VM /ETC

Now that HP Storage Tech Day is a few days removed and all the attendees have had more time to digest what we experienced during our day and a half in Colorado Springs, several blog posts have been published worth reading. The event also picked up some mainstream coverage from sites like The Register, TechVirtuoso.com, ITKnowledgeExchange.com, and Tech Republic.

This post lists links some of the blogs from other HPTechDay attendees that I think make some great points or cover pieces I missed regarding what we saw about storage virtualization at HP. I’m adding some of my own opinions to expand on these ideas from a server virtualization perspective.

I’ve also archived 500 of the #HPTechDay tweets into a .pdf report created by Tweetdoc.org. Check the end of this post for that document complete with working links to photos and urls.

First of all, HP’s Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy on Twitter) has a master index of all posts and articles from HPTechDay in his post StorageWorks Tech Day – in their words so far…. Check it out for just about everything written on the event.

HP StorageWorks TechDay & SMB Announcements
Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_si)

Simon touched on the HP product announcements during the event which I have not covered to date here on VM /ETC.

“There has also been an announcement from HP this morning around a range of new products targeting the SMB market.  As this a StorageWorks TechDay of particular interest is the X500  and X3000 shared storage appliances.  The X500 runs Windows Home Server though this good looking enclosure could be a good candidate to have OpenFiler installed on it and to be used as an iSCSI appliance – great for your home or work VMware ESX or Hyper-V lab.”

A quick check of the VMware Online HCL for supported HP SANs did not list these new products yet. This could be in the works, but, as Simon points out, for now these remain a lab scenario if intended to be used as shared storage for VMware virtual environments.

#HPTechDay: HP really ‘gets’ storage!
Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton)

Nigel reinforced a silent concern of mine before attending this event – I really did not know much about the HP storage line. Frankly, I have not been running into to HP storage devices in VMware environments that often (partly due to our VAR partnerships), and I was somewhat surprised about my lack of product knowledge when mentally preparing for HPTechDay. Simon indicates that part of my issue could be because public opinion of HP’s storage products has suffered somewhat:

“Prior to the event I admit that I felt the HP storage portfolio was bloated and somewhat chaotic – and this despite the fact that I am well versed in two of their more established products – EVA and XP.  I also had a personal opinion, which I know is shared by others, that the StorageWorks group at HP were the poor relation in a large and otherwise wealthy family.  My opinion was that HP didn’t really ‘get’ storage – at least not like EMC or HDS ‘get’ storage.”

He then expresses how his exposure to the new strategy at HP has changed his mind:

“If I had to choose one thing that I took away from the event, it would be that HP actually do get storage.  They have some seriously good products and some top notch people behind it all.  It was actually a pleasure playing with the kit (really slick interfaces…) and having access to such open, honest and technically gifted people.  I can’t stress enough the open and honest way in which everybody came across.”

Simon specifically mentions that the Left Hand, EVA, and SVSP products interested him the most. Another setiment I share exactly and I wrote about in my first post about the event – HP Tells Storage Virtualization Future With Left Hand.

HP Techday 2009: The Final Thoughts!
Devang Panchigar (@storagenerve)

Devang sums up some of the “blanks” that HP left us with:

“So other lacking things from HP were the Cloud Strategy (if they ever plan to enter that space), Unified Storage details, FCoE discussions, Procurve, Deduplication platform discussions, IBRIX technology integration details, Storage Management, Storage Optimization and XP.

It may have been very hard to cover all these platforms in a day and a half with giving all the technology details behind it. Also remember this was an NON NDA session, so we were not preview to all the future products and technologies.”

My own conclusions are in the aforementioned VM /ETC post, but in a quick summary I would say that building block, x86 based storage devices that enable clustered, non disruptive performance tuning, disk expansion, and LUN replication are a compelling vision for shared storage as the back end for virtual infrastructure.

HP Storageworks Tech Day 2009, Day 2 -

John Oberto (@johnoberto)

John has a couple of brief clips in this post that intrigue me. The first is on the IBRIX product:

“IBRIX allows for the integration of several disparate storage systems into a single, unified file system using its Fusion file system. It solves two distinct enterprise storage problems: high capacity, and high performance. With IBRIX, infinite capability scalability, just-in-time scalability, and better manageability are a few of the benefits of deploying it.”

Almost sounds to me like Windows DFS on steriods, but I know it’s got to be much more than that if Pixar used it to produce films like Shrek and Cars. I asked about IBRIX ending up as a possible shared storage target for VI, but the HP response indicated that the idea wasn’t being considered.

Another interesting quote from John that has me needing to investiagte more:

“BTW, do you know that you can automate LeftHand deployments using HP Storage Essentials?”

Once again, not being familiar with HP’s products leaves this a technical mystery to me for now, but this seems to offer the potential to automate storage growth for performance and dynamic demand. Two key factors in VI, no doubt. I must have missed this point during the presentations.

Twitter coverage – Tweetdoc report
(all attendees and others)

The social media buzz around this short event was a story all by itself. If you were in the room while HP was presenting you would have seen every notebook with a Twitter client open. There was an amazing online conversation taking place as the event unfolded.

Stephen Fosket sums up the success of the exposure generated for HP via social media best in his post about the event The Truth About HP’s Tech Day:

“They invited us in to spread the word about their products and get blog exposure. And it worked! The storage Twitter-sphere was dominated with #HPTechDay postings for days, and attendees did indeed blog about the stuff they saw. It was a success from HP’s perspective, and now that we know more about their products we will likely cover them in the future.”

Tweetdoc.org lets you archive tweets by keyword or hashtag for up to a maximum of 500 in a single report. Download most of the “other conversation” from the HPTechEvent.

HPTechDay Tweets (586)

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