Extend Virtualization Beyond the Server with HP

fact sheet Vendor: Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) Vendor's Information: About HP Storage Virtualization About Hewlett-Packard vendor resources Increase Storage Capacity, Enhance Continuity, and Lower Costs JEA provides power and water for hundreds of thousands of customers around Jacksonville, Fla. The utility designs resilient systems to keep services reliable. And because it's not-for-profit, JEA focuses on driving down costs to keep rates low. The IT team at JEA has revisited the organization's approach to storage and servers in its data center. HP has enabled the team to exploit the benefits of virtualization in both areas and has put two new IT strategies into place. The Business Value of Reservationless Storage Forward-looking IT vendors are developing reservationless storage capabilities. The concept is simple: instead of having to reserve and purchase storage capacity up front, capacity is provided on demand to meet the needs of the business. As a result, upfront capital equipment costs are reduced due to an increase in storage utilization. Ongoing operational costs are reduced as increased storage utilization leads to less power, cooling, and space required in the data center. Converged Infrastructure Enhances Innovation for the Dallas Cowboys Centralized IT services in one location are used support stadium operations, customer experience, and business services for multiple parts of the Dallas Cowboys organization. The IT infrastructure driving all these services—as well as supporting more than 30 other businesses in more than 90 locations—is run by an IT staff consisting of the CIO and just 11 internal IT staff. New Data Center Avoided, Thanks to Virtualization and Blades Case Study: CNIB, which provides community-based support for blind Canadians, created the world's first digital talking book library. But the move to all digital talking books meant adding new infrastructure to support the increase in data. HP helped CNIB by providing server and storage infrastructure to handle the expanding data and avoid outgrowing the data center. Virtualize Your End-to-End IT Infrastructure Companies have deployed server virtualization to improve the utilization of their compute resources but are still struggling with massive data growth, rising storage maintenance cost, and underutilized storage assets from a multitude of vendors. ESG Lab Report: The Context and Value of a Fully Virtualized Storage Infrastructure This paper focuses on the power of virtualization in general and the value of HP's Virtualized Storage Infrastructure in particular. Rethinking Storage Virtualization with the HP SAN Virtualization Services Platform Server virtualization creates a series of storage challenges, such as poor storage capacity utilization and increased infrastructure complexities. It also places additional demands on data management. These challenges, if not addressed, will decrease and even nullify its benefits.

Server virtualization promises increased server utilization rates and less server sprawl, and it largely delivers on those promises if done well. But server virtualization is not without problems of its own.

The physical server sprawl you were trying to control has probably become virtual server sprawl. Combined with the increasing amount of electronic data existing within organizations, and the various rules that cover that data's storage and security, your storage infrastructure is likely inflexible, difficult to manage, and inefficient.

What's an enterprise to do? You can extend virtualization to your storage and even the network, thereby creating a converged infrastructure.

Closing Critical IT Gaps and Driving Towards Converged Infrastructure with Storage Virtualization This paper is intended for IT and business managers who are concerned about controlling budget, while closing infrastructure gaps and extending the benefits of IT virtualization. Topics covered include: Identify storage virtualization key strategy going forward; Identify four critical IT infrastructure gaps that hinder businesses today; Introduce the HP approach to storage virtualization to close the gaps; Quantify the benefits of end-to-end storage virtualization; Driving toward converged infrastructure with storage virtualization.

"Over the last couple of decades we've been deploying IT in silos, which has led to a majority of resources being trapped in maintenance and operations," said Brad Parks, who works in Strategy and Planning for HP StorageWorks. "Economic pressures have forced CIOs to take a hard look at efficiency and automation. The convergence of servers, storage, and networking is the next big trend for enterprise data centers in order to shift those resources from maintenance back to innovation."

HP's vision to enable the Converged Infrastructure depends on the design of virtual resource pools, and to that end HP StorageWorks is focused on filling four critical gaps that exist in enterprise storage today.

The first gap consists of the storage silos and stranded disk capacity brought about by IT's response to rapid data growth. In the past, IT responded to data growth by adding more devices, leading to silos and capacity that couldn't be shared across application stacks. This led to low storage utilization rates.

The second gap amplifies the problem of low utilization, and that is the relatively high cost to acquire and scale new storage. Deploying and managing separate unconnected pools of storage hinders flexibility and raises cost. Solving the challenges caused by legacy storage architectures requires a new approach that combines storage innovation with the cost efficiencies of standardization.

The third gap is related to efficiency. Piecemeal management of these disparate storage systems inhibits optimization and automation. Unable to manage the storage as a single, logical pool, each silo needs to be optimized and automated as its own island of storage. This is inherently inefficient and it's both time-consuming and costly.

Lastly, a gap has been caused by the separate IT domains created by siloed storage systems, which hinder unified IT data services. When data services are unified, administrators work at the highest levels of abstraction. They can move and manage storage logically across different arrays, vendors, and storage domains. It's the ultimate in flexibility and efficiency.

By bringing virtualization to your storage environment you can boost your utilization for installed storage assets from under 20 percent to more than 70 percent. The benefits of storage virtualization don't stop there: you can simplify storage provisioning, expand your capacity, and protect data across your storage systems. With a virtualized, flexible storage infrastructure you can seamlessly move data across systems, migrating or replicating it to less expensive storage tiers.

Storage virtualization is nothing new, and in fact, HP revealed that its StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) product family just reached a major milestone with more than 80,000 units deployed. The EVA virtualizes storage at the disk array level to automate management and significantly improve both performance and utilization.

HP's virtual storage infrastructure aims to fill the four gaps. According to a whitepaper by Enterprise Strategy Group, HP's vision for a virtualized storage infrastructure can potentially save enterprises significant money

HP's storage virtualization technologies drive up utilization by a factor of three and can halve storage management costs. Improvements in data provisioning and placement cut costs by optimizing capacity and power consumption. The convergence of storage and servers in HP's virtual storage infrastructure also means better use of less equipment and removal of proprietary infrastructure, further reducing capital costs. Lastly, application integrated management can significantly reduce deployment time.

One of the most significant benefits of storage virtualization is the management efficiency that physical abstraction enables. HP's virtualized storage infrastructure provides for unified data services such as tiering, replication, snapshots, and mirroring across both HP and competitive storage devices. These data services are provided to and managed by virtual pool rather than individual devices.

Intelligent automated tiering uses policy-based tools to automatically store data on the appropriate storage based on the required level of service and protection, frequency of use, age, and other attributes. Replication can be used to move data to other storage capacity synchronously or asynchronously, using data mirroring. Snapshots and clones provide a fast, point-in-time copy of a larger data set, often for interim data protection, load balancing, or test and development. Mirroring enables an exact block-by-block copy of a data set made when the data is initially written (synchronous mirroring) to disk or at a later time (asynchronous).

Another unified storage data service is thin provisioning, a form of storage provisioning in which less physical disk capacity is reserved for an application than what has been logically provisioned with the expectation that more physical capacity can be added later if required.

In addition to the savings provided by these unified data services, enterprises trying to watch the bottom line don't have to replace a lot of existing equipment to implement HP's converged infrastructure. One of the major design criteria for HP's virtual resource pools is that they are modular and built on standards.

HP's SAN Virtualization Services Platform, for example, can take heterogeneous disks arrays and create a single virtual pool across systems. If your data growth issues go beyond block-based applications like databases and also include unstructured data such as audio, video, and graphic content, the HP X9000 network storage system creates a single file namespace that can scale to an industry leading 16 petabytes.

According to HP's Parks, customers usually begin the conversation about converged data centers and storage virtualization in one of three ways. Some customers are working on a major application-related project like a deployment or an upgrade and want to address storage as they move forward. Others are embarking on a major data center transformation project and want to employ virtualization project to gain control of data center sprawl. And some customers start the conversation with business protection. They're concerned about disaster recovery and compliance requirements. The number of such conversations usually begins after a natural disaster attracts everyone's attention.

"Regardless of how you can get into the conversation, you start looking at storage infrastructure and resource utilization," Parks said. "Server virtualization has driven down the cost of computing and primed most customers to apply virtualization concepts to networking and storage – a natural next step towards a converged infrastructure."

For more information, visit: www.hp.com/go/storagevirtualization.