HP Storage Tech Day

In a few weeks I will be attending the HP Storage Tech Day in Houston, TX. Thanks to Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy / http://www.hp.com/storage/blog) for the invite.

This is a follow on from the one held last year and sits alongside the HP Infrastructure Software and Blade Day which occurred last month. The first event was the imputes for the Gestalt IT Tech Field Days.

The agenda has not been finalised but here is what is currently proposed.

Topics such as:

• HP Converged Infrastructure, and how HP StorageWorks fits into it
• Updates on HP’s storage platforms, and
• How HP is competing with the other major storage vendors

You will hear from HP executives such as Paul Perez – VP and Chief Technologist of HP StorageWorks, Andrew Manners - StorageWorks Marketing VP, and several other key executives. You’ll also see demos of specific HP StorageWorks products as well as have a chance to tour some of the HP StorageWorks facilities.

I have done a bit with HP EVA's in the past and always liked aspects of their technology.

There has been so much going on in the storage world in the last year but I have not heard a lot form HP on storage. The biggest news was David Donatelli moving over from EMC and the subsequent law suit. We have had the rise of VCE and Acadia, Netapp have produced their Secure Multi-Tennant Cloud architecture. On the blade front we have HP bashing heads with Cisco around UCS, after all the now infamous Tolly report came out at the Blade Day.

So whats the strategy ongoing strategy for storage at HP? They went and picked up LeftHand, they picket up Donatelli. At the high end HP they have XP which is OEM'd from Hitachi and we have just seen Oracle drop Hitachi in preference for their new step-child Sun.

I am sure there will be lots of technical speed and feeds which I look forward to, but here are some of the high level questions I hope I can get a feel for as well. If I am thinking about these things then I am sure Enterprise customers are thinking about these as well.

• Where does the product line sit? The products from Lefthand are great, I think they may have been the first cab off the rank with a VSA. So whats its future and what do we compare it with. Is it the HP competitor to Dell EqualLogic? EVA and XP, where are things at?
• What about automated storage Tiering, at the sub-LUN level. We know EMC are talking up FAST2, 3PAR are releasing it and Compellent have had it for a while. Whats HP's thoughts on these areas.
• Stack integrations looks to be the flavour of the month, EMC (with Cisco and VMware) as well as Netapp are pushing it hard. So what is HP's take on integrating their own stacks with blades, Procurve/3Com and Storage.
• Cloud. If there was another flavour of the month its Cloud. What are HP's thoughts around storage for Cloud, either internal or service provider.

It all starts on Monday the 29th of March. I will be using Twitter and some blog posts to share my thoughts. I am sure there will be many more questions that will come to the surface before then but if you have any particular thing you would like to grill HP about their storage then post in the comments or DM on twitter (@rodos).

Should be some real geek fun.

Rodos

P.S. For the long disclaimer bit. HP will be paying my travel and accommodation expenses for this event. I can and will write what I feel like, good or bad for HP. In my day job I work for a company that is a Partner of just about every vendor. We have a awesome HP BPSA on staff (Rodos waves at Jakes), plus we are a HDS and Netapp partner. We resell UCS and I am bit of a UCS fanboy. It is what it is, this is my personal blog. Wearing two hats keeps my head warm in winter.

Overlay Transport Virtualization

I am seeing quite a few comments appearing regarding Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualisation recently so I figured it was worth commenting on.

One element of Cloud is being able to easily move workloads around, in and out. The harder this is the more difficult the adoption. If you have ever architected or even harder, implemented, a DR solution you know that re-addressing the networking for a pile of machines can be either difficult, "non-trivial" or just down right impossible. At the same time we see companies such as EMC and F5 working on doing VMotion across sites.

An outcome of this workload migration into the Cloud and long term VMotion across sites is the spreading of layer 2 networks across physical sites. Of course this can be done today but there are all sorts of limitations and difficult bits.

Cisco have been working hard on this problem and have come up with Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV).

Some big players such as Terremark have been trailing OTV, interconnecting three of their data centres. "[...] the company likes what it has seen as an early beta tester of OTV and the Nexus 7000 switches it runs on. Interconnecting data centers takes minutes instead of several hours, says Mike Duckett, Terremark’s general manager of network services." You can read more about Terremark and OTV at this Network World article.

Also, Omar Sultan of Cisco has posted some initial information and a video [shown below] detailing more about OTV.

Its important to note that at the moment OTV is a "Nexus 7000 specific feature" and that they are looking at supporting other platforms and submitting to the standards bodies. I think this is critical for Cisco, there is a lot of Catalyst 6500's out there and not all enterprises may be willing to migrate to the higher end Nexus rage yet without having all of the service modules available.

If you are thinking Cloud for the Enterprise, then my advise is you want to keep an eye on OTV.

Rodos

Cisco sells over 400 UCS systems and executives bullish on VCE

Cisco had their quarterly quarter earnings call a few days ago [transcript care of Seeking Alpha]. These things are really interesting and I am starting to follow them. The senior people give some good summary of they latest goings on in their company and the analysts usually ask some good questions.

A few comments were made about Cisco UCS.

• Chambers : "Our UCS numbers are still in the early stage of customer acceptance and palettes, but again showed sequential (inaudible) rates of over 100% and now over 400 customers have ordered from Cisco."
• Chambers : "So in terms of the datacenter area we're starting to win the architectural battles, you're seeing the value on BTE with EMC and BM where you're seeing that it isn't about server standalone technology. We have no interest in that, but architectural plays. We're off to a good start. "

Interesting, 400 customers of which some would be large and some small purchases (remember how much UCS kit was at VMworld last year!). Also that the top brass view UCS as an architectural play. Interesting to see the reference to VCE (I think the BTE and BM are transcript errors for VCE and VM). Its not about isolated server technology.

There was a longer question and answer on UCS.

Richard Gardner – Citigroup

Okay great. Well, most of my questions have been answered, but I did want to ask you where you're seeing the most success in UCS? You're obviously on a pretty good trajectory there quarter to quarter. Where are you seeing the most success in terms of applications in workloads? Can you talk about who you go up against most often in competitive bidding situations? And why customers choice UCS over competing products when they (inaudible) as your product?

John T. Chambers

Let me take a little bit of cut at it, but I want to also not mislead you. We’re just up to 400 customers. Most of those are doing pilots and implementation. How the first couple dozen go in the big account service providers and enterprise to determine how your next wave goes. Why we’re winning, it’s an architectural play. I (inaudible) it’s a very well class product which in my opinion one that is well ahead of our competitors at this point in time. But it’s the architecture and how the network and possessing capability and storage capability comes together with the applications and the cloud. And the ability to build the architectures where many of the costumers are doing net.

Others are doing it and we’ve been surprised a little bit we’re off in the commercial market play with some real leading edge commercial customers just saying, hey, you save so much in terms of my splurge costs. So much in flexibility and you’re headed to where you’re going to go without locking me in and best in class products in each category. We’re going to line with you.

I probably would say, I would poll a discussion on tele-presences for the next quarter call. We’re probably two quarters out from being able to do the same meaningful discussion on the UCS side of the house. So what I think you can say is that we’re not only holding our own in the data center and virtualization. Padma, what you started with Cloud and what we’re really driving through, we’re having very good success with.

So early implementations of UCS have gone into big service providers and enterprise. How the early implementations succeed is key for ongoing success. Again mention of UCS being an architectural play with reference of how it is networking, processing and storage combining to deliver applications and Cloud.

Certainly looks like the stack is important to the executives at Cisco.

I wondered if it was the same over at EMC, so I dug up their latest earnings transcript. Asking about pipelines William Fearnley asked Joe Tucci "where are the bright spots here when you look across the world for 2010?" The second element to the answer was :

I think there are a lot of opportunities on the back of our partnerships with Cisco and VCE, and revitalizing our DELL partnership; I think those two are massive opportunities for us if we do them right, and I believe we can do them both right. Of course, as we really get into this next generation of how we take the cloud computing and really bring it, internal or private cloud market is going to be a big, big, big opportunity for us and how we really execute on that is phenomenal.

So Tucci is thinking the same as Chambers, VCE, big opportunities and Cloud. I suspect these guys are probably smarter than you or I. If they are betting big something might just be in this. Then of course, maybe they have just spent "big, big, big" money and they want some "big, big, bigger" return on their investment.

Rodos

UCS local disk policy + some vBlock

I have been reading through all of the VCE vBlock reference documents that were recently published as announced by Chad. The last thing we want is for our implementation to be forked, away from the blessed best practices. [jump to the end for brief comments on the guides, this post is about something else]

In the deployment guide it details various UCS manager policies that should be created, I noticed that it specifies creating a "Local Disk Configuration Policy" set to "No Local Storage". The default is for any configuration.

Sidebar - Local disk configuration policy explained.

What the Local Disk Configuration Policy does it configure up the installed disks in your blades as the service profile is deployed to them. Forget going into the BIOS and setting things up, this is virtual hardware and stateless computing people. You just pick a policy, of say RAID Mirror, and when your server profile is applied to the blade it configures the RAID controller automatically. As an aside, you can also have local storage qualifications to even say what size disk you want, so you can deploy your server profile asking it to find a spare blade that matches your requirements.

The reason why I noticed it was because this caught me out during deployment/testing. When it means No Local Disk it really means no disk. We started with this exact"No Local Disk" policy. During some deployment we noticed that no spare blades could be found. After a short time of head scratching we realised that the only blades left were some that had local disks. Its a true testament to stateless computing when you start to forget what hardware you have and where it is, just letting the systems consume it for you. A quick change to a policy of any configuration and it was off and deploying again.

Of course I am going to put the policy back the way it was eventually (when we pull the drives out of that set of machines), here is why :

• Security - To perform stateless computing you are booting from SAN and local disks are usually not required. The only case would be local scratch disk that was transient. You don't want to be writing data to the local storage and then for some reason redeploy your server profile onto another blade, leaving that data behind, bad security move.
• Scrub Policy - Those who know a bit about UCS may say, "Rodos, just create a Scrub Policy". A Scrub Policy scrubs the disk so that a subsequent service profile has clean disks. Problem is that its not effective. Not being one to trust anything I dug into how it scrubs, all it does is overwrite the start of the disk with some zeros, it does not scrub the whole disk with multiple passes. Its a future function to make it a more secure scrub but as it is now I bet you could somehow get at that data.

So my recommendation which concurs with the vBlock guidelines is. Boot from SAN, set a No Local Storage policy and let the automation of UCS stateless computing take care of things for you.

Rodos

P.S.

My thoughts on the VCE vBlock guides themselves. I have skimmed through them all, initial impressions. Of course I will send some notes to those inside the VCE organisation through channels but I figured people would be interested. Reading the VCN (Netapps) document is on my list too, will be interesting to compare.

• Don't think these will do your work for you. They leave more as an "exercise for the reader" than you might think. Its not a design of your system and you are going to have to do some significant work to create a solution. I know, I have just done it.
• There is a lot of detailed information in the deployment guide about UCS and UCSM, very detailed. There is a bit about the EMC storage and a token amount on VMware. Sure it is not a very fare comparison because its easy to describe and detail how to build up the UCS system, whereas in contrast its not like you can describe laying out a VMax in 20 pages. Also the VMax design and implementation service comes with the hardware anyway. The VMware component consists of how to install ESX, not a mention of vCenter Server. Nothing about setting up N1K and its VSMs or PowerPath/VE etc even though they are a requirement of the architecture. Not saying that should be there in detail, but you are not deployed without it and its not even mentioned. Contrast this to the UCS blade details which has every screenshot on how to check the boot from SAN has been assigned correctly in the BIOS.
• My gut feeling is that no one from VMware really contributed to this, it was a Cisco person who did the VMware bits and EMC did theirs.

First APAC Virtualisation Roundtable Podcast

We just finished the first APAC Virtualisation Roundtable podcast which got off the ground due to Andre Leibovici.

You can listen via the widget below or go to the Talkshoe site.



There were quite a few people on the call, maybe around 20 with about 6 or 7 on voice and the rest on chat. Participants ranged from vendors, partners and end users.

Some topics were VDI, NFS vs FC, Xsigo, Cloud, FT, LabManager, 10G. None were a deep dive, we were getting to know each other and just chat over things.

I am sure over time as more people are able to get voice working on Talkshoe there will be more participation. Andre is looking at getting some guests for future events.

Lovely chatting to people, it should be fun. I am sure everyone is looking forward to next week.

Rodos