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While none of the hardware, software, or services updates Hewlett-Packard announced this week is singularly earth-shattering or IT changing, collectively they play important roles in HP's "adaptive enterprise" (otherwise known as "utility") computing strategy.
Breaking Down Barriers
It is ironic that in the industry's effort to make end-users' lives easier by helping them transition from the world of DAS to the world of networked storage, it freed them from the bondage of "captive" server storage only to make them "captive" to networked storage.
In DAS environments, disk resources are captive to the servers to which they are attached or embedded (i.e., disk resources cannot be shared among multiple servers). In networked storage environments, disk resources are free to be pooled and shared among multiple servers. However, because networked storage is generally rolled out on an application-by-application basis within departments across organizations, potentially dozens or even greater numbers of silos of information (or "stove pipes") can result, depending on the scale of the IT environment. The result is a bigger, networked version of the same problem.
Data in networked storage environments can be accessed or shared by servers within a silo but generally not shared among silos. Simply put: stove-piped information is captive information; data has become captive to the applications used to create it.
The challenge among industry players today, therefore, is to help end-users begin to break down the physical barriers of these data silos so that the data they contain can be linked and shared -- and ultimately intelligently managed -- for maximum business benefit. Doing so is no small task: it is a fundamental building block of a "utility" (or in HP lingo "adaptive") computing environment.
IT Consolidation: An Important Step
HP believes, and ESG agrees, that IT consolidation is an important - and necessary - step toward an eventual utility computing end (emphasis on "eventual"), for several reasons, notably:
It (as described above) helps organizations break down the physical barriers that exist in their networked storage environments by enabling them to begin to "link" silos of information.
It allows organizations to gain better control of their IT environments by enabling them to centrally manage data wherever it resides.
While the enhancements that HP announced this week to its StorageWorks family are not revolutionary in nature, ESG believes they will have real benefits for HP customers in the short-term and especially down the road as the company further develops and rolls out components of its utility computing platform.
The HP announcement is broken into three parts: on-line (or primary) consolidation, backup (or secondary) consolidation, and remote office/branch office (on-line consolidation).
Highlights of the announcements include concurrent iSCSI and FC connectivity for its EVA arrays, 4Gb Fibre Channel front-end for the EVA, doubling of the cache and enhanced per-port performance on its XP arrays, and XP support for its EVA 4000/6000/8000 arrays (primary consolidation); enhanced array-based replication for its StorageWorks arrays and a 75% capacity boost (to 70TB) for its Virtual Library System (backup consolidation); and Proxy File Service, encryption, and additional protocol acceleration for its Enterprise File Services (EFS) WAN Accelerators (remote office/branch office [ROBO] consolidation).
XP support for the EVA allows HP customers to virtualize XP and EVA storage into a single pool behind the XP. Simultaneous iSCSI and FC support on the EVA provides end-users with a cheaper connectivity option for building SANs and allows customers with FC SANs to manage their SAN volumes over iSCSI or FC with a common pane of glass. The virtual tape enhancements provide end-users with a more scalable virtual tape option for backup consolidation. And, lastly, the WAN Accelerator enhancements make it easier for organizations to protect ROBO data.
In addition to the above enhancements, HP also introduced a number of new services options, including a storage consolidation framework and workshop, a managed storage services option for utility-ready storage, and a consolidation analysis capability. And, lastly, HP added new hardware support for Storage Essentials, its storage management software, including HP and Sun NAS, IBM DS 6000 and 8000 disk, and Cisco and Qlogic provisioning support.
Hewlett-Packard clearly has one of the most-defined utility computing strategies in the industry today.
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