Category: HP Storage

In a recent podcast HP Storage Strategist, Brad Parks, states, “Over the last 18 months HP has been beating the converged infrastructure drum.” Well, that’s great but more important than just beating that drum, HP needs to continue to provide evidence that all of its divisions are marching to that beat. This week HP StorageWorks division fell in step by enhancing the products in its storage portfolio to better deliver on HP’s broader vision of delivering a converged infrastructure for all size enterprises.

Those who have their feet on the ground are always closest to where the action is and few are closer to end-users in regards to their desktop and server virtualization initiatives than VMware resellers. These individuals recently gathered in Orlando, FL, for VMware’s annual Partner Exchange in part for training but also to swap stories as to where their customers are in their respective journeys toward virtualizing their environments. What they heard and shared is that customers no longer debate whether or not to deploy virtualization. Rather their customers are trying to figure out just how far down the road they can go.

The introduction of Database Availability Groups (DAGs) into Microsoft Exchange 2010 has been a godsend for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) with less than 1000 employees as it gives them the same Exchange availability and reliability features once reserved primarily for large enterprises. But for enterprises with more than 1000 users, Exchange 2010 DAGs creates new storage challenges in SAN environments unless these three techniques for optimizing SAN storage utilization and performance are followed.

Enterprise storage array replication software is rarely accused of being “user-friendly” or “simple to manage”. If anything, exactly the opposite is true with users grumbling about the engineering resources and professional services required to implement it and then the level of end-user knowledge and skill needed to manage it.

Storage has gotten much more appealing over the last few years as cloud computing has found its way into the vernacular of the mainstream press. But at its core storage still operates in the same old boring way that it always has – at the SCSI layer. It is for this reason new features are needed from time to time so SCSI can continue to meet the new demands of the emerging virtualized infrastructure which is exactly what is being announced today by vendors like 3PAR and VMware.

The appeal of sub-volume optimization to end-users is plain as it promises to lower storage capacity and management costs while increasing application efficiency. But before users succumb to its allure, they need to verify vendor claims regarding its benefits as vendors are stretching them to make this technology fit your environment.

As more organizations consolidate servers and create private storage clouds to store the data associated with these servers, the need to lock down that data to meet emerging data governance and eDiscovery demands has grown more acute. It is for reasons like these that features such as 3PAR’s new Virtual Lock are becoming more sought after on storage systems.

There are so many virtual operating systems (VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer) competing for my attention, until now I had not closely examined Red Hat KVM’s value proposition. It was only after I did a little research that I began to understand why 3PAR sees adding support for KVM as important.

Savings can evaporate as the hidden costs associated with managing a virtualized server environment become known. Among those costs, wasted storage capacity on individual VMs may be the most difficult to control unless an organization puts in place a storage infrastructure that can automate the reclamation of this storage.

When thin provisioning first started to gain some traction 5-8 years ago and show up as a feature on storage arrays, it is unlikely that many grasped how it was laying the foundation for the automated recapture of stranded storage capacity. Fast forward to today and we now see this happening with increasing frequency. The latest evidence of this is today’s announcement from 3PAR that highlights how Oracle database users can achieve ongoing capacity savings when placing their Oracle databases on thinly provisioned 3PAR InServ Storage Server volumes.