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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.
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 potential to improve the functionality, efficiency and manageability of their installed storage assets by including HP on all storage short-lists.
Talk to most organizations about their storage infrastructure, and they will describe the proliferation of incompatible SANs stemming from the growth of new applications, mergers, acquisitions and many other causes. Customers will discuss the sensitivity of management to the cost of storage as one of the reasons for so many different types of storage arrays in the data center. They will also note that storage provisioning is a time-consuming and onerous process. Customers will stress the speed at which business is changing, the flattening of the globe and the need to react in hours or minutes to demands for new storage. Almost universally, customers will share their pain about the business disruption that changes in storage infrastructure bring and the difficulty of migrating storage once it has been allocated. As a result of these trends, the rapid adoption of server virtualization particularly with VMware is a major theme.
Backup and the challenges of meeting backup windows, and even knowing if disaster recovery systems actually work is another point of uncertainty and risk for organizations. More experienced users will talk about failed attempts to implement storage resource management (SRM) systems across heterogeneous storage infrastructure. The impact of governance, compliance and escalating information risk is another common theme.
Increasingly, IT in general and storage administrators specifically are being asked to factor environmentals into product procurement decisions. Awareness from executive management is actually creating discussions about disks that spin forever, denser storage controllers and escalating power consumption that contributes to power shortages in the data center.
Many vendors see a single solution to the problems of storage; their product. HP’s strategy with the XP24000 and XP20000, while having a strong product emphasis, is different in that it sees other vendor’s storage products as an opportunity. Storage infrastructures are untidy, and mixed. Rather than criticize how the problem happened, HP has been providing pragmatic ways of linking heterogeneous storage together and providing seamless access and utilization of those installed resources. Instead of proposing to get rid of old storage in the data center, HP has been proposing to breathe new vigor into those arrays and extend their life. This is a compelling message for many customers.
HP saw the opportunity to provide services via a powerful storage controller. In disk terms, HP utilizes a service controller that has the intelligence to discern where data resides and where there is free space. The basic premise of the HP design is to allow the customer to decide what types of arrays to deploy for different applications and have the controller rationalize, through virtualization, the inherent incompatibilities in different array architectures. Fundamental to this approach is the need for very high performance and a network-centric device.
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