Storage Nation

Last week’s news reports that COPAN Systems are back from the dead after their purchase by SGI.  The newly branded arrays have been tweaked (for example 50% of drives can be spinning on the SGI incarnation) but essentially the concept is the same; store shedloads of inactive data.

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  Previous posts: The Four Pillars of Storage Management Four Pillars: Service Four Pillars: The Service Catalogue In any system, resources are finite.  There is always a limitation to what is available.  However there’s also a truism that states if resources are free then they will be consumed at an infinite rate.  So it is with storage.  Someone has to pay for the storage resources that are placed on the floor.  If customers are not charged in some way for their consumption of storage, then they will continue to consume resources ad infinitum.  The solution is to implement chargeback or, to be more precise, billing. Definition It’s worth pausing for a moment and discussing the terms Chargeback and Billing .  When computing was first made available as timesharing, customers were billed for their usage of the shared system.  The billing unit may have been time, CPU resources or some combination of metrics that represented utilisation.  Mainframe resources were so expensive that there had to be an efficient charging mechanism.   The concept of billing is something that was intrisically built into the mainframe design and even to this day, resources can be tracked using records produced by SMF ( System Management Facility ) and reported on through RMF ( Resource Measurement Facility ).  So billing represented a method of charging for usage that wasn’t directly related to the underlying hardware

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010.  Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 This is another post for the hardware geek in you.  James Singer discusses fans; air moving devices is you’re familiar with the IBM lingo.  You’d think fans weren’t that important, but in the C7000 chassis, they are super efficient.  In fact, they were designed with the assistance of model aeroplane experts.  A quick word of warning; this clip is a little noisy towards the end, when James demonstrates the fan’s power. Enjoy! Click here to view the embedded video

In homage to Calvin’s post of today, extolling the virtues of tape, I couldn’t help but create my own tongue-in-cheek version of his post.  So here are my reasons tape still exists in the enterprise. Because we just spent $5million on huge automated tape libraries (that mount each tape on average once a year) on a 5 year depreciation cycle and historically libraries stay forever. Because someone manually changed the tape retention on hundreds of backups to “forever” and we have no idea why they are needed.  If we delete them, chances are the authorities will sue our asses

You may have assumed from my previous post on VPLEX that I am negative towards the concept of storage federation.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, ever since I was involved in deploying ESX onto enterprise storage infrastructure (some 4 years ago), I’ve been waiting for the day true federation would arrive.  Here’s why. Static Configurations Think back to the time before server virtualisation (yes, there was one).  Physically static servers failed over to other physically static servers located in remote data centres.  Once deployed, servers very rarely moved unless there were major physical data centre issues or an upgrade was being performed.  In fact, even when server upgrades occurred, it was typical to acquire a new server and rebuild the application and data on that new hardware to remove any issues with new server drivers, hardware firmware and so on

Those of you with relatively good memories will remember last year’s announcement from Hitachi/HDS, which at the time promised more than it delivered.  In fact, the anagram posed by Claus Mikkelsen on his blog and used as part of the press release was “REGRADES OUR CLASSY TREATS” and should have translated to “STORAGE ARRAYS CLUSTERED”  my tongue-in-cheek alternative was “A DREARY STORAGE CLUSTER” (who could have imagined such a serendipidous alternative).  With EMC’s new release of VPLEX, it’s deja-vu all over again…. With the usual EMC fanfare, VPLEX has been heralded as “ a new storage platform “.

Despite my doubts about its usefulness, on my recent holiday in the US I purchased a shiny new iPad.  OK, over the last few week’s I’ve talked about how I couldn’t see the point of the platform, but two things conspired against me; (a) I love technology (although I stop short of calling myself a geek) and (b) reverse peer pressure from my family goading me about my inability to walk past technology without acquiring it, tipped me over the edge.

I case you didn’t know, I’ve been on holiday since the beginning of April.  I was expecting (after two weeks of rest and relaxation) to be heading off to a new and potentially challenging piece of work.  Unfortunately that work is no longer there.  Not only is the work not there but neither am I – I’m still in the US with my family and can’t travel due to the restrictions in place on aircraft after the volcano eruption in Iceland. In the space of less than a week, I’ve had to put contingency plans into place for both work and pleasure.  We’re lucky; we hadn’t left to go to the airport and so have managed to stay in our accommodation in San Diego.  A two week holiday will simply turn into three; school will have to wait for my wife and children. As for work, I already have some contingency plans in place and things will work out.  But who could have thought such as “simple” natural phenomena could have ramifications for the whole world? The People Problem For the UK and most of Europe the last two weeks have been Easter holiday time (I believe this overlapped the US Easter holiday too).  Quite rightly people have been enjoying time away, but now without the ability to get back home and the fact that more people are away than usual, the lack of key personnel will be causing problems.  None of these are insurmountable if: Key staff can be contacted while away – not disturbed, mind you but contacted in an emergency.  Even with tools as simple as a Blackberry or iPhone, decisions can be made and confirmed via phone, SMS or email

Not being a blades person “per-se”, I was looking forward to the lab session at HP Blades Day where we’d get to understand the physical hardware in more detail.  The video here shows James Singer taking us through the hardware and explaining the basic concepts of how the it is constructed.  What shows through this video is the passion these guys have.  You can tell they live and breathe blade technology.  I really enjoyed this session as I saw it as the starting of my personal vision on where HP are headed in their converged architecture.  Enjoy.  More to come (oh and apologies for James going out of shot – I wasn’t paying attention . Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally I’ve managed to post here the first of a number of video clips from the recent HP Blades Day.  Paul Perez discusses my question regarding the management of the range of (somewhat) disparate storage technologies HP have acquired over recent years.  I’m looking forward to discovering more about: The converged management framework and “on-ramp”.