Comments on: HP’s unified storage/compute strategy http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/ Data storage info & analysis Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:31:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: John Spiers http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/comment-page-1/#comment-205767 John Spiers Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:32:45 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=1623#comment-205767 Steven, You’re right about LeftHand targeting the SMB customer, but the LeftHand software wasn’t purpose-built for the SMB customer, it just happened to be a convenient target market starting point for the technology. HP LeftHand has many Cloud Customers today. As Robin described in his “Cloud Quadrant” blog, “the infrastructure must be self healing, load balancing, and fault and disaster tolerant.” HP LeftHand delivers on these capabilities. One of the key technologies in pNFS is it allows clients to access storage devices directly and in parallel by providing data locality awareness at the client. Clustered systems without this capability are constrained by metadata lookup or I/O forwarding bottlenecks. LeftHand’s patented DSM for Microsoft’s MPIO stack, for example, provides data locality awareness at the client today; delivering superior parallelism and scalability than other clustered storage offerings. PNFS implemented with IBRIX may just simply provide client data locality awareness in an industry standard way. If you look at the underlying technology of IBRIX and LeftHand the possibilities are limitless. Steven,

You’re right about LeftHand targeting the SMB customer, but the LeftHand software wasn’t purpose-built for the SMB customer, it just happened to be a convenient target market starting point for the technology.

HP LeftHand has many Cloud Customers today. As Robin described in his “Cloud Quadrant” blog, “the infrastructure must be self healing, load balancing, and fault and disaster tolerant.” HP LeftHand delivers on these capabilities.

One of the key technologies in pNFS is it allows clients to access storage devices directly and in parallel by providing data locality awareness at the client. Clustered systems without this capability are constrained by metadata lookup or I/O forwarding bottlenecks.

LeftHand’s patented DSM for Microsoft’s MPIO stack, for example, provides data locality awareness at the client today; delivering superior parallelism and scalability than other clustered storage offerings. PNFS implemented with IBRIX may just simply provide client data locality awareness in an industry standard way.

If you look at the underlying technology of IBRIX and LeftHand the possibilities are limitless.

]]> By: Robin Harris http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/comment-page-1/#comment-205748 Robin Harris Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:28:05 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=1623#comment-205748 Steven, As I noted the positions are still loose. I'm busy the next couple of days, but one of the things I want to do is to put some market opportunity boundaries up as well. Currently I'm not sure how much commercial opportunity there is in the cloud sector. Most of the players there are large and don't need much help. Thus the opportunity moves over to the "private" clouds, but in the private HPC space a couple of hundred compute nodes is huge. So I'm thinking about how big the private storage cloud will be. As a first approximation management will be more important than scale. More later. Robin Steven,

As I noted the positions are still loose.

I’m busy the next couple of days, but one of the things I want to do is to put some market opportunity boundaries up as well. Currently I’m not sure how much commercial opportunity there is in the cloud sector.

Most of the players there are large and don’t need much help. Thus the opportunity moves over to the “private” clouds, but in the private HPC space a couple of hundred compute nodes is huge. So I’m thinking about how big the private storage cloud will be. As a first approximation management will be more important than scale.

More later.

Robin

]]> By: Steven Schwartz http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/comment-page-1/#comment-205744 Steven Schwartz Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:57:44 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=1623#comment-205744 I wouldn't say that iBrix or Lefthand are really "cloud" architectures either. LH was built and is targeted toward SMB, for simple to manage, deploy, and buy iSCSI SAN technology. iBrix has traditionally been targeted to HPC as a back-end storage platform, and while they "support" NFS, the true performance is gained via the I/O client, which has proved to be a support problem, since not everyone runs RHEL. I agree with your comments about PolyServe. I don't think it is fair though to compare ATMOS to anything that HP has recently acquired. Time will tell to see how this "cloud" layer plays out, which open standards for data access are adopted, and really what the market will look like. I wouldn’t say that iBrix or Lefthand are really “cloud” architectures either. LH was built and is targeted toward SMB, for simple to manage, deploy, and buy iSCSI SAN technology. iBrix has traditionally been targeted to HPC as a back-end storage platform, and while they “support” NFS, the true performance is gained via the I/O client, which has proved to be a support problem, since not everyone runs RHEL. I agree with your comments about PolyServe. I don’t think it is fair though to compare ATMOS to anything that HP has recently acquired. Time will tell to see how this “cloud” layer plays out, which open standards for data access are adopted, and really what the market will look like.

]]> By: Robin Harris http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/comment-page-1/#comment-205708 Robin Harris Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:27:03 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=1623#comment-205708 Joe, PolyServe is intended for transactional environments - which it is very good at - but it is spec'd at 32 nodes max with 16 nodes a more practical number. It isn't a scale-out cluster, which is why it is an enterprise, not cloud, product. Robin Joe,

PolyServe is intended for transactional environments – which it is very good at – but it is spec’d at 32 nodes max with 16 nodes a more practical number. It isn’t a scale-out cluster, which is why it is an enterprise, not cloud, product.

Robin

]]> By: Joe Kraska http://storagemojo.com/2009/10/03/hps-unified-storagecompute-strategy/comment-page-1/#comment-205707 Joe Kraska Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:44:02 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=1623#comment-205707 As a reminder, Robin, HP has Ibrix, Lefthand *and* PolyServe. This confuses me a bit, actually, as there appears to be some overlap, there. Joe. As a reminder, Robin, HP has Ibrix, Lefthand *and* PolyServe. This confuses me a bit, actually, as there appears to be some overlap, there.

Joe.

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