Back in September 2009, I helped pull together what I believe was our industry's first Tech Day - events where bloggers are brought in to hear from experts.  The collection of people we brought to that first storage focused Tech Day in Colorado Springs was a who's who in the industry - guys like Stephen Foskett, Greg Knieriemen, Ray Lucchesi, John Obeto, and more. 

One of the attendees was Robin Harris (@StorageMojo).  I haven't had Robin back to another HP event since but brought him to HP Discover in Frankfurt and I noticed he just posted a great article talking about our Converged Storage strategy. 

Last week, I had a blog post and video I did of the Flash Module for the P9500 - something I learned about while at HP Discover.  Things were just a wee bit busy for me and I didn't have time to learn much about the Flash Module while at Discover, but I called Ayman Abouelwafa.  Ayman is a senior architect in our enterprise storage lab and my go-to engineering guy when I need to understand something about P9500.  Ayman was in one of my first video blogs and was very helpful in doing a video we did talking about our collaboration with Hitachi Japan.

After talking to him, I realized there was a lot I didn't get from my 4 minute conversation at HP Discover - so here's a bit more of what I learned from Ayman.  First he told me about some new firmware.

Performance Accelerator

• Ayman and his team worked with Hitachi Japan on Performance Accelerator, a new firmware-based program that significantly enhances the back-end random performance, targeting SSD and flash media.
• This significantly expands the P9500 frame-limit for random IOPs.  Ayman told me the firmware enables around a million IOPs per P9500.  Wow!

Guest post by Andy Sparkes, Technical Director, HP Storage

The recent release of HP StoreAll with Express Query and Autonomy IDOL integration demonstrates the power of storage to provide an intelligent large-scale data repository. This intelligence resides in two locations:

1. The Express Query database is integrated into the file-system.

This deep integration means that the database is able to use the snapshot and replication features of HP StoreAll for its protection and disaster recovery. Current solutions use a side-band database, which are typically relational—and not optimal for managing constantly updated and changing metadata in a scale out system. Side-band databases require their own hardware, management, monitoring and DR resources. StoreAll has a unique segmented architecture that enables the deployment of a distributed database and can utilise the underlying capabilities of the file-system for management and protection.

Generating and extracting metadata from objects and files and subsequent operations on them is a complex task. This has to be done without slowing down the system ingest rate whilst carrying out numerous insert operations into the database.

Prior to HP Discover, my server brethren announced the HP ProLiant SL4500 - a new server based product that was positioned for "big data".  I was working to get a podcast with a couple of guys on the team when we realized that we'd all be at HP Discover together so I offered to do a video with them in their booth.  That turned out to be a great choice because seeing is believing - or I should say is understanding. 

I also have a ChalkTalk giving a high-level architectural overview of HP StoreAll that should help you understand the data services it offers and how it's different from the SL4500. 

I did a blog post highlighting about three weeks ago highlighting what the bloggers had written (or videos they had done) but there were a few more since so I wanted to round out what I've seen and close the book on HP Discover Frankfurt.   Here's what I've found since that last post:

Literally as they were shutting the lights off at HP Discover in Frankfurt, I grabbed Brent Allen and had a quick chat with him to get the latest portfolio updates around HP CloudSystem, which also included HP VirtualSystem.  Brent is always fun to talk and really knows his stuff. 

In this podcast, he talked about enhancements to the family which included support for Red Hat Linux and incorporating the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 into the VirtualSystem (VS3).  Here's the podcast with Brent.

If you rather download this as a podcast, right click here and save the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes - go to the iTunes store and search for "Around the Storage Block" or you can open this link and click on the "View in iTunes" button under my picture.

I was walking around the HP Discover Zone (where the demos are) and noticed a booth that mentioned Capacity on Demand.  Back when we first brought the XP Disk Array into our portfolio, I was the marketing lead in storage on something we called iCOD (Instant Capacity on Demand) - so I stopped to ask about what this was.  That was a good choice because I learned about our latest Capacity On Demand program.

I was losing my voice after a couple of days of a lot of talking but fortunately I only had to ask a few questions as my guest Alain Amroun from our European HP Financial Services team gave me a good overview of the program. Check out the podcast with Alain.

While at HP Discover, I got some time with Sam Routledge (@SamRoutledge).  I first met Sam on Twitter and since have met up with him at several events.  Sam was on our customer panel during the HP Storage Press conference and also did a session with HP Storage Marketing VP Craig Nunes (that as soon as I have a YouTube link to will add it to the blog post). 

Today, I noticed a press release about Softcat that I didn't know was coming so I thought it would be a good time to share a podcast I did with Sam at Discover.  Sam works for Softcat in the UK - interesting story here because Softcat started as a channel partner and has now developed a managed services business. 

Ok - some times I'm a bit slow but I think I just figured out how I can embed a Flickr screen show on my blog.  So here are my pictures from HP Discover in Frankfurt.  I wish I would have got a few more "environment" pictures but I was usually focused on getting either a video shot or a podcast recorded that I didn't stop and smell the roses as much as I should of. 

You'll see pictures from the storage press conference, HP Storage Keynote session (to a packed house), Q&A with the bloggers with David Scott and Alistair Veitch, dinner with the bloggers, and a few other things.  Check it out!