LeftHand - a case for a new application category

HP announced today their intention to acquire LeftHand networks, an iSCSI and virtualised SAN player.

Now, I doubt HP needed to buy LeftHand for their iSCSI technology. I suspect the bigger play here is the virtualised SAN technology they have - also known as the Virtual SAN Appliance. This allows a SAN to be created in a VMware guest, utilising the storage of the underlying VMware server itself.

I think we have a new technology sector starting to mature; virtual storage appliances.

At first glance you might ask why virtualise the SAN and initially I was skeptical until I gave it some thought (especially with reference to a client I'm dealing with at the moment). Imagine you have lots of branch offices. Previously you may have deployed a DNS/Active Directory server, perhaps a file server and some storage, the amount of storage being dependent on demand within the branch. Deploying the storage becomes a scalability and support nightmare if you have lots of branches. But how does a virtual SAN help?

Well, it allows you to provide SAN capability out of the resilient architecture you've already deployed in that location. Chances are you've deployed more than one physical server for failure purposes. You may also not need a large amount storage, but want advanced features like replication, snapshots etc. Deploying a virtual SAN lets you utilise these features but leverage both the hardware and storage of the ESX infrastructure you've deployed. The crucial point here is that you've benefited from getting the functionality you require without deploying bespoke hardware.

So you reduce costs, still maintaining a resilient infrastructure provide scalable support for small and medium branches. The challenge moves from supporting hardware (which has become a commodity) to supporting software as part of a virtual infrastructure and that's a different issue. What you've gained is a consistent set of functional SAN operations which can be overlaid on different hardware - hardware which can be changed and upgraded without impacting the virtual SAN configuration.

I've downloaded VSA to test as I now have a resilient VMware environment. I'm looking forward to discovering more.

HP Power Calculators

A while back I mentioned a meeting I'd had with HP regarding Green IT (and in my case specifically storage). As part of the discussion, I asked Lucio Furlani (VP for Marketing in TSG) if we could have Power Calculations for HP storage.

Well, true to their word, HP promised and have now delivered the first of a number of storage Power Calculators, available here: http://egui-prod.houston.hp.com/eGlue/eco/begin.do.

The first calculator is for the EVA4400 and there are more to follow. Get on-line and have a look and feed back what you think!

On the power calculator front, EMC, HDS (and now HP) all produce power tools for their storage products. EMC and HDS need to step up and make their tools public to anyone - after all if you believe your product is superior, then you've nothing to hide.

Does anyone know of calculators for IBM, 3Par, Pillar, Netapp etc?

The Conserve IT Con

There's been a lot of blogosphere talk recently about the Wikibon "Conserve_IT" initiative and how California's Pacific Gas and Electric Company are taking the initiative and offering organisations rebates for demonstrable IT efficiencies. You can find comments here, here and here.

Unfortunately as with so many of these kinds of initiatives, the devil is in the detail. It is worth spending time reading the Conserve IT wiki page and Wikipedia's page on the California Energy Crisis of 2000/2001. To quote from Conserve IT: "Power in California is severely constrained". Why is that? The answer is pretty simple; California botched their deregulation of the energy markets and were screwed over by many companies, including Enron. In addition, significant underinvestment has placed restrictions on power distribution within the state (some of which is starting to be remedied).

It is pretty obvious that companies such as PG&E need other methods of controlling energy growth (Wikibon almost claim a virtue of the way per capita energy growth has remained flat in California compared to the rest of the US and Europe) and rebates for efficient energy use is their approach. Don't think of this as an altruisic green initiative - PG&E and others can't provide the electricity required.

So what about the Conserve IT initiative?

"As part of the qualification process, Wikibon has launched the Wikibon Energy Labs, an independent verification service that validates energy measurements of vendor products. "

Do we have so little faith in our vendors? When companies deploy equipment into their datacentres do they not measure the increased load on their PDUs? HDS and EMC provide tools for calculating the power demands of their products. These are detailed methods of analysis, down to the component level. Cisco provide significant information on power draw for their equipment (I've talked about this before). I'm sure other companies do to - feel free to mail me links or tools for calculating power demands for other manufacturers (I've asked HP about this for EVA but had no response so far).

The truth is, most eletricity generating companies are out to make money and giving organisations rebates for using less of their products makes no business sense. Where there are constraints on offering a service, then perhaps rebates or other incentives can do good, but this is not the norm and won't be replicated as a model across the rest of the US or the world.

As an organisation, you can do all the power calculations yourself. It isn't hard and it isn't hard to validate expected power draw against reality by getting one of your electricians to double check power consumption of a particular piece of hardware.

I'd urge all the vendors to make their power tools transparent and available. I would also urge them to incorporate KVA/cooling figures into their management tools.

In the meantime, read the links above and see how pointless Conserve IT is.

Why Tape Technology Just Doesn't Cut It

There have been a raft of tape announcements in the last week, most notably the two 1TB wannabee's IBM and Sun. For around a mere $37,000, plus the cost of a cartridge, I can backup 1TB of my most precious data. HP have also announced plans to extend the life of the DAT/DDS tape drive.



If you are a large enterprise customer then the cost of these drives may be justified (although I struggle to see how, when LTO4 drives can be had for about $5000 a piece) and I'm sure actual versus list price will be much lower.



The thing is, hard drives just continue to outpace tape growth. With 1.5TB drives on the way, and 1TB SATA drives available for less than $200, then disk-to-disk is much more appealing than tape at this rate. Obviously I'm riding roughshod over the issues of disk power consumption and portability but my point is that tape just isn't keeping up the pace in either capacity or throughput.

The whole issue is especially true in the small business area where it is easy to purchase terabytes of primary storage but backup to tape is really time consuming.

Why can't tape produce the equivalent bit density of disk? Is it the more fragile nature of the medium? Clearly tape is more flimsy than a rotating sheet of metal; the T10000 cartridge tape is 6.5 microns thick and the tape itself covers approximately 11.5 square metres, much more than the total surface area of the spinning plates in a hard drive.


I guess we will just have to accept tape capacity will never be good enough. That's just the way it is.


By the way, Sun get a big fat zero in the RSS ratings for not providing their news in RSS feed format....

Green IT with HP

Last Wednesday I passed a pleasant evening chatting with a number of people from HP on the subject of "Green IT". I happen to think that "Green IT" is an oxymoron as IT is never going to deliver computing power using 100% recyclable energy and components. However, IT can certainly improve its green credentials from the position it occupies now.

The HP representatives included the EMEA VP for Marketing, one of the Sales Managers in HP's Power and Cooling Solutions division, the EMEA Environmental Strategies and Sustainability Manager and the UK and Ireland head of Innovation and Sustainable Computing. As you can imagine this gave the opportunities for plenty of lively debate.

For me, there were a number of highlights; firstly HP admitted and recognises that almost all organisations are attacking the green issue not for a sense of altruism but because being green has a direct impact to the bottom line, whether that is in reducing costs or in acquiring new business.

Second, there's the degree of how complex and unstructured the whole green debate is. Is the aim to reduce carbon footprint or to recycle precious resources (like metals)? How should all of these initiatives be measured? What's a good or bad measure? I think I need more time to mull it over.

An interesting side issue of the discussions relates to how HP have selected the bloggers with which to interact. This is being achieved in conjunction with external agencies who obviously follow the market. My concern is how to HP will determine who is an influencer and who is simply spouting hot air. There's got to be a scientific (ish) basis for this; perhaps it's readership size, perhaps it is references to their blog, perhaps it's the level of comments. Perhaps it is based on keyword count and/or other semantic scanning.

However it is achieved, companies like HP will need to ensure that the tranche of their marketing spend directed at bloggers is appropriately spent. It will be really interesting to see how this develops.

HP Give It Large

Yesterday afternoon I had an opportunity to meet with HP as part of an informal session to make contact with storage bloggers. HP are obviously interested in the possible benefits keeping the blogging community well informed could bring, however my blog is not to act as a mouthpiece for the HP marketing department and I'd suggest if you want to keep abreast of their technology releases, use this XML link.

What's more interesting is where HP storage is headed. Take for example their new Extreme Storage solution. A scalable NAS product which reaches the heady heights of 820TB in a single unit. Fantastic you may think, and I guess if you have a real need for this volume of data in a single unit, then it's the one for you.

However, apart from the obvious issues like whether your raised floor can actually take the weight of a fully configured device (and how do you cool this kind of beast), what troubles me more is how much data on a system like this is actually of any use.

Although the ExDS9100 is aimed at delivering storage for high performance solutions, I think there is a risk of arrays like this being deployed to defer the hard work of actually classifying and setting sensible deletion policies, which, let's face it, for most companies has sat as a task in the "too hard box" for as long as NAS storage has been around. It may well be that some customers see this product as a way to defer the inevitable and actually start managing their data.

Anyway, fair play to HP for entering the market and making use of their Polyserve acquisition and fair play to them for wanting to talk to the blogging community too. If I get any juicy nuggets of information (like whether HP have a position on cloud storage), you can be sure I'll share it here.

New Product Announcement,,,

There's another new product out this week from HP - the XP24000... It seems to have some similarities to another product launch, 224 ports, thin provisioning, partitioning... :-)