution to make sense. If a company is still engrained in traditional IT systems and operation, Synergy makes no sense to them. This solution is targeted and most beneficial to companies that are attempting to run both traditional IT and build new, cloud scale applications at the same time. Cloud scale is about agility and the time required to react to business needs. It is also about handling demands of a very uncertain or dynamic workload. It is about decoupling the applications into smaller and more-manageable pieces. For IT operations, managing both of these is a challenge. Managing both of these types of infrastructure in a single solution is compelling.

Final thoughts

Does Synergy Platform solve all of the management headaches of deploying traditional and cloud-scale? No. There are management headaches above the physical layer, but having a consistent platform for both at the physical level could be beneficial. All IT shops are faced with resource constraints the the more standardization, the better.

When moving to cloud-scale, one of the first conversations has to be ‘where do we have the most similarity and mass that it makes sense to invest in the workflow and automation that makes cloud-scale work?’ It makes sense to standardize and try to maximize the benefits. It is a large portion of the cloud-scale appeal and benefit.

Next week, I head to HPE Discover in Las Vegas. I fully expect to hear more about Synergy Platform and where it is in the release-to-market timeline. As an aside, I have not seen the interface and software actually running Synergy Platform. I saw some early concepts back in December at HPE Discover in London, but I really have not spent any time hands-on with the software. This is one reason I subconsciously avoided talking detail about it in the first post. I post what I know and what I’ve observed – not simply what I’m told by marketing folks [no offense to them]. I would really love that opportunity next week.

May 31, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

What is Composable Infrastructure and where is it targeted?

by Philip Sellers May 24, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last month, just before the flooding, I was onsite at HPE in Houston, TX, for a Tech Day focused on the HPE Hyper Converged and Composable Infrastructure portfolio. I have since had a chance to reflect on everything I had learned about HPE’s Composable strategy – and the larger industry direction of containers and orchestration are it is all taking us. There are potential benefits and lots of hurdles in both of these major initiatives in the industry. The reason behind these concepts and solutions is delivering faster results and flexibility for IT organizations. And while at the Tech Day, I was able to get dig in again and refresh what I’d heard and learn more detail around HPE’s Composable strategy.

What is Composable Infrastructure?

I’ve had the opportunity to drill into HPE’s and the broader industry definition of Composable Infrastructure a couple times in the past year. HPE released Synergy Platform last December at HP Discover in London. This was the first purpose-built hardware platform for composability, but the people I talked with in HP warned me that it would not the only platform.

Composability is the concept of being able to take standard compute, storage and networking hardware and assemble them in a particular way using orchestration to meet a specific use case. When your use case is completed, you can decompose and recompose the same components in a different way to meet new needs. Beyond that point, it also includes the concept of being able to do this with hardware on demand as your usage and requirements change throughout the day. For peak work loads, you may need to compose infrastructure to run a billing cycle and then decompose and recompose the same to be web front-end servers for E-Commerce during a peak usage – like Black Friday. The key here is orchestration and with the orchestration, speed.

In many ways, Composable Infrastructure provides a pool of resources similar to how virtualization provides access to a pool of resources that can be consumed in multiple ways. The critical difference is that these are physical resources being sliced and diced without a hypervisor layer providing the pooling.

Characteristics of Composable Infrastructure

HPE has a strict definition they are following for Composable Infrastructure. If any of these characteristics are missing, they will not classify a solution as Composable, no matter how close it may resemble it.

Unified API
- Single line of code to abstract every element of the infrastructure for full infrastructure programmability
- Bare-metal interface of infrastructure as a service
Software-Defined Intelligence
- Template driven workload composition
- Automation to enable streamlined operation of the system (HPE calls it frictionless operation)
Fluid Resource Pools
- Single infrastructure of disaggregated pools
- Physical, virtual and containers
- Auto-integrating of resource capacity

The API is straight forward, along with the ability to use templates to define and automate system builds. Fluid resource pools also makes sense if you’ve spent any time with a virtualization technology. The point that didn’t immediately make sense is the ‘frictionless operations.’

In terms of frictionless operations, what HPE is talking about today is automation and workflow tools within the management interface to streamline the upgrade processes required on the system. Those may include upgrades in the OS images and it may include firmware and driver bundles along with the management interface rollups.

Self-Healing Infrastructure

Now, take this concept & definition a step forward and layer on monitoring and mitigation software. What becomes possible is a self-healing infrastructure, reacting to events and remediating them on its own. Self-healing is a compelling concept, but so far attempts have been far from exceptional and its really tough to achieve. There is an huge amount of work required in standardization and orchestration that just don’t fit with traditional IT software and OS concepts. Where I say traditional, HPE is using the word legacy or old-style. They’re talking client-server applications – the commercial, off-the-shelf software so many Enterprises are running today.

But looking into the future, HPE can see that self-healing can be realized with cloud-native, scale-out software solutions. And it is betting that if it can build a physical infrastructure capable of programmatically assembling and disassembling systems on-demand, that is can power this self-healing future.

HPE Synergy Platform

HPE Synergy Platform is the hardware HPE believes will power the future of on-premises, cloud-native IT along with the flexibility to host legacy applications in the same pool of resources.

While examining Synergy Platform at Discover, I first noticed that the hardware platform looks very similar to a HPE BladeSystem chassis. It is different in the number of compute nodes and the dimensions of those compute nodes and the networking. But physically, it looks very much like a BladeSystem. What occurs quickly to you is that you have new capabilities like adding a disk shelf that spans two compute bays and provides a pool of disk that can be shared throughout a Synergy Frame (not called chassis anymore).

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Storage-Module-and-480-660-620-and-680-Compute-Modules_low

Compute

Blades become compute nodes, but the concept is much the same. The form factor does not change much – you have half-height and full-height options for compute nodes in Synergy. The dimensions are larger to accommodate a fuller range of hardware inside of the compute node. Starting with a half-height blade, HPE is offering the Synergy 480 Compute Node. It is a similarly equipped Gen9 server to meet similar use cases as the BL460c.

Another change in Synergy, the slots for compute nodes no longer restrict you to a single unit – there is no metal separation between the compute bays. You can do double width units in Synergy, in addition to full-height. HPE is making use of that with a double width and full height Synergy 680 Compute Node. The 680 is an impressive blade with up to 6TB of RAM across 96 DIMM slots and quad sockets. It is a beast of a blade. Other full-height option are the Synergy 620 and 660 Compute Nodes.

Composer & Image Streamer

Orchestration is really what sets Synergy Platform apart from the c7000 blade frames from HP. The orchestration is achieved by modules on the Synergy Platform management modules.

First, the Synergy Composer is the brains and management of the operation and it is built on HPE OneView. From an architecture stand-point, a single Composer module can manage up to 21 interlinked frames. Each frame a two 10Gig management connections – on a Frame Link Module – that can be link frames together. Each frame connects upstream to a frame and downstream to another and this forms a management ring. Using this management network, the Synergy Composer is able to manage all 21 frames of infrastructure. Although each frame has a slot for a Composer management module, only one is required and a second can be added in a different frame to establish high-availability.

Synergy Image Streamer is all about the boot images. You take a golden image, you create a clone-like copy (similar to VMware’s linked clones) and you boot it, when the image is rebooted, nothing is retained. Everything about the image must be sequenced and configured during boot. Stateless operation is very much a cloud-native concept – requiring the additional services to be deployed in the environment – like centralized logging – to enable the long-term storage of data from the workloads. Composer also takes into account updates and patching by allowing the administrator to commit these to the golden master and then kick off a set of rolling reboots to bring all the running images up to date. Just like Composer, the Image Streamer also only needs a single module or two for redundancy in two different frames.

Management in Synergy is made to scale and eliminate the need for onboard management modules and a separate software outside of the hardware to manage many units.

OS Support for Streaming and Traditional OS Support

At launch, Synergy’s Image Streamer supports Linux, ESXi and Container OSes with the full benefit of image, config and run. The images are stateless, meaning nothing is retained when the system reboots. Windows was not supported with the Image Streamer as of December. The Synergy and composable concept is clearly targeted at bare-metal deployments of cloud-native systems.

Now, even though you can’t use the Image Streamer to run Windows or stateful Linux on Synergy, it doesn’t mean they wont’ run. It is still possible to create a boot disk and provision it to a compute node (boot-from-san, boot from USB or SD, etc.). For compatibility, you can use Synergy compute note like a traditional rack-mount or blade server. Of course, when you do, you lose all of the potential benefits of the platform from its imaging and automation engines.

The Fabric

The Synergy Fabric the other huge differentiating factor with Synergy Platform. A single frame is probably not what you’ll see deployed anywhere. Synergy is built to scale up within the rack – with up to 5 frames interconnected to the same converged fabric that provides Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI across all of the frames. Synergy uses a parent/child module to extend the managed fabric across multiple frames. A parent module is inserted in one frame and child modules in up to 4 additional frames. Similar to Composer and Image Streamer modules, the interconnect modules on Synergy uses a pair of parent modules in different frames to achieve high availability. Management of the interconnect modules and fabric is a single interface and utilizes MLAG connections between the modules to communicate management changes.

Shared Local Disk

StoreVirtual is a primary use case with Synergy Platform and HPE expect many users will choose their VSA to do software defined storage in Synergy. But it is hard to get enough disks to matter in the blade form factor. To allow for this, HPE is also showing off a new disk shelf that can fit into two compute bays on a frame. The HPE Synergy D3940 disk shelf can hold up to 40 small form factor disks that can be carved out and consumed by any of the compute nodes in the frame. One important limitation here, however, is that the local disks are only accessible inside of a single frame. The SAS module used for these disks is in a separate bay and is separate from the fabric. So all the disks need to be presented to compute within the frame.

However, StoreVirtual to the rescue. Either bare metal StoreVirtual or more likely as a VSA, the StoreVirtual can take those local disks and present them in a way that they can be consumed or clustered with compute in other frames. All 40 disks may be presented to a single StoreVirtual instance and then clustered with 2 additional StoreVirtual instances in other frames – and then the fabric can consume the storage from StoreVirtual. The great thing is you have choice as a consumer to instantiate and then recompose these resources as needed on Synergy.

Who benefits from these characteristics?

It is critically important to note that you can run traditional workloads side-by-side with cloud-native workloads. While cloud-native benefit more from the Image Streamer and account for stateless OS operation, traditional IT workloads can be run on the same hardware. From the Composer, you can assemble a traditional server, with boot from SAN or boot from local disk in the compute node and run a client-server application. This flexibility is important as organizations attempt to build the new style apps but need to support existing applications. It means that a single hardware platform will be able to deliver both. Unfortunately, organizations that choose to run legacy systems on Synergy won’t be able to fully realize all the benefits Synergy Platform has to offer since most do not apply to these legacy workloads, but having the flexibility is key.

From my viewpoint, no company is going to buy into Synergy simply to run legacy applications on it. The real benefits are for companies that are planning or in the middle of application transition. For companies who have not begun the transition process, Synergy and Composable Infrastructure is going to be a tough sell – because they’re not thinking in ways where the benefits Synergy delivers matter.

May 24, 2016 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

Simple iLO Firmware updates with PowerShell

by Philip Sellers January 11, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

ilo

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise iLO PowerShell cmdlets make it extremely easy to update iLO Firmware in mass. The Update-HPiLOFirmware cmdlet is an extremely handy for updating firmware across many systems. I particularly like this method because it fast, which isn’t always the case when trying to script upgrades. The syntax of the cmdlet is easy to remember and with Get-Help not far away, even if you forget the simple syntax, you can easily find the details. Combine the Update-HPiLOFimware functionality with the Find-HPiLO cmdlet used to discover and report iLOs using a network range and you have a winning combination to automate iLO firmware.

This method proved to be handy for me because I make a point to update iLO firmware prior to updating servers with a new Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP). Since I utilize the virtual media feature in iLO to deploy the SPP to ESXi nodes, I have found it is best to update iLO first and then let the SPP install all other firmware. If the iLO firmware is updated and it restarts during the SPP run, this causes the installer to fail because it lost its media.

Before you start

There are a couple quick things you’ll want to ensure before you start.

You’ll need the HP iLO Toolkit. It is available here – http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/server-software/product-detail.html?oid=5440657.
Make sure you have a consistent admin credential for iLO. It makes updating multiple hosts much easier. The credential can be a local account in iLO or it can be an account from Active Directory if you have defined and setup AD integration on your iLOs.

It is easiest to pass your credentials by variable using a PowerShell credentials object. You can do that easily with the Get-Credential cmdlet.
[code lang=”Powershell”]$ilocreds = Get-Credential[/code]

Alternatively, you can use the -username and -password switches on the Update-HPiLOFirmware cmdlet later.

Step-by-step

Working through the process step-by-step, you’d run the following commands to update firmware:

The first step is to get a list of the servers using the Find-HPiLO cmdlet.
[code lang=”Powershell”]$servers = Find-HPiLO 192.168.200.1-255[/code]

Next, you can investigate the current version of firmware on each iLO found with this simple Select and Sort statement.
[code lang=”Powershell”]$servers | Select HOSTNAME, PN, FWRI | Sort PN, FWRI [/code]
Now that you’ve seen what the Find-HPiLO cmdlet returned, you can scope down the list to what you want to update. In this example, we are looking for firmware older than version 2.22 on iLO4 in teh Where statement. Confirm the output list of servers are the servers you wish to patch.
[code lang=”Powershell”]$servers | Where {$_.FWRI -lt 2.22 -AND $_.PN -like "*iLO 4*"} [/code]
Repeat the scoped list and now pipe that into the Update-HPiLOFirmware cmdlet. This cmdlet need the credentials you setup earlier and it accepts the list of servers through the pipeline. The last switch needed is the location of the firmware file to load.
[code lang=”Powershell”]$servers | Where {$_.FWRI -lt 2.22 -AND $_.PN -like "*iLO 4*"} | Update-HPiLOFirmware -Credential $ilocreds -Location C:\firmware\ilo4\ilo4_222.bin[/code]

Condense it down

The same can be done as a one liner too – Find, Where (scope) and Update… You still need to set your credentials ahead of time.

[code lang=”Powershell”]Find-HPiLO 192.168.200.1-255 | Where {$_.FWRI -lt 2.22 -AND $_.PN -like "*iLO 4*"} | Update-HPiLOFirmware -Credential $ilocreds -Location C:\firmware\ilo4\ilo4_222.bin[/code]

HP PowerShell Toolkits

In addition to the iLO PowerShell toolkit, HPE also has sets of cmdlets to administer BladeSystem OnBoard Administrators and HP ProLiant BIOS settings. You may grab all three sets of cmdlets and find full documentation at http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/server-software/product-detail.html?oid=5440657.

January 11, 2016 1 comment

Datacenter Storage

Is the StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central native data protection better than ISV methods?

by Philip Sellers December 10, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Almost a year ago, I was introduced to a new backup technology that worked natively between 3PAR and StoreOnce. HP called it Express Protect and Flat Backup and targeted VMware environments with the technology. I must have missed the fact that when it was shown off it was branded as StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central. VMware backups are a large percentage of our overall enviroment and so its a particular pain point, so I was very interested to see if this could solve some of the pain.

What is StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central?

The StoreOnce RMC story begins within the 3PAR software line with the 3PAR Recovery Manager software. This was optional software that allowed application aware snapshots on 3PAR arrays for data protection. These snapshots were a way to do application consistent protection and rollback with the the storage array. StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central is an extension of this technology that takes the same application consistent 3PAR snapshots and ships those over to the StoreOnce data protection arrays. Now, in true StoreOnce style, the snapshots on 3PAR are tracked and deduplicated and only changes are ever sent over to the StoreOnce array, making for efficient and fast backups.

While 3PAR Recovery Manager has specific version for many different products including VMware, Oracle, Microsoft SQL and other products, StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central is strictly for VMware at this time.

How does it work?

According to HP staff I spoke with, StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central a typical backup with StoreOnce RMC would look like this:

The StoreOnce RMC uses the vCenter API to snapshot all of the VM’s on a particular 3PAR Virtual Volume.
Once snapshots complete, the 3PAR takes an array snapshot of the VMFS datastore.
Another call is made to the VMware API and the VM-level snapshots are removed. You no longer need them because you have snapshot at the array level.

If this is the first backup, then all of the data is shipped over to the StoreOnce and deduplicated as it arrives.
If this not the first backup, only the changed blocks from the snapshot are then shipped to the StoreOnce backup device directly from the 3PAR.

What are the advantages of this versus ISV software?

It is much more efficient than backups with ISV software for a combination of reasons. The first is the change tracking between the StoreOnce and 3PAR to know what blocks were altered and need to be moved to the StoreOnce. The second is the nature of the StoreOnce deduplication, which is purpose built for deduplicating and rehydrating data for backup applications. The third is it is over native storage protocols without a separate piece of software in between – the actions happen directly between the 3PAR array and the StoreOnce array.

A second advantage is that the control of backups moves from a backup administrator to the application owners – like the VMware administrator and appears in their native management tools. The current StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware puts a plugin into the VMware Web Client that allows the VMware administrator to setup, scheduled, control and monitor their own backups in a view they are very familiar with.

But what about tape? And what about my existing backups?

Ok, you’ve got me there. If you have compliance or policies that dictate you need tape or archival copies of data, you’ll need your ISV software to handle that. But HP is also thinking of those use cases and as long as your ISV software supports a single API, they will be able to pickup and handle data stored by StoreOnce RMC from any of its supported primary storage arrays and move it to tape. But that’s all future and its up to the individual ISV to add support for this capability. At this time, even HP’s own Data Protector doesn’t offer this.

HP’s vision is to take a single control appliance and make it work across their line of storage platforms and may also extend to third parties in the future. Here’s a HP ChalkTalk that explains more about StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central and about the vision moving forward. Its fairly clear, other applications beyond VMware are slated for support in the future.

December 10, 2015 2 comments

Datacenter Networking

HPE shows off engagement project with Madrid museum based on Aruba technology

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Last week at HPE Discover in London, HPE showed off a project enabled by technology from its Aruba subsidiary with the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, a fine art museum located in Madrid. Leveraging Aruba wireless networking and Aruba Beacons and the Meridian mobile app software, the museum was able to create a mobile app experience for visitors of the museum that enhances their visits. The project was used to highlight the company’s vision for today’s networks to meet customer expectations.

According to Dominic Orr, Aruba CEO, the foundation is a wireless network designed to handle today’s expectations, scale and requirements for networking. Most wireless networks, according to Orr, were created to augment existing wired networks and were never intended to be primary interconnectivity for users. The user’s expectation and habits have shifted since most wireless networks were deployed.

Components enabling the experience

The primary challenge of architecture is that wired networking had known constraints and limits whereas wireless doesn’t have those traditional limits since there are no physical ports. A variable number of users and devices may be on the wireless networks requiring different architecture. With the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, establishing this secure, stable, smart and simple wireless network was the first step of this project.

The second component of the solution is Aruba Beacons – Bluetooth low energy devices that allow communication based on proximity. The beacons allow the museum to push notifications when visitors approach specific areas of the museum and also allow location-based communication so that visitors can locate areas of the museum. Aruba 320 series APs include integrated beacon management, giving the beacon experience more enterprise manageability. For users with another wireless infrastructure, Aruba also provides the Aruba Sensors for remote beacon management or even augment Aruba wifi deployments with additional beacon management.

The third component of the solution is a custom mobile app. For this, the museum turned to a third-party app developer – Mobile Experience – to create the custom app based on Aruba’s Meridian App Platform to enable the beacon technology with the app. Mobile Experience worked closely with Aruba on the technical details and deployments for the museum.

What do the beacons enable?

By utilizing Aruba Beacons, visitors are able to get the equivalent of turn-by-turn directions within the museum from their current location to a desired exhibit. Need a bathroom or want to find the restaurant? A custom app can help you get to that location. The app does by locating the visitor in the museum – BlueDot technology – and by using the beacon for a destination point.

The app also allows the museum to distribute guided tours for an hour, or two hours or even let patrons create their own tour based on interests. The app was build using the Meridian AppFramework, which is owned by Aruba, and allows the creation of mobile apps leveraging beacons. Merdian also has an SDK which allows developers to package the beacon technology into existing mobile apps. The app enables the curators to provide additional resources for different exhibits, including video and audio to give background and context to the exhibits – as an enhanced visitor experience.

From a customer perspective, the beacons allow the museum to push notifications based on proximity within the museum. But the technology isn’t just customer enhancing – it provides incredible value to the museum staff. The beacons provide the museum with telemetry data – how long did a patron spend at a specific exhibit or piece of artwork and allow them feedback where to enhance exhibits or expand offerings based on interests of their visitors. All of this feedback is available without interrupting the visitor, so it is not reliant on a feedback form or informal survey at the time of exit – instead it is based on the behavior of the visitor.

December 8, 2015 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

HPE introduces Synergy, a hardware platform for composable infrastructure

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced its first major new platform last week during HPE Discover in London. The new platform is named Synergy and is based around the idea of composable infrastucture – hardware that can be programatically composed into the desired form for a specific use case. The Synergy platform follows up on the Project Synergy concept HP introduced during the June Discover event in Las Vegas. While HPE has been working with third-parties to get support for its API for composable infrastructure, it was also creating the new generation of hardware needed to power the concept.

HPE staff says that Synergy is a completely new hardware platform built to enable the composable concept. In many ways, the Synergy platform looks like a next-generation C7000 blade chassis. There are quick, noticeable differences.

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Pulled-out_low

HPE Synergy 12000 Frame with 12 compute nodes and the Synergy Composer module pulled out

Synergy trims down the number of compute slots from 16 to 12. When asked why – HPE execs told me that the goal of the Synergy platform was to power compute for the next 10 years and that meant flexibility not density as a primary concern. Some peer bloggers scoffed at the 10 year future for the platform, but as an HP customer, that is the lifetime I have received from my existing C7000 BladeSystems as a platform, which are approaching a 10 year anniversary.

With the Synergy platform, there are some terminology changes. HPE engineers told me that they are moving away from the term blade and refer to the servers as compute nodes. The interconnects become the fabric in the Synergy platform. And lastly, the core chassis that everything plugs into is known as a frame.

In an attempt to future-proof the new platform, HPE created a mid-plane in the frame that is photonics capable – meaning, when photonics come to market, there are pathways to utilize them in this chassis. The midplane has also been simplified, according to HPE engineers and there is a bit more breathing room mean for cooling around the servers. Utilizing the additional space, the new compute nodes will have the same number of DIMM slots as their rackmount counterparts, allowing them to stack as much RAM and removing any downside to the converged platform.

Solving issues of scale

While the physical hardware largely resembles the C7000 BladeSystem chassis, HPE set out to solve several of the problems that exist with the C7000 when trying to create a composable infrastructure platform.

First, Synergy embraces HPE OneView as the management platform, removing the onboard administrator management. OneView lives within the Synergy Composer, a management appliance that exists in one of the two appliance bays located on the left side of each of the Synergy platform frame.

Second, Synergy scales better using OneView by allowing a single Synergy Composer to manage up to 20 frames. The Frame Link Module is built to connect frames over greater distances over normal twisted pair, copper cables (CAT5, CAT6, etc.). For redundancy, another Synergy Composer can be placed into an appliance bay in a different frame and the pair mirror one another with failover capabilities.

Solving issues of the OS

Third, Synergy introduces an all-new Synergy Image Streamer – another type of appliance module that sits in an appliance bay – allows for all the boot images required for systems to be stored centrally and managed. The idea behind Image Streamer is to bring many of the same benefits of virtualization to a physical world. Images are stored in the streamer and combined into a Server Profile which includes all of the BIOS settings, WWN and MAC address settings and . The bootable image is presented to the compute node over iSCSI to allow for boot. The complexity of the iSCSI configuration is masked away from the user and handled by Synergy Composer. A second Image Streamer can also be added to another frame for redundancy and the two mirror one another.

The Image Streamer squarely targets OS models without persistent data. Currently, Linux, VMware ESXi and Docker are currently supported OS models with Image Streamer. The boot image is stored as a Golden Master in the Image Streamer and this golden image is forked and combined with a ‘personality’ containing the IP address, hostname and other settings that are applied against the image at boot. The personality can include necessary steps to configure the OS, such as esxcli commands to perform configuration after boot. It is worth noting that Windows is not currently on the list of supported OSes. To patch your OS, you boot the golden image, integrate your changes and then recommit the golden image. At this point, you are able to recompose all of your assigned compute nodes, reboot them and you’re instantly patched. If a patch causes an issue, you are able to roll back to previous state just as easily with a reboot.

Using the Image Streamer doesn’t prevent users from running traditional workloads – like local booting or boot from SAN Windows cluster nodes with SAN storage. Traditional servers can be configured and setup next to Image Streamer profiles. HPE engineers see the Image Streamer as the ultimate flexiblity

Improving connectivity

Another major change is around the fabric and connectivity of the Synergy platform. Since the storage and network have converged even in the C7000 years using FlexFabric modules, Synergy continues this converged theme by utilizing the same Virtual Connect technology of the C7000 and extending it so that a single controlling Virtual Connect module in a one frame can be physically connected to child fabric modules in additional frames. The single Virtual Connect allows for centralized control of Virtual Connect over multiple chassis – or frames. The modules can be daisy chained to simplify management and mobility between compute nodes. The benefit is flexibility to reassign the same server profile to a compute note in a wider range of chassis. The C7000 would almost certainly limit you to blades in the same chassis as reassignment options – due to boundaries of the WWN and MAC ranges.

HPE-Synergy-with-Storage-Module-pulled-out_low

In addition to Virtual Connect, there is also a 12Gb SAS storage module that allows connectivity to Synergy D3940 Storage Modules located in the frame, like the one pulled out in the picture above. The new storage module can be equipped with up to 40 small form factor drives that can be grouped and presented to the compute nodes in the same frame. This would allow disks to be attached and presented as local storage or served up as a StoreVirtual VSA within an ESXi host.

Ship date & pricing

Synergy platform is expected to go on sale at the end of first quarter in 2016 and ship to customers during second quarter of 2016. Pricing has not been announced.

For deployments utilizing the Image Streamer with full redundancy, a minimum of three frames will be required, according to HPE engineers. This allows the necessary management NICs for redundancy with the Image Streamer and redundancy with the Composer appliances. This aligns the Synergy platform with larger environments that need flexibility and the ability to shift and adapt workloads often and on the fly.

December 8, 2015 1 comment