I've known Nick since 2004, when I met him at Microsoft in Seattle. Since then we've met practically twice a year - Seattle, Las Vegas, Austin, Houston, Sydney, Singapore. You name it we covered ;) Lots of fun...
Should have told you this several days ago but I have a couple of blog posts where if you leave a comment (on topic), I'll have an HP Storage shirt sent to you. If you're interested, here are links: > Information Retention and Analytics > Information Protection (Sorry, having trouble getting the link to work so had to re-edit comment several times) If you do, be sure to send me an email with your size and shipping details. All of that is in my blog posts. So leave a comment, get a shirt!
Ok folks, final days to enter and be in to the next round to win the HP Spectre laptop and the HDX removable storage...
Here is some more information about the HP Storage event happening 3rd December 2am GMT. If you are interested in storage make sure to visit the event page and register to attend it online.
I believe my current workplace would be considered enterprise. We operate a 24/7 business with 2.5 days of closure a year.
We are largely a Microsoft/VMWare site. On the corporate side we have Windows + Exchange + SQL plus a significant number of vendor/business applications, along with some HPUX and Oracle.
We currently have 2 EVAs which are becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Our main line of business recently went through a major systems replacement (of a 10 year old, serial based Unix system to Windows/IP/VMWare). At the time we chose to implement HP 3PAR for our VMware and SQL Storage (specifically for those line of business apps).
The 3PARs have been fantastic so far and are a ton easier to manage than our existing EVAs.
Our main issues at the moment are performance, storage growth and ease of operation.
We have been trying to track down seemingly intermittent performance issues on our EVA SANs for almost 2 years. Unfortunately we do not have the skills or tool sets to do so. Vendors tend to recommend StorageWorks which is prohibitively expensive. Without it the EVAs are essentially a black box, storage requests go in, storage comes out (usually).
We have been pushing for replacement of the EVAs and 3PARs appear to be our best option. PeerMotion has been mentioned as an easy migration strategy, however all these tools understandably require outages to cut over from one SAN to another. We simply cannot do this in our environment. We are currently only using a very small subset of 3PAR functionality - Thin Provisioning and Thin Reclamation. Our business is reluctant to use any technology that they are unfamiliar with.
Storage growth is also a major issue for us. A lack of effective capacity management usually results in reactive storage expansion - leaving us in the position where we cannot accommodate user requests for storage unless we purchase hardware - which involves lead times, engineering and change control processes. With a recent push to Thin Provisioning on the new 3PARs there is major concern we will end up in the position of failed writes due to poor management of capacity. Expansion of the 3PARs does not appear to be trivial either, due to their magazine/cage based design, though this may be due to our decisions to spec them with very few disks initially.
We have also installed HP P4500/P4000 storage systems locally and in remote sites. These have proved to be fantastic for certain applications, but do present another island of storage for us to manage. We are now in the position of having 3PAR and EVA on Fibre Channel and iSCSI p4500 storage, across two datacentres, meaning there are a number of capacity issues to manage. Each has their own console and their own management technologies that are totally independent making storage management a nightmare. Combined with manual storage tiers (SSD and FC or FC and FATA) capacity management is a nightmare. We are also without an effective tool to migrate between any of them. StorageWorks and PeerMotion appears to do this - but I shudder to guess at the costs.
In an ideal world we would have one standard storage platform (3PAR) with the ability to transparently migrate data and manage everything from a single pane of glass. One can only dream.
Not sure if I'm really in a good position to answer some of these, but here goes.
> What are your current storage problems in enterprise and SMB?
It always keeps running out and it's never fast enough. :)
Just a few years ago we used HP Data Protector to backup servers and database to an LTO-4 tape library. This was fine until the data on each server grew to the point where it took so long to complete the scheduled backups, that if for any reason the backup of the first server did not complete before the second needed to start, then you had a bunch of failed backups to clean up.
So now backup to FC disk based storage array is used, but tape has the advantage that you can send a copy offsite or put in a fireproof safe for disaster recovery. Offsite backup is possible with disk arrays too, but moving many TB of data can be a problem.
> Do you use any specific technique to solve these problems?
Some plans for offsite disaster recover solution.
> What kind of hardware/software platform are you using to manage storage?
Right now I'm not managing the actual storage except from the server side. Redhat server/RHCS with data on SAN including some GFS volumes. Backup also to SAN. There is another group looking after the actual EMC SAN. In other parts of the world we are using either EMC or HP EVA SAN.
> How do you leverage HP products now?
as above...
> Are you attending HP Discover, or watching online?
Not attending and not sure if I will have time to watch online.
I'd love to have SSD for storage in our Geekzone servers. I tested an Intel server with 800 GB SSD and 256GB RAM for a while here at home. Virtual machines would start in a matter of a couple of seconds instead of the usual two - three minutes to have things up and running...
freitasm: HP is set to make some big storage announcement during the Discover EMEA 2012. They have started the conversation with a web cast a couple of weeks ago (watch below) and continue by publishing case studies at their storage microsite.
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