Near "real-time" summary of this morning's first two sessions:
Welcome all to HP Storage Tech Days, Day 1 kicking off right now. The crowd awaits in hushed expectancy in this giant amphitheatre … well actually it’s a conference room in Building 6 of the HP campus in beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado, and the crowd is a few dozen tech bloggers and engineers, but expectancy there certainly is as Craig Nunes launches into his Strategy Overview I’ll be blogging live today and tomorrow morning – or until my hands drop off, whichever comes first -- about the themes of the Tech Day, our strategic focus on converged storage, and the products that HP is strategically investing in (3PAR, HP LeftHand, StoreOnce).
Craig heads marketing for HP storage – heads up, he’s going to make claims “you will not believe
Craig Nunes: Converged storage overview
First, some HP growth numbers:
The new HP Storage biz: Where are we investing? We’re focusing on eliminating boundaries. The new HP Storage, you gotta think about it 3 ways:
Let’s take ‘em one by one:
Converged Storage. We’re aiming at the fastest growing moves in the market – e.g. cloud deployment; ITaaS. Lefthand Scale-out SAN has got virtualization covered; IBRIX covering the content explosion; StoreOnce handles deduplication and disk based backup. Each is high-growth.
What is Converged Storage?
Think of it as an architecture.
And it’s more than a vision, we’ve made announcements:
Issues with dedup 1.0 include architecture forces data rehydration; limited scalability; extended recovery times that impact the business; backup failures increase risk and affect SLAs.
Deduplication 2.0 must deliver: federated dedup for deployment independence; superior scalability and efficiency for cloud and big data deployments; rapid restore.
HP StoreOnce B6200 3.5x ingest speed; 7x restore speed; Built-in high availability
HP LeftHand : Converged virtual storage Virtual SAN appliance VSA and P4800 a BladeSystem based system. What’s the story for Unified? If you’re looking backward, go for unified. We’re going for converged storage.
X5000 Converged Virtual Storage; HA file server cluster, array controllers, 32TB Capacity, Windows storage server. Scalable to 128 TB! Nice chassis!
VirtualSystem: ONE SKU, call, and company. Best of Breed; Path to Cloud. In reality, not new, though debuted under this moniker since last year. Late 2007 HP debuted 3cV formalized in 2010 under one SKU and one support contract. It is the only thing out there challenging VCE.
Brad Katz: HP P4000 LeftHand overview
Brad knows the product probably better than anyone – hence no slides (applause!) Will cover where HP is going, where we see the market going. We’ll be doing a lab later this morning.
An impromptu poll of the audience prior to the Tech Day shows these guys are pretty familiar with LeftHand.
It’s a midrange position, but can go low or high into the low enterprise range; a broad portfolio, but sweet spot is in the midrange.
A scaleout system
You have the ability to create clusters, nodes, to meet requirements for different apps. Federation gives you the ability to migrate data online. Simple, fast data movement across clusters, all done seamlessly in the background and user can monitor; administrator can control speed.
The other part of it is asset refresh; you decide it’s time to refresh, just bring in new node to the cluster. Interoperablity between all the platforms in the family is a big part of federation. The platforms include: VSA (kind of low-end); rack models 4300, 4500 enterprise and high end platforms (P4800).
VSA is very much a picture of convergence. Lets you annex any number of third party storage devices and add them to the LeftHand federation. When the environment grows you can upgrade easily to physical platform.
P4800
Generally deployed in groups of 2 nodes. At shows, people get excited about the 2 huge drawers of 35 disks! One JBOD serves 2 nodes. Today we offer 2TB disks, 70 disks. 12 spindles low end, up to triple that.
Density is far beyond more traditional rack mount models. When launched about 2 years ago we said it was VDI focusedbut then after a several successful deployments we expanded beyond VDI. We’re seeing large deployments and multi site deployments, it’s really starting to take off.
Within a single BladeSystem enclosure you can have compute on one side, storage on the other, networking below; all in one package! This is true converged storage. Conceptually cool, but real advantages: e.g. you don’t need the physical hardware, switches, bundles of cables. You can add management console if you want. Also, since late last year, support for FlexFabric.
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