SCSI Express from HP Discover

[#1]

 By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

While wandering around the HP Discover Zone (demo area) last week in Vienna, I bumped into my colleague Lee Johns checking out a booth that said SCSI Express.  I knew there was a briefing by the SCSI Express team in the bloggers lounge but missed it and I didn't know what it was.  So I took the opportunity to ask Lee, who is the Director of Converged Storage, to explain it to me.  We did a podcast on the spot!  We then talked to Joe Foster in the booth to go a bit deeper on the topic. 

SCSI Express fits perfectly into our converged storage strategy.  SCSI Express is a next generation IO that will improve performance and latency within a server - and if you've been paying attention to what we're doing at HP Storage, we'll be able to take advantage of that with many of our storage products like the P4000 LeftHand and StoreOnce Backup System. 

Here's that podcast with Lee and Joe:

You can also download this podcast by right-clicking here and saving the file OR you can download all of my podcasts from iTunes by clicking here - it will open iTunes and allow you to download all of my recent podcasts.  If you have any issues with this second link, paste this into your browser: itpc://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss69339.xml.   "itpc" is a special format that opens iTunes and lets you download the podcasts from iTunes. 

I have a couple of images to share with you as well - images that we discuss in the podcast.  First, here's what a SCSI Express card looks like:

Joe and I looked at the performance of a single SSD drive connected to a ProLiant server via SCSI Express and a number of SAS-based SSD's connected to a ProLiant server through an HBA on the SCSI Express card. 

Nigel Poulton is a blogger who was at HP Discover and I invited to join our briefings in the bloggers lounge.  I think he must have went to the briefing we had on SCSI Express because he has a technical deep dive on SCSI Express titled I've seen the future of SSD Arrays. This isn't for the faint of heart but explains the technology much more than we did in our 8 minute podcast.  

[#2]

Great post Calvin. I think HP is spot on to focus on developing a new storage interconnect.  The leverage with what's going on with blade infrastructure and virtual switching could be tremendous.   I've been reading up on the NVM Express initiative, have you guys done a head to head compare/contrast with that approach?  Hope to catch up soon!

[#3]

Hey Chris - nice to hear from you.  I didn't know about SCSI Express until I saw it at HP Discover.  The team driving this is the ProLiant team but they're my new best friends so I'll be asking lots of questions!

[#4]

Good morning,

  Exist a ExpressCard (new PCMCIA cards) that translate scsi 2 to my laptop ?

  I have a HP Scanjet 4C and has a scsi 2 connector and before was connected to my desktop that has integrated an scsi 2 card that HP is giving you. Now my desktop died and I want to conect to my laptop with one ExpressCard

  Thanks for your help.

[#5]

Hi Ciro - sorry, your question is completely outside of my domain of SMB and Enterprise storage.  I'd suggest contacting www.shopping.hp.com to see if someone can answer your question.  Best of luck!

[#6]

Hi Calvin,

Sorry I missed you @ HP Discover I also had the pleasure of getting acquainted with SCSI Express at that same booth. I was educated by James Singer.

He told me only the top 2 connectors on the SCSI Express card are SCSI Express enabled. You can tell by looking at your photo. The 2 uppers connectors have more copper connectors on the top. Those are used to extend the PCI-e bus into the SCSI Express disk/module.

Also the benchmark screenshot was for 2 SSD's as well as 2 SCSI Express disks/modules in a RAID0 setup.

That thought I'd mention it. Have a good one.

[#7]

Hi Yuri - this blog post is from a year ago at HP Discover Vienna so not sure if anything has changed but I think it's time for an update on SCSI Express.  I saw James walking around the Discover Zone but didn't realize (or see) where we had the SCSI Express demo.  I had a very busy HP Discover. 

BTW, I saw that you left the same comment multiple times - comments are moderated on my blog as I get about 30% SPAM comments.

Thanks!