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HPE Storage

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

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 Storage Trends

Peer Persistence and Adaptive Optimization interoperation on 3PAR

by Philip Sellers July 7, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This is part one of a two part series on enhancements to the HP 3PAR StoreServ platform announced at HP Discover in June.

One of the biggest benefits of being an HP invited blogger for HP Discover is the opportunity to sit and talk with architects and executives during coffee talks and importu meetings in the bloggers lounge. This gives me and other bloggers the opportunity to ask our specific questions from really technical or strategic HP staff. During the past two HP Discover events, I have had great opportunities to talk to HP 3PAR storage team members and get some great information about specific issues and some ideas on where things may be heading.

At HP Discover in Barcelona back in December, Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) introduced me to Siamak Nazari, an HP Fellow and chief architect for 3PAR’s OS. I and few other bloggers had the opportunity to talk about how HP develops the 3PAR OS and the evolution of the ASIC inside the 3PAR.

In December, I asked Nazari specifically about things that break with Peer Persistence and the 3PAR advanced features. Earlier in the year, my employer had implemented a pair of 3PAR StoreServ 7400’s in our environment in a Peer Persistence configuration. I quickly noticed that the advanced feature sets didn’t fully support Peer Persistence and I was curious when we might expect that.

Peer Persistence is 3PAR’s flavor of Metro Storage Clustering for VMware. Peer Persistence allows synchronous replication between the two arrays and a seamless failover from one set of LUNs to another between arrays without interruption to the VMware workloads. The primary 3PAR presents its LUNs under a WWN as active storage paths and the secondary/replication array presents its LUNs in a secondary/passive state until the failover occurs. When failover occurs, the replica becomes the active paths and the other array becomes secondary/inactive. The failover and monitoring can be automated with a Quorum Witness to handle the failover in the event of an array failure.

Peer Persistence is the new addition to the 3PAR feature set and understandably, a lot of the other advanced features don’t recognize Peer Persistence. One of the things we realized immediately is that Peer Persistence and Adaptive Optimization do not share data. So while AO is balancing data between storage tiers on the primary array based on the read and write characteristics of data, the secondary array is not receiving all the read operations so its AO will not optimize the same or as well as the primary.

Nazari acknowledged that this is the case in 3PAR at the present time. One of the potential solutions to this is an enhanced federation between 3PAR arrays, which may get delivered in a future 3PAR OS release. There is nothing technically to prevent this type of data sharing between arrays to allow AO to optimize workloads the same across arrays, but presently the arrays don’t share the data. Federation would allow for this type of data and a lot of other data to be shared and managed centrally across multiple arrays.

But one of the things that I’ve realized is that HP, like all companies, has limited resources to apply to a large set of problems to solve. So, they prioritize features based on biggest benefit to customers and other factors.

So during HP Discover in June, I had the opportunity to talk with Priyadarshi Prasad (@Priyadarshi_Pd) about developments announced during the June event, including thin deduplication and HP’s strategy to get solid state storage down to the cost of spinning disk and I also wanted to get an update on my earlier question.

I asked again about any developments for advanced features like Adaptive Optimization interoperating with Peer Persistence. This time, we had a different conversation – one that prompted this post.

Pointing back to the announcements of the latest HP Discover, Prasad talked with me about the total cost solid state disk in a 3PAR array. This June, HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all flash array with new 1.9TB Solid State Disks, Thin Deduplication and Adaptive Sparing. As a combination of these announcements, HP estimates it can deliver an all-flash array with usable storage at a cost of $2 per GB – similar to the cost of spinning disk. Prasad pointed out that if HP can reduce the cost of solid state storage to the same as spinning disk, would technologies like Adaptive Optimization even be needed anymore? Spinning disk is adopted for its low cost per GB, but if solid state can be adopted at the same cost, why wouldn’t customers go there instead.

While delivering $2 per GB solid state, until there is another tier of storage that is more costly and better performing than solid state, tiering technologies would become more or less obsolete. One valid observation is that non-volitile RAM (NVRAM) is coming and may present options for another, fast tier of storage, so we may see this come again, but it sounds like today that federated AO may have just moved way down the list of priorities.

As a customer with existing 3PAR with spinning disk, obviously I want to see some sort of federation and central management which also shares AO characteristics between arrays. It doesn’t do anything for customers who have already adopted spinning disk on 3PAR. Most likely, if we adopted all solid state, it will be in a new array or within a tier on our existing arrays. Its not likely for us or many customers to take existing spinning disk offline within existing arrays. So, for this reality to come to fruition, its going to take several years for arrays to refresh all-together or for new arrays to be adopted side by side.

But it certainly warrants more information and investigation to the HP claim of $2 per GB for solid state disk. That’s where part two in this series goes next – investigating HP’s 3PAR StoreServ $2 per GB.

Disclaimer: HP invited me to HP Discover as a blogger and covered my expenses to attend the event. I also spoke at a session during the event. As always, the views and opinions stated on this blog are my own. HP was given no editorial control over content or topics for my posts.

July 7, 2014 3 comments

Datacenter Storage

Storage Essentials 9.7 shows off performance enhancements and new platform support

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This week at HP Discover, the Storage Essentials team unwrapped version 9.7 of the product for customers to see. The next release, code-named Castle, features a number of enhancements with support for several new EMC storage platforms, support for Windows 2012 and updates to support a lot of new versions of array code. Storage Essentials 9.7 also focuses heavily on performance improvements and is expected to be released in July.

One of the major shifts in architecture for Storage Essentials is a move away from embedded Oracle database to an embedded PostgreSQL database. The new database platforms appears to be less resource intensive [from my own testing], quicker to install and just as responsive as the previous embedded Oracle. Upgrade and migration from 9.6.1 to the new release migrates the data painlessly, since Storage Essentials packages its own database export utility that pulls out the data from Oracle and pushes it into PostgreSQL easily. The overall installation time is considerably less since the switch to PostgreSQL.

For 9.7, the Storage Essentials team has worked to improve load times and performance of the application. One of the changes made for performance is decoupling the topology calculation which relates elements together after discovery so that it can be run once at the end of the collection process. In my environment, the changes have reduced the time to perform a backup data collection from about an 1 hour and 20 minutes to about 16 minutes, including topology calculation, as a result of optimization in the code. Another performance improvement deals with how the data is loaded into the Java applet of the application. The improvements result in faster loads of the Capacity Manager, Backup Manager and Performance screens.

Storage Essentials is a storage resource management software. It provides topology visualization for storage environments, centralized storage system event logging, performance reporting and a wide array of preconfigured reports for the SAN switches, arrays and hosts. Storage Essentials can collect information from SAN connected hosts, monitor file servers and NAS resources, monitor capacity and performance.

Slides and additional information from the session presented will be made available on the HP Discover website.

Disclaimer: I spoke about the next generation version of Storage Essentials along with Inge De Maere and Kara McMillian during HP Discover. I worked with HP Storage Essentials team as a beta user of the new version and they invited me to share my customer experience during the What’s New session.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP Data Protector will support Federated Catalyst at launch

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog post about Federated Catalyst, a new feature in HP StoreOnce D2D backup devices. See the earlier post for more information about Federated Catalyst.

HP_Data_Protector Without backup software to actually use Federated Catalyst, the technology itself doesn’t do much good, so my first question is when would Data Protector support Federated Catalyst. The good news is that Data Protector 8 and 9 will both support Federated Catalyst when it becomes generally available with the new 3.11 StoreOnce firmware.

I confirmed with Data Protector staff that Data Protector 9, which was recently announced and soon to be launched, will support Federated Catalyst at launch and Data Protector 8 is getting support via a patch. Users already running Data Protector 8.12 should already have support delivered for their existing backup environment.

Data Protector 9 was announced on May 14, during Microsoft TechEd, with a laun
ch timeframe scheduled roughly one month afterwards. The new version of Data Protector features enhancements for vSphere backups, including a new method to perform granular file recovery directly from full VMDK backups.

The Data Protector team also announced a new product called Backup Navigator on May 14. Backup Navigator is a dashboard and analytics platform for backup. The intent of Backup Navigator is to observe and learn how backup is running in Data Protector so that in future releases it can predict and make recommendations to improve backups and then in a third phase, it will be able to fully automate backup scheduling and operations.

As a Data Protector customer, support for Federated Catalyst should allow for easier administration and fewer required Catalyst stores in a backup environment. It is also welcome news that both the HP Storage and HP Autonomy Data Protector teams timed the release together in both products.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP introducing Federated Catalyst to StoreOnce

by Philip Sellers June 10, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

b6500 This week at HP Discover, HP announced a new Federated Catalyst feature for the StoreOnce family of disk to disk backup arrays. The new capability will allow backup administrators to make large Catalyst stores on a StoreOnce and allow for data to be striped across all the back-end service sets in the array. Federated Catalyst is available immediately on the StoreOnce B6500 line and will be coming in a few weeks to the StoreOnce B6200 line.

Federated Catalyst overcomes a previous limitation in the StoreOnce family that tied a Catalyst store to a single service set within a StoreOnce device. The same limitation exists for a CIFS store or a virtual tape library store in a StoreOnce array. This is another advantage for HP’s Catalyst technology since it assists administrators who are managing many Catalyst stores.

Previously, within a StoreOnce with 2 couplets and 4 service sets, a minimum of 4 Catalyst stores would be required to use all the available resources in the device. This added additional management points and coordination for the backup administrator within the backup software. By striping the data across all the available service sets, a single large Catalyst store is possible to utilize all the available data.

There are other considerations such as deduplication ratios for stores and the number of backup streams that go into architecting the best possible backup environment but breaking Catalyst stores away from service set boundaries will let IT shops make better decisions about how to lay out stores within StoreOnce for backup. This also provides more scalability for medium sizes shops that may want to purchase a StoreOnce with a smaller initial sizing and grow it over time.

Compared to VTL technology, Catalyst offers a simplified approach to managing backup data. With VTL’s, a library is built and it is populated with emulated tape cartridges. Like physical cartridges, each one has a bar code and media label and other properties that dictate when the data on the cartridge expires and may be re-used. Within a VTL, however, if there are more cartridges than needed, the un-used cartridges will be used before any cartridges are recycled and reused based on backup policies. This leads to inefficiency and extra storage utilization within VTL libraries.

On the flip side, if the VTL has too few cartridges, then the library runs out of space and backups stop. This leads to a big management point for administrators to size and ensure the correct number of cartridges. Catalyst also improves the VTL situation by improving performance. VTL emulates physical tape and so backup software talks with it and expects a certain amount of time before a tape is loaded or unloaded and this adds time to backups. With Catalyst aware software, the D2D backup device is seen for what it really with all of its native capabilities instead of being seen as tape.

June 10, 2014 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Squeezing the ultimate performance out of vSphere

by Philip Sellers June 2, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Over the course of the past few months, I have had the opportunity to compare physical workloads directly against virtualized workloads. As workloads have moved into vSphere in the environment that I support, we have had the opportunity to compare workloads head to head, pinpoint some bottlenecks and remedy them in our environment. In addition, I have spent a considerable amount of time researching running business critical applications inside of vSphere.

Power Profiles Matter with Performance

In Elias Khnaser’s PluralSight course Best Practices for Running XenApp/XenDesktop on vSphere, he says to check the power management settings of your servers, particularly in blade servers, since they many come with a dynamic power profile based on processor performance states (P-states). P-states conserve energy in servers by operating the processor it different power levels. With a dynamic profile, it may be lowering power to the CPU in order to save energy, but at the expense of optimized performance.

hp_power_profile I checked this on my HP ProLiant blade servers and they were set to the default “Balanced Power and Performance.” The label doesn’t sound all that bad, but on further searching, this setting enabled the dynamic power management within a server. With this enabled, the CPU’s seemed to be powering down and taking additional time to power up when demand from vSphere increases.

Changing the Power Management setting to “Maximum Performance” ensures that the CPU stays powered fully, however, it may take additional power to do so. In my initial testing, this increased performance within my business critical applications where we are measuring transaction times. We were able to observe a decrease in the transaction times by nearly one half.

ilopowersettings

HP has a technical whitepaper outlining Power Regulation in ProLiant servers. I found two ways that you can adjust the power profile – both by entering BIOS during boot and also in the iLO on ProLiant systems. For ProLiant G7 and Gen8 systems, the iLO power profile change is instantaneous. For G6 and earlier systems with iLO 2, it appears to activate on next boot. I also found that depending on the profile setting on the hardware, vSphere presents different options at the hypervisor level. When the server is in dynamic mode, vSphere is able to configure a profile from the Configuration tab of the host. When set to “Maximum Performance”, the ability to change or set a profile is not available in vSphere.

In addition, VMware has a knowledgebase article (1018206) with troubleshooting steps for poor performance based on power settings. This KB article details not only HP ProLiant servers but also Dell servers.

And finally, there is one more place to check and that is the power profile settings within your Guest OS. Setting the profile to a high performance profile may also have a positive impact on performance.

Training: Business Critical Apps on vSphere

VMware has made some great online training available to all customers and the same courses are available to partners who seeking accredittation for virtualizing business critical apps (though Partner University). Each course is a 3 hour, online self-paced class.

Paravirtualized SCSI driver

paravirtual2 VMware unanimously makes the recommendation to the the Paravirtualized SCSI adapters within guest OSes when running business critical apps on vSphere in all the courses linked above. Paravirtualized SCSI adapters are higher performance disk controllers that allow for better throughput and lower CPU utilization in guest OSes according to VMware KB article 1010398. The same KB article also gives step by step instruction for adding the controller and driver into Guest OSes.

Reserve the Entire Memory Allotment

reserveallguestmemory VMware recommends reserving the entire memory allotment for virtual machines running business critical apps. This ensure no contention where high performance applications are concerned. vSphere 5 and higher with virtual hardware version 8 or higher has a checkbox that allows for reserving the entire allotment of vRAM, even as allocations change.

Avoid Thin on Thin Storage Provisioning

From my own experience, running vSphere thin-provisioning works great on array technology that does not have native thin provisioning capabilities, but if the storage has thin provisioning at the array level, use that and instead use the thick provisioning in vSphere, however which thick provisioning option to use varies by array.

While moving an application onto vSphere in my environment, we had development setup on an array without thinning capabilities and production on an array with thin provisioning. The production environment took more than double the time to perform the data build-out when utilizing thin on thin capabilities. Once we noticed this, investigation showed that it was thin on thin that was causing the performance derogation. Once the disk allocated the blocks within the VMDK, the performance derogation disappeared. Our theory is that the slowdown occurs when allocating new blocks for data.

Converting the production virtual machine to thick disks by performing a storage vMotion to a new LUN caused the build to complete in less time than on the development VM backed by the array without thin capabilities. In my particular case, it was an EVA without thin capabilities backing development and a 3PAR with thin provisioned LUNs backing production. The recommendation for 3PAR is to use “Thick Eager Zero” disks since the 3PAR will recognize and zero out the space of the ‘eager’ zeroed disks. I have seen other recommendations for different arrays, where many recommend the “Thick Lazy Zero” disks.

Thin on thin also presents more challenges in estimating and accommodating growth in an array over time. Any thin provisioning technology should be monitored for over-allocation to ensure that there is adequate room for growth on the array. Doing thin on thin may obstruct this view somewhat, so proceed with caution and know that you’re likely losing some performance.

June 2, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Exploring HP’s Power of Common Architectures in Storage

by Philip Sellers January 31, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

During HP Discover last month, I had a great chance to hear from David Scott, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Storage, and also to have a conversation with Siamak Nazari, the Chief Software Architect of 3PAR. One of HP’s talking points for 3PAR for the last several years has been around the idea of Polymorphic Simplicity – a marketing term that they use to describe how HP is positioning the 3PAR architecture from the mid-range, to performance to high-end storage all with a single architecture, feature set and interoperability.

With the current arrangement of 3PAR systems, HP has the mid-range StoreServ 7200 with 2 nodes max, the StoreServ 7400 with 4 nodes max, it has the all-flash performance focused StoreServ 7450 and then the high-end StoreServ 10000 series arrays with a max of 8 nodes. All of the systems share the same 3PAR ASIC and software. The management interfaces and configuration concepts are the same regardless of which model. The underlying OS is the same across all – meaning that although the 7000 series was introduced just 1 year ago, its runs the same OS as the flagship 10000 series arrays which have been proven. The illustration below is from HP to show how the 3PAR architecture fits many different use cases where different factors are most important – all with one common architecture underneath.

HP-One-Architecture

While I’ve heard the message at previous HP events, it wasn’t until talking with Siamak Nazari that I began to understand why this has been such a big point from HP. Evolving a storage OS is a difficult tasks for any company. That’s why storage innovation often happens with start-up companies that build a new design from the ground up, instead of inside of mainline vendors evolving their dual-controller arrays into a modern storage array. HP’s purchase of 3PAR brought them a modern storage architecture that was natively multi-node capable. Where the complexities are exponentially more difficult to move from single controller, to dual controller to multi-controller, HP took the opposite approach by adapting a modern 8-node architecture down to a 2-node and 4-node configuration.

The real key for HP 3PAR customers is that by HP building a portfolio that spans a wide breadth of use cases, it expands the install base of the overall architecture while refining and enhancing the underlying OS. Enhancements made for one particular use case get shared by all of the customers through shared enhancements. Customers ultimately win by getting incremental improvements from their existing investment – all delivered by software.

HP has been consistently shipping improvements through software on the 3PAR StoreServ systems for several years. When it introduced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 in June of 2013, the all-flash array boasted OS improvements for handling all-flash drives in the array. In December, HP revised the 7450 and nearly doubled performance to 900,000 IOPS with less than .7 milliseconds of latency [100 percent Random Reads, 4K block size local to controller] and more than doubled the possible capacity by introducing a new technology called Adaptive Sparing and by introducing new 480GB and 920GB SSDs at lower price points.

3par-ssd-dec2013

Adaptive Sparing allows the HP’s 3PAR StoreServ array take over coordination of sparing flash sectors instead of having the individual drive handle sparing. HP found that it could manage the sparing capacity as a pool more efficiently than by letting the individual drives handle this — and that allowed the 3PAR StoreServ arrays to access more of the actual flash capacity. The net result is an increase in overall utilization and lower the price point for flash in the array.

So, where is the benefit here for all? While the Adaptive Sparing technology was developed specifically for the all-flash 3PAR StoreServ 7450, the same Adaptive Sparing technology is also benefiting any HP 3PAR customer who is using SSD. This was one of the best examples of benefits from a common architecture that I had heard from HP.

But common architectures is not just a benefit from the HP 3PAR StoreServ – it is an approach adopted by other HP Storage solutions, also. HP’s StoreOnce D2D backup, StoreVirtual arrays and StoreAll NAS hardware are all based on their ProLiant hardware configurations. Since HP has made the conscious decision to build out solutions based on ProLiant servers, each generation provides performance increase and innovation that is also shared with software solutions. During Discover in Barcelona, Spain, last month, HP announced the new generation of the StoreOnce – the StoreOnce B6500 – based on the ProLiant Gen8 server hardware which boasts considerable performance gains obtained both by software and hardware improvements.

Taking the common architecture further to the software stack, StoreOnce and StoreAll also have a lot of shared DNA within their software stacks. Both solutions leverage the IBRIX technology that HP acquired in 2009. According to David Scott, the IBRIX distributed file engine is used across a couple product lines, although not specifically talked about. While HP knew that the IBRIX technology was fantastic technology, it was really about targeting the correct solutions for a problem and tuning the software to specific solutions. And like the shared ProLiant and shared 3PAR technology, incremental improvements on one side will mutually benefit the other sides as well.

January 31, 2014 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage

HP bundling StoreVirtual VSA with new ProLiant purchases

by Philip Sellers December 6, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP is bringing software defined storage to the masses by bundling the StoreVirtual VSA (virtual storage appliance) with the purchase of new ProLiant hardware. The new offer, announced November 12, is available with 10 models of ProLiant and includes a 1TB entitlement for StoreVirtual VSA. That license can be combined on up to 3 nodes for a total capacity of 3TB of total storage in a free software SAN. And although the license is limited to 3 nodes within the StoreVirtual cluster, the storage can be made accessible to any connected servers in the site.

The new offer is attractive for small office or enterprise remote office deployments where typically only a few servers are deployed. HP is targeting the SMB market with the new offer in an attempt to gain market for the StoreVirtual software defined storage line of products according to Dale Degen, category manager for Software Defined Storage at HP.

“I’m pretty excited because this will expand the scope of who has been exposed to this concept,” Degen said during a call this week.

Chock full of features

The free 1TB licenses are no gimmick. The licenses include the full package of StoreVirtual capabilities, excluding Adaptive Optimization. Those capabilities include large enterprise features like asynchronous replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, network RAID and storage clustering. The only thing not included with the 1TB license is HP’s Adaptive Optimization feature for sub-LUN tiering and support. Users who want support for the StoreVirtual can upgrade to a retail copy of StoreVirtual, with pricing beginning at $3,000 list for 3 nodes of 4TB each and includes 3 years of support. Although the free licenses are limited to 3 node clusters, customers are free to create multiple clusters and the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console manages multiple storage clusters easily, which is a great benefit to larger companies who may have StoreVirtual storage at both primary and remote sites.

The free licenses are easy to obtain, according to Degen. Any of the eligable ProLiant servers shipping after November 1 include a sticker with a key that can be used to unlock the license from the HP website. Customers can take their keys and and fulfill the request, download the VSA software package and retrieve the licenses.

From personal experience, the deployment process of the StoreVirtual VSA is very easy. Users can obtain the ‘Zero to VSA’ toolkit, as Degen called it, from the HP website which offers a streamlined deployment process for the VSA. In my lab environment, the manual deployment steps took about 10 minutes – mostly pointing the wizard to your vSphere or Hyper-V environment and then letting it push out the appliance. Deegan also said that the Zero to VSA toolkit includes a CLI environment which could let power users automate the deployment in enterprise environments.

SMB users: what is StoreVirtual and what’s a VSA?

Many SMB users may not have heard of HP StoreVirtual and may be wondering what it is all about. At a high level, StoreVirtual takes the local storage inside of a server and uses software to pool the storage and offering it up as an iSCSI based SAN. Multiple servers deployed with StoreVirtual also pool together and replicate among each other to create a RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) configuration. Like RAID, RAIN is the concept of stripes or mirrors for the data between nodes. StoreVirtual is a software-only solution, although HP also sells hardware solutions created around StoreVirtual software. Originally created by Lefthand Networks, the StoreVirtual continues to run the Lefthand OS on bare metal installs and inside of the VSA or virtual storage appliance. Lefthand OS, formerly known as SAN/iQ, is currently at verison 11 and is a very mature product in a market full of new solutions.

StoreVirtual’s feature set is also on par with much larger enterprise storage platforms, but by utilizing existing storage or servers, it offers a much lower price point for many customers looking for SAN storage. Virtualization and particuarlly vSphere have pushed many SMB users to look towards SAN solutions to accommodate virtual workloads and provide highly available storage.

The VSA (virtual storage appliance) concept is an outgrowth of the Lefthand OS within a virtual machine. Like installing Lefthand OS on bare metal hardware, the VSA uses onboard, local storage under the ESXi or Hyper-V hypervisor and creates pools on this storage so that it can be served up for any number of uses on the network, but many times that use case is to store virtual machines. While the VSA can present storage back to its local virtual host machines, it can also be used by any other server or virtual host with connectivity to its SAN network.

Sounds great, how to I get it?

For all the latest information about the offer, about StoreVirtual VSA and about how to take advantage, go to the HP website at http://hp.com/go/FreeVSA.

December 6, 2013 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP Storage is touting unified architectures for the future

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Its all about unified approaches for HP Storage as they push forward into the future. David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of HP Storage, has spent a lot of time during HP Discover talking about HP’s unified approach in storage architectures as opposed to competitor’s fragmented approaches.

In the StoreServe and StoreOnce product lines, HP has been working to create a full portfolio of product offerings based around a central technology – in the StoreServ’s case – the 3PAR ASIC, in the StoreOnce, based around the HP Labs StoreOnce deduplication technology, and with the StoreVirtual with a pure software approach. It has been working to deliver solutions of different shapes and sizes around these common architectures. HP calls it Polymorphic Simplicity, or multiple solutions meeting different needs around a central architecture.

3parpolymorphic

One of the key benefits of the common architectures approach is the ability to manage products with a common interface and management style, meaning less training and learning curve for administrators. In the 3PAR StoreServ lines, administrators get the same GUI and command line interface, the same OS and feature sets across all levels of the product – spanning from entry-level to enterprise. With its StoreOnce backup and recovery portfolio, HP has packed the same deduplication technology into its backup product and into its portfolio of disk to disk backup devices. In addition, all of the devices run a common OS and have a common management interface. The other key in polymorphic simplicity is data portability between solutions – achieved through Peer Motion on the HP 3PAR arrays and through deduplicated replication on the StoreOnce.

HP’s New Product Announcements

In December, HP introduced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 and 7400 at HP Discover in Frankfurt. The 7200 and 7400 were meant to address customer situations “where value matters” and the existing 3PAR StoreServ 10000 class was meant for tier 1, mission-critical needs. But, as Scott says, this left a gap in between “where performance matters.” So, HP has introduced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 – an all flash array to meet customer needs when performance is key.

The 7450 is capable of 554,000 IOPS (4K random reads) with .7 ms latency. This is achieved through a specialized ASIC which takes into account flash characteristics. The ASIC tunes IO and cache flushing specifically for flash. Thin provisioning and system-wide striping native to 3PAR help address flash wear issues to extend the life of the flash storage by saving writes that are unnecessary and by spreading necessary writes across all of the disks in the array.

In addition to the new hardware offering, HP also announced Priority Optimization being added to the 3PAR OS across the entire portfolio. This feature will allow for guaranteed control of IOPS across a multi-tenant array. IOPS can be allocated at the tenant and application level allowing for SLA-type guarantees or simply partitioning and isolation to occur within a single array. The 3PAR line also received integration enhancements for Hyper-V and OpenStack Fiber Channel support.

HP also unwrapped the software-only StoreOnce VSA, marrying software defined storage with information protection. The StoreOnce VSA allows customers to run the StoreOnce on virtual platform not exclusively dedicated to backup and recovery. Like its dedicated hardware siblings, the StoreOnce VSA supports the StoreOnce Catalyst protocol and deduplicated replication across all of the product line. It is architected to be multi-tenant capable, allowing for backup and a service from service providers using the StoreOnce. Some of the use cases include remote office and branch office deployments in the enterprise utilizing existing hardware and small-to-mid business who don’t want dedicated storage hardware but want to leverage standard servers with the StoreVirtual VSA and StoreOnce VSA for primary store and information protection.

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.

June 12, 2013 2 comments