HP StorageWorks 2006
HP StorageWorks 2006
June 26th, 2006:In the lush surrounds of Kota Kinabalu on the northern tip of Borneo, HP’s StorageWorks 2006 conference kicked off to the sounds of tribal drums and techno beats.
By Greg McNevin
Running for two days on February 21 and 22, this year’s conference attracted over 400 delegates determined to soak up some sunshine and catch the latest on all things storage. And the buzz from HP is storage consolidation and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).
Running for two days on February 21 and 22, this year’s conference attracted over 400 delegates determined to soak up some sunshine and catch the latest on all things storage. And the buzz from HP is storage consolidation and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).
Day One
StorageWorks Division vice president Anthony Chan played the role of tribe Bomoh, or medicine man, introducing the conference and outlining the consolidation vision to come.
While on location, IDM spoke with HP’s: • Senior Vice President & General Manager for StorageWorks, Enterprise Storage & Servers Business Unit and Technology Solutions Group, Bob Schultz
• Vice President, Marketing, StorageWorks Division, Duncan Campbell and
• Global Portfolio Manager for StorageWorks Services, Thomas Goepel
IDM: There were a few announcements this morning, could you perhaps elaborate on the simultaneous 4gig and iSCSI EVA offering? BS:We introduced the 4000, 6000 and 8000 models last may. Here we are nine months later refreshing EVA products. It shows the evolution in our ability and our commitment to that product. Not everyone has 4gig yet, and certainly nobody has 4gig in iSCSI running simultaneously in their Arrays. Customers are interested the iSCSI connectivity because when the build fibre channel SANS, they still have some servers that they didn’t connect because it just wasn’t cost effective at the time to put fibre channel all the way out to those servers and bring them in. Now with iSCSI they can really leverage the Ethernet infrastructure they have in place and consolidate those servers. DC:When you think about your business there are certain products that you think about as the heartbeat. And the EVA from our standpoint, is the heartbeat of our storage business. When we look at out competition, maybe they have it in HPA, or in a switch, or in director. We have 4gig from an end to end standpoint. So what do customers care about? BS:You get simplicity, you get cost, you get great agility, so that’s an example of how we separate ourselves. When somebody gets 4gig, everyone will have 4gig eventually. It’s one of those timing issues. But can they put iSCSI and 4gig together? That’s a bit more challenging. IDM: StorageWorks 06 has consolidation as a central theme, how does HP respond to criticism that centralising can create greater risk through hardware failure? BS:I would actually say that you are lowering your risks. Think about having fifty switches, with fifty cables. You have all these points of hardware failure, of break points. By consolidating these you are in some ways you are reducing the risk.TG: When you talk about risks, the biggest factor unfortunately it is the human factor. That’s where the most failures come, from human error. By consolidating you reduce the risk of human error such as the risk of plugging the wrong cable in the wrong place.DC: The other way to look at it is how to give the risk manager more control. If you can attack the cost both from an equipment and a headcount standpoint, then it resonates well. IDM: So where is HP storage heading? BS: Well, you saw us acquire a company called AppIQ, last week we closed a deal to acquire a company called Outerbay who does database archiving. For HP it’s an investment in storage software, but it’s really an investment in storage systems. Now we have software that accelerates our storage systems. So to think about where we are going, we’re moving towards an adaptive enterprise, so we’re making investments in automating processes. The power of HP is not only having great products and solutions in our categories, but is connecting them together. It’s hard to find storage systems anywhere in the world that aren’t connect to a server or clients. So we’re looking at how you can design that all together and provide clear benefits to customers that niche competitors can’t.Relative to Asia Pacific, I think what is interesting about this region is the adoption of technology. The WAN accelerator for example, enables you to deploy branches faster and more flexibly. So in growing economies where people are building infrastructure like they are here, you can see consolidation really using best practices to accelerate services for customers. Where in the US and in Europe is more about the cost aspect. This is the biggest region in terms of square miles and the distance between things and the scale of the countries. You have the size and then the population, so ways to enhance branch offices and make them more efficient are really going to be key in this region.
The medicine man appears in many different cultures, as a centre of knowledge, of wisdom, of information. This is what HP is pitching itself as, the medicine man with a tincture for any storage ill. HP sees itself as chief Bomoh in the storage industry, bringing together all the different strands of data storage into one cohesive package.
To achieve its vision of a unified storage environment, HP made a number of announcements of day one of the conference. The first, highlighted enhancements that have lead to concurrent Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity in HP’s StorageWorks EVA and XP disk arrays. HP claim that it is the only company to currently offer this capability.
Next came the announcement that it now offers EVA array support for 4Gb SAN environments. This comes barely nine months after its last major EVA upgrade, where 2Gb support was released. HP also announced a new tape library, the MLS2024. It is 2U high and supports 24 cartridges for 9.6TB capacity with LTO drives which, the company claims, is double the capacity and half the size of competitive offerings.
"People think of the virtual library system is disk storage. It’s made to look like a tape library, but you don’t have to manage it and treat it like a disk array."said Bob Schultz, Senior Vice President & General Manager for StorageWorks, Enterprise Storage & Servers Business Unit and Technology Solutions. "For our competitors like EMC, when you set up their VTL, you have to set it up like an array.
You have to manage it and configure it and partition it and do all of those things you do with an array. "With out VTL we’ve missed all of that. You’ve just got to answer four questions: what type of library, how many tape drives, what’s the media you want to have and what’s the name of the library. And then it’s done. It's ready to go. It takes care of everything else in the background. When you add more capacity it does this automatically.
That's HP's ability to work with both disk and tape, you get integration and you don't have to spend a lot of time learning something new."All of these announcements are part of HP's overarching storage consolidation push which, according to Gartner's Vice President of Research Phil Sargent, means greater ease of management, simpler upgrading and significantly reduced maintenance costs. Sargent says that SAN consolidation can actually be the most important aspect of consolidation. "Get your storage right first. Don't put the horse before the cart." he said.
Making that first step can however, be hazardous if done haphazardly. "Over a third of companies performing storage consolidation will experience a major setback due to poor planning." warned Sargent citing common consolidation pitfalls such as poorly defined and enforced standards, lack of knowledge when it comes to legal requirements, lack of project leadership, problems with software co-existence and general lack of skills.
Sargent said that before commencing storage consolidation an organisation must investigate its benefits, clearly understand the objects for consolidation, assess the impact on the disaster recovery plan and above all set realistic expectations and objectives.
Day Two
Day one was all about consolidation, and while this theme continues on day two, today it has a bent on information lifecycle management (ILM).
Vice president of HP Storage Software Frank Harbist got the day rolling by highlighting just how ILM fits in HP's vision of an end to end solution. Harbist says that an organisation's information is arguably one of its two most valuable assets, the other being its people.
ILM is, in HP's mind, as much a part of storage as the hardware. The company sees operational and archived data, traditionally two very different things managed in different ways and in different places, converging into one seamless source of secure and accessible information.
"From an archival standpoint, we'll have the broadest portfolio of products that all integrate with a common backend. Which has a tremendous TCO proposition four our customers." said Harbist.
It also sees the line between storage management and ILM blurring until they are both part of the same process in the not too distant future. Quite an ambition considering it is still not widely understood exactly what ILM is.
"ILM as a concept is still not clearly understood." said Graeme Penn, associate vice president of Storage Asia Pacific for IDC. "Two thirds of organisations do not have scheduled updated information taxonomies, and 35% have no knowledge about what regulatory compliance affects their enterprise."
IDC says that many companies are still in the planning and deployment stage of effective SAN environments and have yet to grasp the value, or even the need for ILM.
"Understanding the value of the information in your organisation is the key to embracing ILM." said Penn. And once this value is recognised, a networked storage system that can grow and adapt as your ILM needs evolve becomes the blocks your company's future is built upon.
Storage Is ILM
Alongside its hardware and software, HP is also pushing into ILM with a view that it be consolidated with storage management. Considering IDC told us all on day two that ILM is still not clearly understood by many organisations, this will mean a greater emphasis on HP's services.
"It's still very early days for ILM." said Frank Harbist, vice president of HP Storage Software. "ILM is not a product, it's about solutions. For HP, that means services."
HP says that it has expanded its services to assist at virtually every stage of storage consolidation. From analysis, to decision making and deployment. The company says that its services help customers deal with storage consolidation issues, aiding them to set objectives, identify constraints and develop an overall strategy for managing and using information throughout their enterprise.
HP has an ambitious, all-encompassing vision for the future of data storage. Time will tell if it becomes the big Bomoh.