/// IDG Tech Dossier

HP CONVERGED STORAGE:

Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform

for Virtual and Cloud Computing

FROM STORAGE MONOLITH

TO UTILITY SERVICE

with new demands from the virtualization of servers

and clientshas made storage increasingly inflexible
and complicated to manage.

IN TODAYS HYPERCONNECTED WORLD, with its

multiple mobile devices, ubiquitous Internet access
and pervasive social media platforms, people expect
immediate access to information and services. These
expectations are increasingly felt in corporate IT
departments, where business units demand instant
applications and turn-on-a-dime services.

These factors stand in the way of the kind of adaptability, agility and integrated management that the
efficient enterprise requires. If organizations are to
continue toward the goal of delivering ITaaS, they
need to break down these barriers and lay the
groundwork for a next-generation architecture.

Virtualization and cloud computing can help corporate

IT meet these demands by helping it become more
flexible and agile. But the ultimate solution is to
transform the way IT is delivered. Many enterprises
have already started on the journey toward a full
IT as a service (ITaaS) model.

/// THE LIMITS OF

As organizations travel this road, however, they often

run into a wall. Actually, several walls, including those
between the server, storage and networking functions.
The traditional IT infrastructure is often too rigid to
enable companies to fully utiilze their IT resources. In
many cases, servers, storage and networking have
been built and managed separately, creating functional silos. And within the storage architecture, an
explosion in the amount and types of datacoupled

TRADITIONAL STORAGE

The typical storage architecture was designed 20 years

ago, when workloads were predictable and data was
structured. But today companies are dealing with an
unprecedented amount of information, including unstructured data such as audio and video, which requires
massive capacities. Storage systems must accommodate many different types of workloads with different
performance requirements. Add to the mix increasingly
demanding applications, distributed data center environments, legacy business processes that must be supported
and nonstandard infrastructure inherited through
acquisitions, and you get a gerrymandered architecture
comprising many discrete storage resources that must be

2 /// HP CONVERGED STORAGE: Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform for Virtual and Cloud Comput-

THE JOURNEY TO AN EFFICIENT ENTERPRISE

Organizations typically pass through five phases as they transform their traditional operations into an IT as a
service (ITaaS) model:

Standardize and
consolidate

Virtualize and
automate

Self-provision
services on
demand

managed individually. Such an architecture is disruptive

to scale, expensive to own and operate and increasingly
difficult and labor-intensive to manage.
ITaaS requires a pool of storage thats flexible and
fungible. The IT staff must be able to quickly configure
storage for a particular need and then just as quickly
reconfigure it so it can be used again elsewhere. The
storage must be malleable so that capacity can be
quickly expanded, data and applications can be easily
and securely migrated and workloads can be automatically rebalanced. Applications need to be online
24/7/365, so high availability is paramount. Finally,
management of the entire storage pool, as well as
coordination with virtualized servers and networking,
should be streamlined and simplified.

/// THE PATH TO IT AS A SERVICE

Organizations need a strategy for rearchitecting
storage so that it enables, rather than constricts, the
delivery of IT services. According to HP, its all about
Converged Storage, which breaks through the barriers,
reducing complexity so that IT can expand storage on
a pay as you grow basis. It involves the creation a
pool of storage based on modular building blocks that
can be moved and reconfigured on the fly to support
a range of needs. In fact, HPs approach to Converged
Storage incorporates several core capabilities:

8 M
 ULTI-TENANCY:

the ability to securely host

many different applications in a single pool
of storage, delivering the appropriate level of
resources and performance for each application

8 FEDERATION: the ability to geographically

distribute storage resources and move data
among those resources without disrupting user
access to that data

8 EFFICIENCY: the ability to allocate resources

in the most cost-effective manner through thin
provisioning and other techniques

Aggregate
internal and
external services

Become an IT
service bureau

8 AUTONOMIC MANAGEMENT: the capability to

reconfigure itself, balancing workloads and ascertaining the appropriate tiering of data without
manual intervention
One aspect of enabling Converged Storage is the use of
utility storage. This approach incorporates technology
that improves the ability of IT to quickly and efficiently
adapt to the needs of the business. Utility storage can
host many different applications, move them around
nondisruptively, efficiently allocate resources and reduce
the amount of hands-on management required.

/// STORAGE BECOMES A UTILITY

Server virtualization has transformed corporate IT
over the last several years, and with good reason.
By virtualizing, companies enjoy major cost savings
and gain flexibility and efficiency, a key step toward
enabling ITaaS. However, the ability to create and
move services in minutes has led to a proliferation
of virtual machines and servers that threatens to
overwhelm data movement and storage technologies.
Todays multicore processors enable physical servers
to run 10 or more virtual machines simultaneously.
One rack can now house more than 1,000 virtual
systems, requiring a massive increase in I/O density,
performance, availability and capacity.1
Virtual server environments need a new generation of
storage, one that is highly scalable, flexible, available
and reliable. Whats required is utility storage. Initially
adopted by cloud service providers, this architecture
was developed to deliver storage as if it were a utility
like electricity or water, enabling users to buy only
what they need, when they need it, and pay only
for what they use. As enterprises implement cloud
services in their own data centers, they want to take
that service provider model, move it into their data
center and use it themselves.
Utility storage makes for massive consolidation,
flexibility and scalability, so IT departments can

3 /// HP CONVERGED STORAGE: Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform for Virtual and Cloud Comput-

THE HP 3PAR GET THIN GUARANTEE

Reduce storage capacity requirements by 50% or more.
With HP 3PAR Storage, you can meet existing data and
application requirements with 50% less storage capacity and no performance tradeoffs. Lower capacity
requirements mean fewer disks to purchase up-front,
less equipment to house, power, and cool, and less storage to managewhich translates into CAPEX and OPEX
savings. 3PAR has already helped hundreds of customers shrink their storage requirements in half, and now
HP guarantees it.
Learn about the Get Thin Guarantee by going to
3PAR Programs.

reduce storage infrastructure and lower costs while

improving their ability to respond to fast-changing
needs of business units. Heres how:

8 EFFICIENCY
Traditionally, applications have been overprovisioned,
resulting in very low-capacity utilization, which runs
counter to the IT objective of reducing acquisition and
operational costs. Often the results are more up-front
capacity allocation; more dedication of resources
to each application; and more money for powering,
housing, and cooling disks that are not needed today
and may never be needed. Utility storage can improve
efficiency with its use of thin provisioningprovisioning of capacity only as the application needs it. Taken
a step further, it enables thin persistence by detecting
and returning unused space to the storage pool. Utility
storage also offers thin conversion, migrating fat or
traditionally provisioned data to a thin volume and thus
reducing the amount of capacity required.
Utility storage also features granular policy-driven
capabilities that pair data with the most costefficient resource capable of meeting that datas
particular service level. This means that data can be
placed in the correct tier of storage based on need,
taking advantage of solid-state drives (SSDs) in very
cost-efficient manner. Support for SSDs, traditional
Fibre Channel drives and less expensive serial
ATA (SATA) drives means quality of service at the
lowest-possible cost.

ment burden that keeps them from addressing real

business needs.
Utility storage simplifies, automates and expedites
storage management, enabling the system to
regulate itself to a large extent. Autonomic storage
handles provisioning, tiering and change management without the intervention of an administrator.
Consider the ability to tier storage. The autonomic
features of adaptive optimization software allow
for successful deployment. IT administrators
wont implement tiered storage unless it is simple.
They need an autonomic optimization strategy
that includes (1) the ability to move infrequently
accessed data to a lower tier, (2) the ability to move
frequently accessed data to a higher tier and (3)
the ability to do this without disrupting users. Utility
storage meets these needs and is extremely easy
to manage and adaptable in an environment where
unpredictability is a constant, all while achieving
outstanding service levels. In addition, utility storage
has plug-ins for VMware and Microsoft hypervisors,
simplifying storage administration and integrating it
with virtual server management.

8 FLEXIBILITY AND AGILITY

Traditional storage is rigid, requiring tight coupling
between workloads and storage resources. Utility
storage breaks those barriers by implementing key
architectural changes.
One is secure multitenancy, which enables a
single consolidated array to host many different
applications or business units while keeping these
groups and their data secure and segregated. HP
3PAR multitenancy, for example, enables massive
application consolidation on one storage system,
squeezing more economies of scale out of the
storage investment. With data striping across disks
and 3PARs mesh active architecture, organizations can avoid the need for separate arrays across
different types of applications.

8 EASE OF MANAGEMENT
Utility storage is also autonomic, which is crucial in
an unpredictable data center. Without the ability to
respond quickly, administrators face a huge manage-

See how Priceline.com saves 50% in

administration time with HP 3PAR storage.

4 /// HP CONVERGED STORAGE: Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform for Virtual and Cloud Comput-

Previously, putting different applications with different

performance requirements into one array compromised capacity, performance, utilization and/or
resilience. But with multitenancy, mixed workloads
can be consolidated, giving each the resources it
needs. For example, transaction-intensive workloads
and throughput-intensive workloads can be put on the
same storage without contention. This dramatically
reduces the number of storage arrays that must be
purchased and managed.
The second architectural feature is storage federation, which enables the movement of data and
workloads among arrays without affecting applications, users or services. Storage federation, as
enabled in HP Peer Motion software, addresses
three primary customer challenges: workload
balancing, asset management and capacity
optimization across the data center. With todays
unpredictable workloads, storage needs to have
the flexibility to move data from overutilized to
underutilized assets without any disruption. Asset
management or technology refreshes require tradeoffs between investing in current assets before
retiring them, on the one hand, and the complexity
that comes with moving data, on the other. Storage
federation eliminates those trade-offs, offering the
opportunity to refresh storage anytime without
disruption.
Storage utilization at the data center level rather than
the individual system level is another area in which
storage federation can help. With technology such
as thin provisioning, IT can optimize capacity with an
array. Now combine that with storage federation to
take better advantage of the power, cooling, acquisition and other cost savings across the data center,
improving efficiency not only at the array level but
also at the data center level.

/// BENEFITS OF UTILITY STORAGE

Utility storage solutions, in particular HP Storage,
brings simplification, efficiency and agility to storage
environments. Utility storage reduces capital
expenses by cutting hardware purchases and floor
space requirements. It also increases virtual machine
density, enabling the storage systems to handle
these increased demands without additional physical
servers or storage arrays. This also translates into
reduced operating expenses for maintenance, power
and cooling. At the same time, this architecture
dramatically increases the agility and flexibility of
the storage system, removing limitations that cancel
out some of the benefits of server virtualization

enabling corporate IT to function more like a service

organization.

/// ONE STEP AT A TIME

Implementing Converged Storage is an evolution and
does not require immediate wholesale replacement of
current systems. But by putting a plan into place now,
enterprises can optimize their current storage investments while building toward a converged future and
accruing concomitant benefits along the way. The plan
should include three basic tenets:

8 UPDATE, STANDARDIZE AND CONSOLIDATE

PLATFORMS: use standard hardware and
operational processes as a base on which to build
a data center infrastructure. This reduces sprawl,
lowers costs and eases management.

8 ADD SOFTWARE INNOVATIONS:

implement
software that enables scaling without disrupting
data or applications, to create and easily move
storage modules and change configurations for
growth. With scale-out storage, the physical form
factor is no longer a limitation, allowing for more
predictable operational costs while enabling flexibility.

8 INTEGRATE MANAGEMENT:

add tools that

facilitate management across servers, storage
and networks. This enables IT to operate as a
utility, deploying new applications in minutes
and provisioning resources on demand.

By using these concepts as a base, organizations

can develop a storage platform that is ideal for
supporting virtual and cloud computing. Indeed,
HPs Converged Storage will enable organizations
to deploy storage faster, reduce the time it takes to
deliver IT services, reduce energy use and physical
space requirements and cut the time and expense
of managing storage systems.

For more information on Converged Storage,

click here.
For more information on HP 3PAR, click here.

Source: Evaluating Storage Technologies for Virtual Server

Environments, Evaluator Group, June 2010
1

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HP CONVERGED STORAGE: Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform for Virtual and Cloud Computing

Suggested Reading
These additional resources include business white papers
and previously published articles from IDG Enterprise.

////////////

Extend your data centers

life expectancy
Companies can extend the life of their
data centers by two to five years through
a combination of IT strategies
By Sandra Gittlen
Computerworld
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the
1,200-square-foot data center at the Franklin W. Olin
College of Engineering that means the facility has
been operating three years longer than CIO and vice
president of operations Joanne Kossuth had originally
planned. Now, even though the school needs a facility
with more capacity and better connectivity, Kossuth
has been forced to set aside the issue because of the
iffy economic times.
Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has
tabled revamp discussions, she says.
Like many of her peers, including leaders at Citigroup
and Marriott International, Kossuth has had to get
creative to eke more out of servers, storage, and the
facility itself. To do so, shes had to re-examine the life
cycle of data and applications, storage array layouts,
rack architectures, server utilization, orphaned devices and more.
Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, says
hes been bombarded by large organizations looking for
ways to avoid the cost of a data center upgrade, expansion or relocation. Any data center investment costs at
minimum tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of
dollars. With a typical data center refresh rate of five to
10 years, thats a lot of money, so companies are looking for alternatives, he says.
While that outlook might seem gloomy, Kumar finds
that many companies can extract an extra two to five
years from their data center by employing a combination of strategies, including consolidating and rationalizing hardware and software usage; rolling out virtualization; and physically moving IT equipment around. Most
companies dont optimize the components of their

data center and, therefore, bump up against its limitations faster than necessary, he says.
Here are some strategies that IT leaders and other
experts suggest to push data centers farther.
Relocate noncritical data. One of the first areas
that drew the attention of Olin Colleges Kossuth was
the cost of dealing with data. As one example, alumni,
admissions staff and other groups take multiple CDs
worth of high-resolution photos at every event. They use
server, storage, and bandwidth resources to edit, share,
and retain those large images over long periods of time.
To free the data center from dealing with the almost
10TB of data those photos require, Kossuth opened a
corporate account on Flickr and moved all processes
surrounding management of those photos over there.
Not only did it save her the cost of a $40,000 storage array she would have had to purchase, but also
alleviated the pressure on the data center from the
resource-intensive activity associated with highresolution images.
There is little risk in moving noncore data out of
the data center, and now we have storage space for
mission-critical projects, Kossuth says.
Take the pressure off of high-value applications and
infrastructure. Early on, Olin College purchased an
$80,000 Tandberg videoconferencing system and
supporting storage array. Rather than exhausting that
investment from overuse, Kossuth now prioritizes video
capture and distribution, shifting lower-priority projects
to less expensive videoconferencing solutions and
YouTube for storage.
For example, most public relations videos are generated outside of the Tandberg system and are posted
on the colleges YouTube channel. The data center no
longer has to supply dedicated bandwidth for streaming and dedicated hardware for retention, she says.
More importantly, the Tandberg system is kept pristine
for high-profile conferences and mission-critical
distance learning.

Read the full article

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HP CONVERGED STORAGE: Utility Storage: The Ideal Platform for Virtual and Cloud Computing

Suggested Reading

////////////

////////////

Only 3 Cloud Storage Use

Cases Ready For Prime Time:
Forrester

Data Center Spending

Shake-Up

What storage can you move to the cloud now?

Forrester explains and shares advice on how to
get the benefits without jeopardizing operational
effectiveness.
By Andrew Reichman
CIO
Despite the confusion surrounding what cloud storage
really means and how it might be used, few advances
in storage have been hyped as much as cloud storage. Understandably, IT professionals are intrigued by
the prospect of reducing their reliance on internal capabilities, eliminating capital spending, and improving
the overall cost structure of specific parts of their storage environment by moving workloads to the cloud. At
the same time, every vendor in the space is painting
its products and message with a cloud veneer. To cut
through the hype, Forrester defines cloud storage as:
Storage capacity that is disaggregated from the primary computing environment, with the location, ownership, and operation of the storage resources managed
by a single or a combination of service providers.
While it may be tempting to think (and market) that the
cloud will eliminate data center storage as we know
it in one fell swoop, this isn t likely. Theres no magic
in the cloud, and the concept of a consistent architecture with geographic separation from the primary
data center is not well suited to all workloads. Instead,
buyers and vendors need to think carefully about the
specific workloads they are currently provisioning for
that might be effectively solved in a cloud architecture.
The majority of today s cloud storage options focus on
low price, but lack the security, scalability, and trust
that enterprises require. Recent research from Forrester found that currently, only three cloud storage
use cases are ready for prime time:
Read the full article

Survey shows private clouds and server virtualization are driving a shift toward data centers as
an operating expense
By Lauren Brousell
CIO
Cloud and virtualization are changing the way CIOs
look at their data centers and, more importantly, how
they spend on them.
The CIO Data Center Strategies Survey, which polled
416 CIOs, indicates that data center spending is
holding steady at about 25 percent of IT budgets
on average, but it will gradually shift from a capital
expenditure (capex) to an operational expenditure
(opex). This is suggested by the finding that CIOs think
server virtualization (49 percent) and private clouds
(34 percent) will have the largest impact on their data
centers over the next two years. The shift toward data
center spending as an operating expense will likely be
a gradual one: CIOs expect opex spending to go up 7
percent over the next two years while capex spending
will decrease by 5 percent.
Barr Snyderwine, CIO of Hargrove, an event and trade
show company, says his core data center is currently
a capital expense and accounts for around 20 percent
of his IT budget. He expects it to become slightly more
of an operating expense as he explores bringing some
customer websites to the cloud. His data center is
becoming a higher priority. We have more content
than ever, he says.
Sixty-five percent of those surveyed agree with
Snyderwine, saying their data centers will become
significantly more important in the next two years.
Furthermore, 52 percent of CIOs said they are very
confident that they are making the right data center
investment decisions to support their strategy.

Read the full article

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