Grid computing's heavy footprint on HP storage strategy
Grid computing's heavy footprint on HP storage strategy
Aug 8, 2005: HP's vision of storage in the future focuses largely on grid computing and the company is busily adapting its storage lines in readiness for the mass migration to grid architectures.
This emerged publicly through a meeting held between Ann Livermore, executive vice president, HP Technology Solutions Group, and a number of the company's enterprise storage customers to outline how HP views the future of storage.
"First, storage should be easily acquired, deployed and managed. Storage capabilities should be scalable in many dimensions, including capacity, performance, resilience and geographic dispersion," announced Livermore. "Furthermore, it is desirable that storage capabilities are deployed as they are needed.
"These issues can be addressed through a more modular architecture. One way to think of it is as a self-managing storage grid. The grid will provide flexible, scalable, large-scale shared pools of storage and will include provisioning and other storage-management features."
Livermore told the audience that HP has the concept of an HP StorageWorks Grid which serves as a storage architecture blueprint for its strategic investments.
"The HP StorageWorks Grid will perform the functions of today's network storage while scaling differently and providing integrated management of the storage grid as though it were a single system," she said.
The HP StorageWorks Grid will consist of a modular hardware infrastructure. The individual building block modules are built from high-volume commodity hardware. HP calls them smart cells. Each smart cell contains storage media - for example, disk or tape drives. Each smart cell also contains a central processing unit and perhaps cache memory as well.
Smart cells are characterised by useful combinations of physical storage attributes and management control points. The idea is that by networking these smart cells together, you can create a peer-to-peer grid that forms a very flexible, unified and agile ecosystem that is capable of providing real-time scalability.
"The concept of the HP StorageWorks Grid represents a logical evolution from today's SANs. A storage grid can be added to an existing SAN, just like a conventional storage array. Or a storage grid can be created from scratch," added Livermore.
"The second attribute of the storage delivery model of the future is that it will present just one entity to manage. The modular storage grid will be viewed and controlled as a single system image from an administrative point of view.
"The system will be designed from the ground up to be self-managing. Tasks traditionally associated with storage resource management will be accomplished by the utility itself, with no administrative involvement," continued Livermore.
The system will include the necessary features for an administrator to monitor, configure and control the system as a unit. But it will not require an administrator to know anything about the individual smart cells. Instead, administrators will deal with business application requirements.
Livermore said the promise of large-scale storage pooling - or virtualisation - will be fully realised.
The third attribute of the future storage delivery model is that the HP StorageWorks Grid will be designed as a service-oriented architecture.
"Everything that is traditionally thought of as information technology can be rendered as a grid service. This includes computer systems, a quantity of computer cycles, storage space, a printer, an application, a data file, a set of records in a database, and more. Virtually any IT resource can be rendered in the form of a grid service.
"Think of this service in the same way that you think about a consumer service - anything from hiring a repairman to downloading a music file. You need a service. You find it. You request or purchase it. And, finally, it is provided to you. The storage grid infrastructure will enable each service to be registered, discovered, provisioned, accessed, shared, removed, managed, monitored, metered and even billed for."
Livermore said that HP viewed its StorageWorks Grid as an enabler for a a loosely coupled, service-based IT world.
"It is clear that this vision for the future of storage is comprehensive and ambitious. The HP StorageWorks Grid represents a much more capable, application-focused environment than is possible today.
"It will take several years to fully develop. It will be an evolutionary journey. But it's a journey that you can start on today. It's a journey that many of our customers have already begun," concluded Livermore.
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