(Editor's note: You can read this post in German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French)
A step-by-step approach to moving from static to dynamic utility storage to support virtualization and cloud computing
They say that cloud is a journey. For most, it’s one fraught with challenges, obstacles, and, yes, grief, particularly when it comes to storage.
Having spent nine years managing a service provider data center, I can attest to the emotional attachment we have with infrastructure. The job often forces us to spend more time with machines than our family.
1. Denial: “My current storage is fine.”
It’s time to face reality - the era of the storage silo is over. Most of today’s storage was architected around the same time as the first web browser… dual-controller monolithic systems supporting predictable, physical workloads.
While these systems have been upgraded over the years, foundational gaps are revealing themselves. Look at today’s data center – virtualization, cloud and an explosion of big data content – all unpredictable workloads that require a different approach.
2. Anger: “I was told this system would be great for cloud.”
The goal of cloud is to enable the transparent delivery of IT “as-a-service.” Service delivery starts with a massively shared physical infrastructure. Just ask public cloud service providers like Savvis that use common elements to host infrastructure, platform and software services.
I’d like to dig into three critical design elements based on HP’s experience as the storage platform for four of five leading service providers in the Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders Quadrant:
3. Bargaining: “My system does all that.”
On the off chance your fragile emotional state has you bargaining the future ROI of your cloud initiative lets dig into how HP 3PAR Utility Storage uniquely addresses these areas.
Dynamic multi-tenancy: With cloud you have many applications fighting for the same resources. 3PAR eliminates the need to fight. Massive parallelism is achieved with a mesh-active design where all applications securely access the power of the whole cluster. Additionally, the system separates the processing of control functions and actual data IO. Translation: the video streaming program doesn’t choke your mission-critical OLTP database. And it does it transparently… without any manual tuning. This optimization has allowed many service providers to double the virtual machine density on their servers and contributed to the 450,000+ SPC-1 IOPS delivered by a SINGLE 3PAR system.
Efficient use of resources: Cost is a major driver to public cloud providers. For private cloud to compete, you must get the most from every dollar and disk. HP 3PAR accomplishes this with a 4th-gen zero-detect ASIC. In lay terms, the system sucks the fat from provisioned volumes and constantly hunts down empty 16k segments. (Watch @HPStorageGuy Calvin Zito hunt down some fat in this zero-detect lab.)
But it’s not enough just to run thin; you must do it without sacrificing performance. Unlike other “bolt-on” thin storage implementations, with 3PAR you can run performance sensitive applications in a thin state without impacting SLAs. Ask your current array provider if they can do that… not all thin is equal. The proof is in the HP Get Thin 50% capacity savings guarantee.
Management automation: Much like the human respiratory system, 3PAR performs many core tasks on its own as they are needed – autonomically. An example is 3PAR Adaptive Optimization that moves blocks between SSD and HDD to balance cost and performance. It extends to provisioning… as IT folks we don’t always get things right the first time so it’s important to not only provision but also re-provision easily. With 3PAR it takes 2 mouse clicks and causes zero application disruption. (Want to see Calvin provisioning a volume?)
Management is also important in the context of the cloud stack. An example is the fully automated provisioning that we can do through service portals with HP’s storage provisioning manager as part of HP CloudSystem. This level of integration is only possible when you have server, storage, and networking engineering under the same roof. It allows an administrator to define QoS standards so that all cloud services, including storage volumes can be provisioned without any admin bottleneck.
4. Depression: “What do I do now?”
Obviously you are at an IT vendor web site so I wouldn’t leave you hanging… HP can help. We can eliminate the boundaries between storage and the rest of IT and accelerate the path to cloud.
Enterprises evolve at different speeds. If you are just now amplifying your virtualization effort or scoping a hybrid cloud project any gains you make in storage agility and efficiency will serve you well. HP and our channel partners offer a range of service engagement options to help you blueprint your path to cloud nirvana and architect a transition plan to get you there. Examples are the HP Cloud Assessment and Discovery Workshops.
I’ve embedded quite a few links into this post but here are a few more you may want to check out:
>> Buy 50% less storage capacity… Guaranteed!
>> Thin Conversion and Storage Federation with HP 3PAR(Video)
>> Converged storage for the new era of computing
>> HP positioned as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End Modular Disk Arrays by Gartner
>> Flip through the full set of 3PAR related posts
5. Acceptance: “I’m ready to get started.”
Great! Thanks for taking the time to read this whole post. What trials and tribulations have you found on the pathway to cloud? Any best practices or tips to share with the rest of the class?
For those in the United States, we are going to be hitting the road soon with a travelling HP event focused on the path to cloud. Check to see if we are coming to your town with the HP Pathways to Cloud Road Show 2012 and sign up now.
I’d love to meet you at the event, hear from you on this blog or chat with you on Twitter – @HPBradParks.
