HP Discover Day 3: Sessions focus on building for the future with Converged Storage

[#1]

By Melissa Elicker, social media editor for HP Storage  @ElickerAtHP

If it’s Wednesday (and it still barely is), then it must be Las Vegas – and another information-packed storage day here at HP Discover.  As I attended several sessions, the one thing that really hit home was the clarity and consistency of the message HP storage is delivering here.

 It’s this simple:  If cloud, virtualization and big data are on your roadmap, then you can’t afford to use storage designed 20 years ago. The best way to move ahead and to accelerate ROI is to put the focus on innovation with storage built with convergence in mind. Here’s a quick recap of three sessions I went to today that expound on that direction in a very real way.

Keynote panel discussion: The power of convergence (TK2124)

A powerful group convened to discuss the integration and innovation that come together to deliver the Converged Infrastructure, including  Bethany Mayer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Networking; Antonio Neri, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Services; Mark Potter, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Industry Standard Servers; David Scott, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Storage Division. Stephen DeWitt, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Group Marketing, moderated the discussion.

David Scott talked about the disappearance of planning horizons in a world driven by virtualization and cloud computing. Unpredictability is the new norm, as you have no idea of the application work load thrown against your infrastructure. This, combined with the explosion of unstructured data overflowing with human information, is at the heart of the challenges Converged Storage addresses.

Boldy go where no storage has gone before (Session TB2707)

“Architecture matters. A feature added in to an old architecture is not the same as a feature built in to the architecture,” said Craig Nunes, Vice President, Marketing, HP Storage, as he dove into a discussion of the accelerate pace, exponential data growth and unpredictability that’s driving today’s new era of IT.

How to cope? Consider SSD technologies and optimization.

Building on that point, Ken Kirchoff, Director, UNIX Systems and Storage for priceline.com, took a deeper dive into how his company is using HP 3PAR Storage to stay ahead of the curve and deal with unpredictable workloads.

He offered keen insight into the impact of Adaptive Optimization on a virtualized infrastructure, and he identified three key benefits that come from Converged Infrastructure:

• Simpler, strategic and tactical decision-making
• Short strategic planning horizon and elimination of the “trickle-down” effect
• Simplified database layouts

As Nunes said,  “No one quite explains it like the guy living it.”

Why your storage costs are out of control, and how to fix it with Converged Storage (Session BB2706)

Tom Joyce, Vice President, Marketing, Strategy & Operations, HP Storage, also hit on the topic of unpredictability – and how it impacts your approach to storage workflow. He summed up the challenges at hand:

• Store – massive scale, virtualized, application proliferation, risk
• Optimize – utilization <30%; reduce costs
• Manage – too many tools and people, not enough time
• Protect – more data, more copies, more risk, less time

He focused on innovative traits (and benefits) of the modern design that is HP Converged Storage:

• Leveraging of industry-standard technology
• Federated scale-out software and architecture
• Converged management and orchestration

Joyce was joined by Shahin Pirooz, executive vice president, chief security officer and chief technology officer, CenterBeam, Inc.

And a few miscellaneous things learned

Other tidbits I picked up today: 3PAR technology grew from high-performance computing roots, and 3PAR coined the term “thin-provisioning.”

Also I heard several references to Moore’s (not Murphy’s) Law. The basic rule states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months. The accelerated pace of change today is most likely leaving Moore’s Law in the dust.

Now speeding toward Thursday – with another full day of storage sessions up and coming.

Follow the daily updates from HP Storage for Discover 2012: www.hp.com/storage/discover

[#2]

Hi,

Why MDS600 array not compatible with new Gen8 servers.

The new Gen8 servers are (BL420c Gen8, BL460c Gen8, BL465c Gen8, DL160 Gen8, DL360e Gen8, DL360p Gen8, DL380e Gen8, DL380p Gen8, DL385p Gen8, ML350e Gen8, ML350p Gen8 servers).

Please explain.

Thanks,

Chiranjeevi

[#3]

My understanding is that the team is working on the MDS600 with Gen8 servers now.  There will be public information about what is supported soon - if you need to know more in the short-term, you'll need to talk to your HP representive to get the information under a CDA.