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Midsizewize - The SMB/Midmarket Server & Storage Blog by Urs Renggli

MANAGING YOUR DATA EXPLOSION

Published 06 February 2008, 08:23 AM

Hello again,

One of the consistent things I hear from midsize business customers is that they struggle to cope with the burgeoning amount of data in their organisations. Many have direct-attached storage which makes the sharing of storage resources difficult, thus increasing the problem.

Any data storage expert will tell you that implementing a storage area network (SAN) is one of the most effective ways to build in the flexibility, high availability and scalability needed in a modern business technology infrastructure.

One of the arguments I hear against SANs is that some midsize customers think of them as being difficult to implement and manage, and that they can’t afford SAN specialists in the IT function. HP, takes it very serious to design products specifically for midsized customer needs that are simple, affordable and reliable.

That’s why today HP announced the new HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array family (MSA2000), a new generation of entry-level, low-cost Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI disk arrays.

These have been designed to offer a highly available, virtualized SAN environment to effectively help manage exponential data growth especially for customers with smaller site. At an affordable cost, growing businesses can with the new products launched today increase disk utilization and performance with simplified back-up and recovery capabilities.

Standardized storage management software maximizes administrator efficiency and streamlines IT processes. We’ve also built in features you’d only normally expect to find on higher priced systems, including Snap and Clone to protect their data and ensure business continuity.

If you still have most of your storage attached directly to your servers or if you are concerned with regards to data availability make sure to check out the news of today. I am sure it could make a big difference for you and your company as data availability is a critical element for running your business.

Click below to learn more and let us know what you think about this cool product.

Press Release

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080206xb.html

WW Announcement page:

www.hp.com/go/msa2000

We know you are a highly creative bunch, extracting the most from your limited resources, and we’d like to know what you are doing to manage exploding data growth. Post here to tell us and your peers how you do it.

Regards,

Urs

Posted By Urs Renggli | 2 Comments | Trackbacks | Permalink


Comments

Sorry, but this product is not what was expected. Marketing hypes and against the strategy workarounds like this one will not help when the product is not ready on time. I see no good improvements in HP storage products during last three years. Proliant servers are doing exellent, but HP storage becomes more and more behindhand compared to competition. The excellent MSA70 was released (with two years delay, but still done) but now the MSA strategy again went wrong.

Why this product is not green and why it is against HP own storage strategy?

First, three years ago HP declared that HP will lead the industry in transition to 2.5" SAS drives. Remember this promise to customers?

http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/misc/drives-enclosures/sas-hs2.wmv

also read another white paper about 2.5" SAS:

http://www.seagate.com/content/pdf/whitepaper/TP-534.pdf

So these new MSA2000 are for SATA drives only, for low I/O and shall be with 1TB 3.5 "green" drives to be green (with lower capacity drives watts/gigabyte is too high for near-line). But FibreChannel cost is not OK for 7200 SATA. iSCSI is just right. Proliant servers and blades are excellent to utilize iSCSI arrays - the only drawback is that we need a license key, but otherwise iSCSI is built in.

What is needed for "normal" and "green" loads with higher I/O, is 2.5" SAS drives. Also, I would like to use the same "universal" 2.5" drives I am using in Proliant servers.

To be both green and industry leading, please release ASAP the MSA2070f (that is MSA70 with fibre controllers, for customers with fibre infrastructure only), and the MSA2070i (MSA70 with iSCSI controllers). For me MSA2070i will be the "blade servers enabler" in the datacenter. With jumbo frame support iSCSI performance with 2x1Gbit/s active-active MPIO connections is good enough to use it as mainstream technology. In random I/O loads not the 1Gbit/s wire speed but drive mechanics are still the bottleneck, so the more spindles, the better. I purchased thousands of HP 2.5" SAS drives with MSA70 to host various customer IT solutions. Not because they were the cheapest ones, but because the strategy of 2.5" was right, random I/O good, and I also wanted to support the company who dit it first. Release of MSA2070i would allow me to switch to blade servers instead of managing hundreds of DL380 servers with P800 and MSA70, and would solve the current issue of physically moving MSA70 enclosures around when change in storage needs arises. And MSA level cost would be still acceptable for many of my customers. Any idea when really green 25 drive (MSA70 style) enclosure with 2.5" SAS and iSCSI controllers will be released? The same as current MSA2000 enclosures, just with 25x2.5" SAS disks in 2U? MSA2070i is the product I am waiting for 3 years.

Meanwhile I still need to buy DL380+P800+MSA70 instead of blades+MSA2070i. Because I still believe that HP 2.5" green storage strategy is correct. Or was it?

# Sunday, March 02, 2008 08:43 AM by AlmantasK

Thank you for your comments, I always welcome input of any nature from our valued customers. I am sorry to hear that your expectation are not being met in some respects, but please be assured that we strive to make our products the best that they can be and indeed have an excellent reputation for doing so. I'd like to address your comments as follows:

Firstly, concerning the portfolio:

HP has made significant investments in the Midmarket and SMB portfolio offerings. We've recently also launched the EVA4400 (starting at $15K), and have a very competitive offering with All-in-One Storage Systems. Please see the following whitepapers that highlight EVA compared to other storage offerings. http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-6634ENW.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-8080ENW.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Next, I'd like to address the MSA2000. If you compare the new MSA2000fc and MSA2000i to competitive products from other major vendors re: uptime, performance, and cost, it delivers a strong and superior value proposition. Universal 2.5" disk drives -- the same as you use in your ProLiant servers -- are on the roadmap and will be released later this year. However, customers deploying new MSA2000 products are often focused on capacity. 3.5” drives provide the greatest flexibility for balancing performance and capacity, and so the MSA2000 has led with 3.5” drives. When 2.5” drives are available later in the year, the MSA2000 will allow the customer to balance capacity, performance, density and environmental factors. We aim to make all our products as green as possible within the constraints of their technolgy and HP has an impressive reputation for environmental considerations.

We are excited about the new MSA2000 family and are receiving a lot of positive feedback. Let me highlight some features of the new family that are creating some buzz:

- Improved bandwidth – from 2Gb FC to 4Gb FC - Denser chassis / controller architecture – drives and controllers packaged in a 2U chassis - Updated from U160 SCSI architecture to 3Gb/s SAS - Larger LUN count and host connect count – vital for virtual server environments - RAID 6 support for greater protection – critical for large capacity SATA drives with long rebuild times - 1GB transportable cache without batteries – important for single controller systems and environmentally friendly - Large LUN size support – beneficial in tiered storage environments - Controller based Snapshot and Clone functionality – important data protection functionality

Also -- we'd love to have you share your insights in our advisory council and beta program; if you're willing to participate, please email us at charles.vallhonrat@hp.com. If you have additional questions, please feel free to email me at urs.renggli@hp.com.

Best regards,

Urs

# Tuesday, March 04, 2008 01:23 PM by urs renggli

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