Storage Nation

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

The other news item I alluded to in the previous post is a little company called Nasuni.  I chatted with them at the urging of the smartest PR person in the business, Judy Smith at JPR Communications, a couple of days ago and I thought I would share my views here. Here is a pretty picture

We learned as kids.  Here is an article I wrote about it in Mainframe Executive, which has been cross-posted to MainframeZone. I am also pleased that an article by moi — the REAL storage blogger wannabe — has just hit the wire at ESJ.com.  It covers file proliferation and the lame efforts of the industry to scale

“What will it take to make you scream?” asks Milo, the bad guy in The Last Boyscout. “Play some rap music,” responds Bruce Willis in the lead role of private investigator Joseph Hallenbeck.

Home lab storage I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place. Storage I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options on any testing I’m performing.  The storage is broken down as follows: DroboPro – 8.4TB of raw storage across 7 disks (nearly fully populated) – iSCSI Iomega ix4 – 2x 4TB of raw storage across 4 disks – iSCSI & NAS CLARiiON – 2.2TB of raw storage across 15 disks – Fibre Channel This gives me 18.6TB of raw capacity.  One of the ix4 devices is production, running my VMs on ESX, the other is for testing performance and configurations but will ultimately form my remote backup solution.  Servers Server Rack My main server is an Intel Based, 2 CPU, 8 core custom-build machine with 16GB of RAM.  It runs ESXi 4.0 and has access to all storage resources as well as another 1.6TB of internal storage.  This machine runs all my production and test virtual machines.  A second server runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (upgraded this week).  This is my Hyper-V test server.  It has a single 500GB drive and access to all storage resources, including fibre channel via an Emulex LP12000 HBA card. I also have two other smaller servers that act as test machines in various scenarios, one of which is currently acting as an OPEN-E server (the subject of a future post). Fabric The fabric in my test lab is provided by a number of McDATA 3232 switches.  Although they are servicable, they are looking old now, so I’m looking to acquire a Cisco MDS switch to add to these for some time in the future

This week we shared with our partners that Oracle and HDS will not renew the current distribution agreement for our Enterprise Storage platform that we had with Sun Microsystems prior to the Oracle acquisition. That agreement expires on March 31. We have enjoyed a very good relationship with Sun over the past nine years and have many joint customers whom we consider as our own. Oracle has ongoing capability to service their installations beyond the end of the Sun contract and we will continue to work with them to ensure that these customers receive the same high level service and support.

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies

 iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS .  That got everybody twittering -  with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair!  So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion. If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR.

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process