Around the Storage Block Blog

[#1]

Guest post by Priyadarshi Prasad, APEX Product Manager

Recently I was asked to share my opinion on areas where HP storage has been innovating and I replied, “In my biased opinion, this product, (APEX), has single handedly made HP storage a leader in the Tier 1 quality of service space. The product lets customers meet quality of service for their mission critical applications. It lets them specify service level objectives for Applications (think OLTP, Backup etc) and works with the server (HPUX/Windows/Linux) and storage (P9500) to meet that SLA.”

My opinion may be biased because of course I am the Product Manager. But what is the market/customers/competition saying.

• Fact 1:  9 months after APEX launch, the competition (EMC/HDS/IBM…) has no answer whatsoever. Some are doing their best to ignore, and some their best to fudge, like HDS’ Claus in his blog.  His claim that HDS’ Server Priority Manager which can do similar to what APEX does was, well, FUD. And lest we forget, we also have the same product to offer to our customers, and we know what it can and cannot do. Our response by @HPStorageGuy Calvin Zito to Claus is here.
• Fact 2 - APEX is winning in the market! In the recently concluded APEX business status review, APEX exceeded its forecast targets on all parameters. APEX not only has its first customer (that was long time back) but is also ramping up nicely. Given how extremely conservative large enterprise customers’ IT departments are, it was a pleasant surprise to see customers adopting APEX with such enthusiasm.

So what are we doing now. Celebrating? Far from it. Miles covered, and many many more miles to go.

We just announced another path breaking feature in APEX (with v2.1) - the Dynamic LDEV Ownership Management, or DLOM. This allows LDEVs (which are owned by micro-processor blades in P9500) to be moved dynamically from one MPB to another depending on how loaded MPBs are. This results in improved performance (improved quality of service) and better utilization of P9500 array resources. None of the competitors, including HDS, will have this.

What is great about DLOM is that it does not have any OS/platform dependency whatsoever. Every P9500 customer, existing or prospective, can use APEX to improve quality of service of their P9500 Disk Arrays, regardless of what hosts they are running.

On the roadmap front, we are continuing to work to expand platform support for APEX . Currently APEX (I/O prioritization feature) works on HP-UX, Windows and Linux. In the next release, our aim is to provide QoS on very popular platform, and expand HBA support.  With this, we will bring value to a large number of enterprise customers. I find this to be very exciting and I think you will get great value from APEX.

(Editor's note: I have attached a PDF version of the APEX software customer presentation - it provides a lot of detail on APEX functionality, benefits, and support.  On another note, I met Claus last week in San Francisco and had a great time with him at a #storagebeers event. However, given the venue, we didn't have a chance to demo APEX for him.)