HP LeftHand P4000 Peer Motion demo
I had a lot of fun and learned a ton myself over the last few days by getting some hands on time with our HP LeftHand P4000. Let me briefly recap what I've done so far:
- In my first post titled HP LeftHand Zero to VSA, I showed the new installer for our Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) that makes installing a VSA very easy - I counted 5 steps.
- Part 2 is titled HP LeftHand P4000 Centralized Management Console (CMC) demo and in this video I show the CMC being used to do some basic provisioning tasks with the P4000 VSA's I created in part 1 - tasks like create a management group, a cluster, a volume and then connect the volume to a host.
Today's video is cool!
I really enjoyed doing the hands on I'll show you today. I used Peer Motion software to do a cluster swap and volume migration. As I was doing this, I thought it would be awesome to have a video playing on the P4000 volume that was part of the cluster swap or volume migration - so you can see that this happened without impacting the "users" - in this case me.
First a little background on Peer Motion
There's a new white paper about Peer Motion that is almost finished - so instead of me trying to be creative in talking about it, here's an excerpt from the paper:
Peer Motion is HP’s data migration technology which offers HP LeftHand users two simple and flexible methods of moving data volumes within a LeftHand SAN. Those methods are volume migration and cluster swap. Volume Migration and Cluster Swap employ storage federated software, to transparently move application workloads between tiers of data storage and/or storage clusters in a LeftHand environment. Peer Motion on HP LeftHand supports all P4000 storage models - spanning from the P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) to the midrange and high performance P4000 storage systems.
In short, Peer Motion enables dynamic resource leveling of LeftHand storage clusters without storage downtime and/or maintenance window outage. Resource leveling for LeftHand systems is quick, easy and executed within a few simple steps thus eliminating the need for long term storage planning and complicated budget forecasting.
Sometimes it's easy to be skeptical about what a vendor document says - when you see how quick and easy this stuff was on the video, you won't be skeptical. Check out the video:
That wraps up what I wanted to show you today. I'm hoping that my R&D guys can get me the resources to do a multi-site SAN and we'll simulate a site level failure in the near future. That will be fun! In the mean time, we do weekly live demos of the P4000 that you can join. Go to www.hp.com/go/P4000Webinar to sign up. As I've told you before, you can get a full featured trial of the P4000 with our 60 trial of the VSA - get it at www.hp.com/go/TryVSA.
