By Lee Johns, @StorageOlogist and Director of Converged Storage
Many of you know I am an Ologist. What you might not know is that one of the things I love to do in my spare time is cook, and today I am going to cook up a Cloud in a 17-inch box.
Ingredients
With a minimum of 16 processor cores and up to 512 GB of memory, it has the potential to run 100s of virtual machines and about 100 TB of raw storage in a highly available array. This recipe requires 10U of rackspace and has a single, shared power and cooling infrastructure with built-in networking. Sound implausible?
Let me first start with the ingredients you will need:
Let’s get cooking
First take out your 17-inch box. Here is an HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure I prepared earlier:
Now pair up the 8 servers and 8 storage blades and populate the enclosure.
Storage Blade Server Blade
Believe it or not, you can configure each Storage blade with as many as 12 SFF drives; all hot pluggable. That is right, that half-height storage blade holds 12 SFF hot pluggable drives. They can be SAS, Midline SAS or Solid state and maximum capacity per blade is 10.8 TB. Find out more at the HP D2200sb Storage Blade page.
The base for our recipe is created: a single HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure with your choice of server and loaded with 114 drives (96 in the 8 storage enclosures and 2 in each of the 8 servers).
Add the special sauce
Next comes the special sauce—networking. For this dish, all the traffic will be Ethernet or iSCSI, so we will use the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Modules. Install two of these in the back of the enclosure. This will allow each FlexNIC in the servers to be configured from 100 Mb up to 10 Gb, allowing just the right amount of network bandwidth to suit your taste.
Check out the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10 Gb Ethernet Module for BladeSystem c-Class overview page to learn more!
HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet Module
Now for the topping
The base and the sauce are complete, now for the topping. We want to run virtual machines, so VMware is always a good choice. You may already have some licenses or you may need new ones. Also, for those of you on an alternative diet, you can use Microsoft Hyper-V.
With licenses installed on all servers, what should you do with the server’s available drives? Take that pool of virtual machine-ready resources, which is currently DAS, and whip it into shared storage, with 8 pinches of HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance. These licenses will be installed in a VM on each server and the entire pool of disks can be turned into a clustered, highly available SAN.
For more about the latest SAN/IQ 9.5 software that powers the VSA and the rest of our P4000 LeftHand products in the release notes or you can download the full-featured trial software.
Final steps
To finish, season with your favorite virtualized applications and voila! You have a foundation for a Cloud in a 17-inch box.
Alternative ingredients: Instead of using the HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance, substitute the HP P4800 LeftHand SAN and serve even bigger environments.
At HP this is what we call “Converged Infrastructure,” and in this case, we have built in Converged Storage using federated and scale out SAN technology from HP. Why have your data travel over an expensive network to get processed on the server when you can have it live close to where it works and reduce latency and cost?
Also, for the best presentation, you might want to add in a management application like VMware vCenter or Microsoft Systems Center and integrate the HP Insight Management plug-in (a single product for both servers and storage), which will enable the whole enchilada to be managed from your preferred console.
Variations of the recipe
Here are some variations on the recipe from our customers that you might want to try:
Blakemores Solicitors
“We’re convinced the new infrastructure and brand will provide a competitive edge within what some people are describing as the law profession’s big bang.” --Kevin Goosman, associate and IT manager, Blakemores Solicitors
“This highly flexible, virtualised server and storage environment with its comprehensive disaster recovery capability is the ideal platform to support the business generated by our Lawyers2you brand. We were particularly impressed with the P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) licenses,” says Goosman. “They allow us to use a virtual server’s internal or direct-attached storage as a virtual SAN, without the expense of additional SAN storage hardware.”
ITX Enterprises, Inc.
ITX Enterprises, Inc. uses HP Converged Infrastructure to host a private cloud that speeds behavioral healthcare practices toward becoming Instant-On Enterprises.
“In our old environment, we were spending 70 percent of our time on maintenance and putting out fires and only 30 percent on new projects. With the HP BladeSystem and HP P4800, we have reversed that ratio: now we spend 30 percent on maintenance and 70 percent on new projects.” --Todd Christensen, IT Manager, ITX Enterprises, Inc.
Commerz Direktservice
Commerz Direktservice reduced end-user computing costs by 50 percent with HP Converged Infrastructure.
“HP introduced us to the HP P4800 G2 SAN, which was perfect for our client virtualization needs,” says Kritzen. “We were not aware of any other vendor besides HP that could offer a converged infrastructure solution with all the processing and storage resources we required to host virtual desktops. We get high performance, high availability storage within a standard blade enclosure, with its own isolated and secure storage network.” --Joerg Kritzen, IT Project Manager, Commerz Direktservice GmbH
The finished product
One last thing for those who like to know more than the ingredients, the finished product includes:
*Must have less than 2ms latency between sites.
Oh, and if you would like the full system cooked by the experts and delivered to you ready to eat, then you can always order an HP VirtualSystem VS2. After all, nobody likes to do the washing up.
Check out the attachment just below this text - a new business white paper talking more about Converged Storage.
