HP, 3PAR Tout Virtual Storage

As summer slowly winds to a close and the fall tradeshows loom on the horizon, vendors are ramping up their storage virtualization efforts. Clustered NAS and silicon-based thin provisioning are firmly in their crosshairs as they flesh out their virtual storage strategies.

First up is HP,which made a slew of virtualization announcements today, including a clustered NAS offering built on software from last years PolyServe acquisition.

HP is essentially using PolyServe’s file serving software at the heart of a NAS gateway bundle, which includes the vendor’s Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) hardware.

Dubbed the NAS 4400, HP is touting the hardware/software combo as a way for users to take the complexity out of their file servers.

“It’s an integrated NAS system based on EVA 4400,” says Ian Duncan, director of marketing for HP’s NAS products. “When you think about how customers deal with file serving traditionally; they buy more file servers [and] you end up with server sprawl.”Virtualization is the solution to this problem, according to the exec, who explained that the NAS 4400 consists of a 4.8 Tbyte-EVA device connected to three Proliant DL380 servers running PolyServe virtualization software.

“This isn’t something that we have done, historically,” adds Duncan, explaining that users previously had to link the different pieces of hardware and software themselves. “That approach gives great flexibility, but the challenge is [that it introduces] a degree of complexity.”

By adding more disk shelves, the EVA can be expanded to 98 Tbytes, and HP told Byte and Switch that the NAS 4400 bundle will be available sometime in the fourth quarter of this year. Pricing for the Windows and Linux versions of the NAS 4400 bundle will start at $94,270 and $97,630, respectively.

Rival vendor EMC is also working on its own file serving technology, code-named "Maui," which will sit on top of "Hulk," a top secret hardware platform developed specifically for Web 2.0, which EMC first discussed last year.

Social networking technologies such as wikis, blogs, and sites like Facebook need masses of storage, hence today’s announcement from HP and the development of EMC’s closely guarded "Maui" project. This area is already hot, and its effects on storage could be immense. Users are already predicting that the requirements of social networking will drive enhancements of the management of fixed unstructured content and files.HP and EMC, however, are not the only vendors banging the virtual storage drum. Thin provisioning specialist 3PAR, for example, today unveiled the latest version of its InServ storage servers.

The T400 and T800 arrays offer a performance boost thanks to an ASIC upgrade. “It’s the first storage architecture in the industry with what we call ‘thin built in’,” says Craig Nunes, 3PAR’s vice-president of marketing.

Thin provisioning, which has been gaining momentum during recent months, works in conjunction with storage virtualization. The technique aims to ensure that applications consume storage only as they write blocks or groups of blocks to a particular volume.

The 300-Tbyte T400 and the 600-Tbyte T800 replace 3PAR’s S400 and S800 devices, which relied on software-based thin provisioning.

“Because it’s in silicon, it’s in the chip, it will be very high performance,” says Nunes, explaining that the T400 and T800 offer double the throughput of their predecessors. “The T-class controller has about 2.5 Gbytes per second of I/O bandwidth, and about 5-Gbytes per second of memory bandwidth.”The T400 and T800 are available now, priced at $115,000 and $175,000, respectively, about 10 percent more than their predecessors.

At least one user has nonetheless embraced 3PAR’s latest hardware. The Supreme Court of the State of Wyoming has bought one of 3PAR’s T400 systems, which it will use to replace a set of iSCSI devices from LeftHand Networks.

“We have a new data center, but it’s space-limited,” says Frostie Sprout, the Supreme Court’s senior network and systems manager. “We didn’t want to have to manage a whole bunch of [LeftHand] units if I could get it all into one single storage array.”

The official explains that the Court will be increasing its use of digital images and audio recording, so has decided to move off its seven LeftHand DL320s. “The 320s had 20 Tbytes raw [but] the T400 unit that we have bought is 225 Tbytes raw and we could expand that to 300 Tbytes.”

Despite this capacity hike, Sprout is still keen for 3PAR to enhance its latest offerings, explaining that, even at capacity there are still a few extra drive spaces available on the T400 that he would like to use.”If I have got the physical room available for it, it would be nice,” he says. “But that’s a programming issue and that’s something that they may change their minds about some day.”

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.