HP is increasingly demonstrating that its vision includes positioning itself as an innovator at the high end especially with respect to managing heterogeneous storage assets. HP appears to be a leading proponent of avoiding dreams of owning the entire data center storage infrastructure. Rather its aim appears to add customer value by recognizing and accommodating the diversity of installed storage assets at customer sites.
HP Continues High-end Storage Innovation An Analysis of HP's XP24000 Disk Array Capabilities
Executive Summary
HP's November 2007 announcement of enhancements to its HP XP24000 and XP20000 continues the consistent progression of the product line. While this announcement represents a seemingly small step in the realization of HP's vision, it has big implications. Specifically, instead of just making new storage better, HP continues to deliver on its promise of improving the efficiency of already installed storage assets.
To accomplish this, HP has built upon its May 2007 announcement of thin provisioning and extended this capability for externally attached storage. In other words, HP can provide virtualization, thin provisioning and storage management services not just for its own new storage, but for installed storage as well, all in one system. The key questions for storage executives are "does it work" and if so what is the business case of adopting this approach? This white paper focuses on these two questions.
The answer to these two questions was best summed up by a quote from a storage manager who installed virtualization and thin provisioning; "It saved me an array.I got 30 terabytes for free." ITCentrix has confirmed that other installations have similar positive stories. While there are some applications unsuitable for thin provisioning, and care needs to be taken on others, the software world and customer base is beginning to see that block-based virtualization, thin provisioning and storage services are trends they must embrace.
The business case for these enhancements is illustrated in the case study within this report. A financial company was expecting to buy two arrays over the next twelve months. The choices were:
. Add an additional array to the three installed already, and an additional array in six months time; or . Add an XP24000 with external virtualization capabilities and evolve it to provide thin provisioning to the installed arrays over time.
The financial case was simple. The XP24000 adds 5% more usable capacity than the alternative over the next 12 months at one half the costs, saving more than $800K (even after accounting for migration expenses). It saves an array and is expected to
allow the redeployment of a full time equivalent. Figure 1 below shows the summary results.
TCO Comparison (3 Year Impact on IT Budget)
$2,500
$2,095 )0 $2,00000($ sra $1,500e $1,277Y 3 re $1,000vo stso $500C
$- Competitive Best of Breed (80TB) HP XP24000 (40TB & externalmanagement of 70TB Installed)
Additional Cost of ArraysAdditional Cost of Storage Software on New ArraysAdditional Cost of Software for Managing Installed ArraysAdditional Cost of Storage AdministrationAdditional Cost of Storage OperationsCost of Virtualization & Thin Provisioning ProjectCost of Power, Cooling & SpaceTotal Cost of Storage & Storage Management
Figure 1 - TCO Comparison of Impact of Thin Provisioning for External Storage
This announcement of external thin provisioning, together with improved performance, support for 750GB SATA drives internally on the XP24000 and XP20000 and strong support for VMware, positions HP as a clear leader in performance and functionality in high-end arrays, and a clear leader in assisting adoption of the functionality and integration into the storage infrastructure. Storage executives should explore the
Copyright 2007 ITCentrix 2
potential to improve the functionality, efficiency and manageability of their installed storage assets by including HP on all storage short-lists.
Copyright 2007 ITCentrix 3
Storage Dynamics
Storage Business Environment Talk to most organizations about their storage infrastructure, and they will describe the proliferation of incompatible SANs stemming from t... [download for more]
