StorageRap

Lee Johns (the apparition) explains HP's StoreOnce technology

Lee Johns is one of my new co-workers at HP and he gets himself into all sorts of interesting things - like the upper left corner of this video, where he talks about data sprawl, dedupe and HP's StoreOnce technology.

He does an excellent job highlighting how StoreOnce technology is portable and can be located in any location in the infrastructure with the ability to transfer deduped data without the necessity of rehydrating and deduping it. 

 

 

Remaking Storage with Jay Livens

Jay Livens and I were both in Boulder, CO last week for an HP worldwide storage marketing meeting where he spoke about HP's broad portfolio of data protection products.

The link (above the video) will take you to an ESG Lab Report on HP's Data Protector and Deduplication Solutions.  Here is a taste of what you will find in that report:

A growing number of organizations are struggling to protect information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Most are alarmed at the rate of data growth in these locations. Many lack the IT staff and expertise needed to manage traditional tape-based protection methods. Many more are frustrated with the cost and complexity of managing tape media at remote offices. Disk-based backup and replication to a corporate data center reduces the complexity and risk, but, until recently, it’s been too expensive to justify due to the cost of remote office disk capacity and the WAN connectivity required.

At the time of testing, the street price started at $4,499 for a 2 TB system. This included dynamic deduplication and low bandwidth replication—ESG Lab found the HP Storageworks D2D to be an affordable, simple, and effective solution for the protection of valuable information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Data protector provides a single point of management and catalog for local and replicated backup data that reduces complexity and cost for distributed environments.

Leo and the cloud vision at HP

I made this steering wheel cam after watching Leo address the company today in a world wide broadcast to all employees.  I was glad to see him speak intelligently about the enterprise storage, server and networking business and I was very interested to hear him speak about the intersection of our end of the business with the personal products and imaging/printing parts of the business.  He showed a lot of class, humor and aggressiveness and I think I'm going to like his leadership style.

What was surprising about EMC's bid for Isilon

A screencast discussing the bid EMC is making for Isilon.  Covers the topics EMC highlighted in their announcement, including "big data", Atmos integration and the EMC effect.  Contrasts the differences between EMC's divergent NAS strategies and HP's Converged Infrastructure NAS strategy with the X9000 platform.

 

What HP sees in 3PAR

A lot has been written about HP's acquisition of 3PAR. I see it as a real game changer in our industry.   This screencast explains why.

My introduction to HP's Converged Infrastructure

As 3PAR is integrated into HP, there is a lot of new stuff to for us to figure out. One of the most important concepts at HP is Converged Infrastructure (CI).  The basic idea of CI is to maximize a customer's investement in technology by consolidating resources in common, modular building blocks.  3PAR customers are already accustomed to the idea from with our InServ storage systems, but CI goes far beyond 3PAR's storage vision by including server and network technologies.  It's a big idea with huge implications for product engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and support - and it  raises the importance of software in data center solutions.

 

Virtual wired-dude demo of 3PAR management

My friend JR, an SE at 3PAR (now HP) , made this demo showing our autonomic management capabilities. It was a bit long, so I scrunchified it and now it makes him sound like he was completely caffeined out when he made it. That's what friends are for, right JR?

Introducing The Clandestine Airplane Cinema and good things happening at SNIA

SNW in Dallas was very educational and fun - an excellent show and there are some informative Infosmack interviews in the works that people might want to check out. 

You might also want to go directly to SNIA site to catch up on the latest developments in the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI)  and their Green Storage Initiative (GSI). 

The Cloud Storage Initiative is developing the means to create and transfer metadata for data stored in the cloud.  This is a huge deal because it promises to alleviate one of the largest concerns about cloud storage, which is portability of data among different cloud storage service and IAAS providers.

The Green Storage Initiative introduced a new power efficiency program called SNIA Emerald, which is providing power consumption measurements for storage. There are many challenges involved with this sort of work and I give the folks working on this at SNIA a lot of credit for making progress through such a thorny topic.  SNIA Emerald is an excellent example of how SNIA is providing leadership for the entire storage industry.

Working Socially in Barcelona and the future of EVA

(Gaudi's La Pedrera , in Barcelona)

There was an HP marketing event in Barcelona last week for European, Middle Eastern and African journalists, analysts and social media people. I was invited to attend and met a lot of people I hadn't met before - both from within HP as well as people from the storage blogosphere.  The event was not exclusive to storage, but covered servers and networking products too - and emphasized HP's vision for doing more work with fewer products, which is the underlying philosophy of HP's Converged Infrastructure (CI).

The social media attendees were given front row seating during the product presentations.  I'm sure it seemed a bit odd to the presenters that the first two rows of attendees were often heads-down engaged with the Twittersphere, but that's certainly indicative of the way social technologies are changing marketing. I give the HP marketing team a lot of credit for putting social media front and center during these sessions. 

The social media people assembled there included influential bloggers;  Ilja Coolen, Alessandro Perilli, Chris Evans, Greg Knieriemen, Paul Miller, Chris Mellor (yes, Chris Mellor from The Register, who spans both traditional journalism and social media), and HP insiders; Tom Augenthaler, Kristie Popp,  Chris Purcell, Andy Bryant, Lee Johns and Calvin Zito. The group dynamic was terrific - a lot of energetic conversations and humor.

Barcelona is known for its fine restaurants - each of them better than the last - and we certainly ate well. My recommendation is a small restaurant called El Clandestino. Andy Bryant found it on Google and although it perplexed our taxi drivers by being on an almost invisible street on the maps, it was worth the effort.

One of the big questions people had before this event was what would happen to HP's EVA product line after the 3PAR acquisition. The video below, taken at Montjuic on my way out of town (more on that later) discusses that topic.

Notes from Oracle Open World

A screencast about 3PAR at Oracle Open World 2010. 

SAGA: ZFS - The prequel

The news of the settlement between Oracle and Netapp over their pending ZFS lawsuit hit the wires this morning. Three cheers for open source filing technology - sort of.

Click the picture below to see the video page:

Click this link to see the exciting conclusion to SAGA: ZFS

SAGA: ZFS - Is this the end?

And now, the final installment of SAGA: ZFS.

Click on the image below to watch the video page:

Click this link to see the sordid start of SAGA: ZFS

3PAR on the Hotspot over virtualized servers

With VMworld in San Francisco this week, it's only fitting that Michael Haag is on the Hotspot discussing 3PAR's support for server virtualization.

If you are at VMworld this year, please stop by our booth, #313, to see what all the commotion is about and why 3PAR storage is so popular for cloud computing.

Demo: Thin Reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation

This is an older video I shot from late last year with Chakri Avala from Symantec and and Karl Swarz for 3PAR demoing how thin reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation works. Storage demos like this are a bit like watching grass grow, but storage admins will get the idea of how file system-integrated reclamation works.

Demo day reprise: 3PAR's plug-in for VMware vCenter

Yesterday I posted a demo of our new, updated InForm Management Console 4.1 and so I thought today I'd re-post a two-part video showing our VMware vCenter plug-in that was made by 3PAR architect Maneesh Jain.  Make sure to pay attention to the Recovery Manager section of the demo that shows how easy it is to recover VMs, directories and files.

Virtualized storage from 3PAR flexibly adapts to mid-range up through enterprise VMware environments because our single software architecture runs the same code on both platforms.  The skills used to manage one platform are preserved when switching to the other.