Q&A with Lee Johns of HP StorageWorks

As part of this month's focus on storage, I wanted to explore various facets of this very essential but comparatively less-noticed aspect of an enterprise IT environment. I decided to feature HP StorageWorks in this week's Q&A so as to tap their brains about common misconceptions and current developments relating to the deployment of Storage Area Network (SAN) products and solutions. I posed the followed questions to Lee Johns, who is the director of product marketing for Unified Storage at HP StorageWorks. Johns responded via email.

FCIO: What are some common misconceptions about SANs? Do you have anything to offer from an HP (NASDAQ: HPQ) perspective?

Lee Johns: Generally the role of the SAN is well understood by customers. They look to SANs for storage consolidation and the centralization of processes to manage and protect data. If there are misconceptions, they are:

• For smaller businesses, there is a perception that SANs are expensive. HP for instance provides shared storage arrays starting at under $5000. Our HP StorageWorks X1000 G2 Network Storage Systems can be both block- and file-based storage. The advent of new server-to-storage interconnect topologies like Shared SAS and iSCSI have enabled customers who are not experienced with Fibre Channel to get the benefits of a SAN for a much lower initial outlay. Additionally, scale-out modular SANs combined with thin provisioning technologies have changed the long term cost equation. You no longer have to predict your storage consumption needs far into the future and buy an expensive initial SAN controller to cover predicted future needs. You can now start out small and grow as you need non-disruptively.
• iSCSI SANs lack performance compared to Fibre Channel. There are many reasons why Fibre Channel or iSCSI might be best for you as a customer but for the vast majority of customers, performance is not one of them. iSCSI is a very fast growing interconnect for SANs and more and more customers are talking advantage of it.
• All Shared Storage (SANs) are virtualized. Because SANs bring together storage for multiple applications and servers it is thought that they are virtualized. This is not the case. For a SAN to be efficient in the use of the disk space, you need to ensure you have technologies like Multiple Controllers (preferably more than two), wide stripping, thin provisioning, Secure Virtual Domains and autonomic tiering. Only by combining these elements can you ensure that you are leveraging all the resources in the SAN to best effect for all of your uses and applications.
• Multi-site disaster recovery with SANs is very expensive. This is not necessarily the case. HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN Solutions provide this capability built into the solution. The modular nature of the HP StorageWorksP4000 SAN Solutions enables traditional SAN boundaries to be broken down and nodes from a single array can be placed at multiple locations for improved disaster recovery. Network RAID technology stripes the data across all the nodes in the system to ensure data availability in case of a site failure.
• My SAN utilization is high. Very few organizations really know their utilization rates on their SANs. If they do measure them it is often a simple equation of space available to space consumed. Many SANs place considerable overhead on operations that limit the available space. For instance they may require you to create reservations for snapshots or thin provisioning. Many organizations could save considerable money and time in managing space and reservations simply by purchasing shared storage that requires no reservations for these common SAN features.

FCIO: In what ways does a SAN still maintain an edge over high performance NAS with their lower per megabyte costs?

Johns: I do not agree with this premise. All solutions use the same disk--with iSCSI we use the same network. There is no reason for costs to be more for one or the other. HP has SAN solutions that cost well under 10K. That is not the decision point or differentiator for customers.

FCIO: What do you have to say about the current fascination over cloud-based storage?

Johns: There are multiple facets to the cloud: Public cloud storage providers who are selling storage as a service and private cloud implementations where organizations are looking to provide a more utility-based computing model to their customers. Regardless of what the private cloud is called it is a customer need for utility storage that enables them to run multiple customer applications efficiently on a multitenant storage platform. They want to be able to bring up and tear down infrastructure quickly and provide a more granular billing as it applies to usage to their businesses. 3PAR was a strong force in providing this technology to the public cloud and with the acquisition of 3PAR, HP is extending the reach of the 3PAR technology to our enterprise customers, worldwide, who are looking for the benefits of utility storage. More than that, HP is providing an entire solution, the HP CloudSystem with 3PAR, as the backend storage so that customers can quickly and easily roll out infrastructure as a service based on templates from a single management console.

Bottom line is that customers are looking for vendors who can help them optimize their traditional IT and provide them with an onramp to a converged infrastructure that offers utility computing services. 

FCIO: What are some common problem scenarios that the deployment of HP's SAN solution addresses?

Johns:

• Storage efficiency;
• Multi-Site disaster recovery;
• Utility storage (cloud);
• Cost-effective storage growth;
• Elimination of traditional storage refresh costs;
• Data availability (on a scale depending on customer need); and
• Data management (simplify).

FCIO: What do you see on the horizon for the SAN industry?

Johns: The future of the SAN is bright but there needs to be change. Most of today's SANs are built on 20-year-old architectures. They were designed in a time when customers had unique silos of disparate IT infrastructure. Workloads were predictable and storage growth was more manageable as they were essentially consolidating storage from servers. Most of the data was in databases and the rollout of solutions was driven by IT timelines.

Today we live in a different world. Virtualization is pervasive and the new requirements are driven by utility computing and IT infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure silos are being replaced with Converged Infrastructure. Workloads are unpredictable and the timeline is being driven by enterprise business wanting to fulfill demand instantly. Also, the data is changing with more unstructured data being generated from many areas but especially by the mobility of the workforce and the mobile technology they have available to them.

All of this demands that the SAN industry change. Tomorrow's SANs will be designed based on clustered architectures, be modular and scalable and most of all be efficient, autonomic and multi-tenant. In addition, more Converged Infrastructure solutions will emerge where the boundaries between server and storage are blurred. Customers want to manage their applications and not their technology. Block and file will converge at an infrastructure level allowing customers to scale each independently in order to manage their workload needs.

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