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June 15, 2014

HP Discover 2014: Datacenter services

Filed under: Datacenter — Tags: , — Nate @ 12:54 pm

(Standard disclaimer HP covered my hotel and stuff while in Vegas etc etc…)

I should be out sight seeing but have been stuck in my hotel room here in Sedona, AZ due to the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had from food I ate on Friday night.

X As a service

The trend towards “as a service” as what seems to be an accounting thing more than anything else to shift dollars to another column in the books continues with HP’s Facility as a service.

HP will go so far as to buy you a data center(the actual building), fill it with equipment and rent it back to you for some set fee – with entry level systems starting at 150kW (which would be as few as say 15 x high density racks). They can even manage it end to end if you want them to. I didn’t realize myself the extent that their services go to. requires a 5 or 10 year commitment however (has to do with accounting again I believe). HP says they are getting a lot of positive feedback on this new service.

This is really targeted at those that must operate on premise due to regulations and cannot rely on a 3rd party data center provider (colo).

Flexible capacity

FAAS doesn’t cover the actual computer equipment though, that is just the building, power, cooling etc. The equipment can either come from you or you can get it from HP using their Flexible Capacity program. This program also extends to the HP public cloud as well as a resource pool for systems.

HP Flexible Capacity program

HP Flexible Capacity program

Entry level for Flexible capacity we were told was roughly a $500k contract ($100k/year).

Thought this was a good quote

“We have designed more than 65 million square feet of data center space. We are responsible for more than two-thirds of all LEED Gold and Platinum certified data centers, and we’ve put our years of practical experience to work helping many enterprises successfully implement their data center programs. Now we can do the same for you.”

Myself I had no idea that was the case, not even close.

HP Discover 2014: Software defined

Filed under: Datacenter,Events — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 12:26 pm

(Standard disclaimer HP covered my hotel and stuff while in Vegas etc etc…)

I have tried to be a vocal critic of the whole software defined movement, in that much of it is hype today and has been for a while and will likely to continue to be for a while yet. My gripe is not so much about the approach, the world of “software defined” sounds pretty neat, my gripe is about the marketing behind it that tries to claim we’re already there, and we are not, not even close.

I was able to vent a bit with the HP team(s) on the topic and they acknowledged that we are not there yet either. There is a vision, and there is a technology. But there aren’t a lot of products yet, at least not a lot of promising products.

Software defined networking is perhaps one of the more (if not the most) mature platforms to look at. Last year I ripped pretty good into the whole idea with good points I thought, basically that technology solves a problem I do not have and have never had. I believe most organizations do not have a need for it either (outside of very large enterprises and service providers). See the link for a very in depth 4,000+ word argument on SDN.

More recently HP tried to hop on the bandwagon of Software Defined Storage, which in their view is basically the StoreVirtual VSA. A product that to me doesn’t fit the scope of Software defined, it is just a brand  propped up onto a product that was already pretty old and already running in a VM.

Speaking of which, HP considers this VSA along with their ConvergedSystem 300 to be “hyper converged”, and least the people we spoke to do not see a reason to acquire the likes of Simplivity or Nutanix (why are those names so hard to remember the spelling..). HP says most of the deals Nutanix wins are small VDI installations and aren’t seen as a threat, HP would rather go after the VCEs of the world. I believe Simplivity is significantly smaller.

I’ve never been a big fan of StoreVirtual myself, it seems like a decent product, but not something I get too excited about. The solutions that these new hyper converged startups offer sound compelling on paper at least for lower end of the market.

The future is software defined

The future is not here yet.

It’s going to be another 3-5 years (perhaps more). In the mean time customers will get drip fed the technology in products from various vendors that can do software defined in a fairly limited way (relative to the grand vision anyway).

When hiring for a network engineer, many customers would rather opt to hire someone who has a few years of python experience than more years of networking experience because that is where they see the future in 3-5 years time.

My push back to HP on that particular quote (not quoted precisely) is that level of sophistication is very hard (and expensive) to hire for. A good comparative mark is hiring for something like Hadoop.  It is very difficult to compete with the compensation packages of the largest companies offering $30-50k+ more than smaller (even billion $) companies.

So my point is the industry needs to move beyond the technology and into products. Having a requirement of knowing how to code is a sign of an immature product. Coding is great for extending functionality, but need not be a requirement for the basics.

HP seemed to agree with this, and believes we are on that track but it will take a few more years at least for the products to (fully) materialize.

HP Oneview

(here is the quick video they showed at Discover)

I’ll start off by saying I’ve never really seriously used any of HP’s management platforms(or anyone else’s for that matter). All I know is that they(in general not HP specific) seem to be continuing to proliferate and fragment.

HP Oneview 1.1 is a product that builds on this promise of software defined. In the past five years of HP pitching converged systems seeing the demo for Oneview was the first time I’ve ever shown just a little bit of interest in converged.

HP Oneview was released last October I believe and HP claims something along the lines of 15,000 downloads or installations. Version 1.10 was announced at Discover which offers some new integration points including:

  • Automated storage provisioning and attachment to server profiles for 3PAR StoreServ Storage in traditional Fibre Channel SAN fabrics, and Direct Connect (FlatSAN) architectures.
  • Automated carving of 3PAR StoreServ volumes and zoning the SAN fabric on the fly, and attaching of volumes to server profiles.
  • Improved support for Flexfabric modules
  • Hyper-V appliance support
  • Integration with MS System Center
  • Integration with VMware vCenter Ops manager
  • Integration with Red Hat RHEV
  • Similar APIs to HP CloudSystem

Oneview is meant to be light weight, and act as a sort of proxy into other tools, such as Brocade’s SAN manager in the case of Fibre channel (myself I prefer Qlogic management but I know Qlogic is getting out of the switch business). Though for several HP products such as 3PAR and Bladesystem Oneview seems to talk to them directly.

Oneview aims to provide a view that starts at the data center level and can drill all the way down to individual servers, chassis, and network ports.

However the product is obviously still in it’s early stages – it currently only supports HP’s Gen8 DL systems (G7 and Gen8 BL), HP is thinking about adding support for older generations but their tone made me think they will drag their feet long enough that it’s no longer demanded by customers. Myself the bulk of what I have in my environment today is G7, only recently deployed a few Gen8 systems two months ago. Also all of my SAN switches are Qlogic (and I don’t use HP networking now) so Oneview functionality would be severely crippled if I were to try to use it today.

The product on the surface does show a lot of promise though, there is a 3 minute video introduction here.

HP pointed out you would not manage your cloud from this, but instead the other way around, cloud management platforms would leverage Oneview APIs to bring that functionality to the management platform higher up in the stack.

HP has renamed their Insight Control systems for vCenter and MS System Center to Oneview.

The goal of Oneview is automation that is reliable and repeatable. As with any such tools it seems like you’ll have to work within it’s constraints and go around it when it doesn’t do the job.

“If you fancy being able to deploy an ESX cluster in 30 minutes or less on HP Proliant Gen8 systems, HP networking and 3PAR storage than this may be the tool for you.” – me

The user interface seems quite modern and slick.

They expose a lot of functionality in an easy to use way but one thing that struck me watching a couple of their videos is it can still be made a lot simpler – there is a lot of jumping around to do different tasks.  I suppose one way to address this might be broader wizards that cover multiple tasks in the order they should be done in or something.

HP Discover 2014: Helion (Openstack)

Filed under: Datacenter,Events — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 10:36 am

(Standard disclaimer HP covered my hotel and stuff while in Vegas etc etc…)

HP Helion

This is a new brand for HP’s cloud platform based on OpenStack. There is a commercial version and a community edition. The community edition is pure OpenStack without some of the fancier HP management interfaces on top of it.

The easiest thing about OpenStack is setting it up – organizations spend the majority of the time simply keeping it running after it is set up.”

HP admits that OpenStack has a long way to go before it is considered a mature enterprise application stack. But they do have experience running a large OpenStack public cloud and have hundreds of developers working on the product. In fact HP says that most OpenStack community projects these days are basically run by HP, while other larger contributors (even Rack Space) have pulled back on resource allocation to the project HP has gone in full steam ahead.

HP has many large customers who specifically asked HP to get involved in the project and to provide a solution for them that can be supported end to end. I must admit the prospect does sound attractive, being that you can get HP Storage, Servers, Networking all battle tested and ready to run this new cloud platform, the Openstack platform is by far the biggest weak point today.

It is not there yet though, HP does offer a professional services for the customers entire life cycle of OpenStack deployment.

One key area that has been weak in OpenStack which recently made the news, is the networking component Neutron.

[..] once you get beyond about 50 nodes, Neutron falls apart”

So to stabilize this component HP integrated support with their SDN controller into the lower levels of Neutron. This allowed it to scale much better and maintain complete compatibility with existing APIs.

That is something HP is doing in several cases, they emphasize very strongly they are NOT building a proprietary solution, and they are NOT changing any of the APIs (they are helping change them upstream) as to break compatibility. They are however adding/moving some things around beneath the API level to improve stability.

The initial cost for the commercial $1,400/server/year which is quite reasonable, I assume that includes basic support. The commercial version is expected to become generally available in the second half of 2014.

Major updates will be released every six months, and minor updates every three months.

Very limited support cycle

One thing that took almost everyone in the room by surprise is the support cycle for this product. Normally enterprise products have support for 3-5 years, Helion has support for a maximum of 18 months. HP says 12 of those months is general support and the last six of those are specifically geared towards migration to the next version, which they say is not a trivial task.

I checked Red Hat’s policy as they are another big distribution of OpenStack, and their policy is similar – they had one year of support on version three of their production and have one and a half years on version four (current version). Despite the version numbers apparently version three was the first release to the public.

So given that it should just reinforce the fact that Openstack is not a mature platform at this point and it will take some time before it is, probably another 2-3 years at least. They only recently got the feature that allowed for upgrading the system.

HP does offer a fully integrated ConvergedSystem with Helion, though despite my best efforts I am unable to find a link that specifically mentions Helion or OpenStack.

HP is supporting ESXi and KVM as the initial hypervisors in their Helion. Openstack supports a much wider variety itself but HP is electing those two to begin with anyway. Support for Hyper-V will follow shortly.

HP also offers full indemnification from legal issues as well.

This site has a nice diagram of what HP is offering, not sure if it is an HP image or not so sending you there to see it.

Conclusion

My own suggestion is to steer clear of Openstack for a while yet, give it time to stabilize, don’t deploy it just because you can. Don’t deploy it because it’s today’s hype.

If you really, truly need this functionality internally then it seems like HP has by far the strongest offerings from a product and support standpoint(they are willing and able to do everything from design to deployment to operationally running it). Keep in mind depending on scale of deployment you may be constantly planning for the next upgrade (or having HP plan for you).

I would argue that the vast majority of organizations do not need OpenStack (in it’s current state) and would do themselves a favor by sticking to whatever they are already using until it’s more stable. Your organization may have pains running whatever your running now, but your likely to just trade those pains for other pains going the OpenStack route right now.

When will it be stable? I would say a good indicator will be the support cycle, when HP (or Redhat) starts having a full 3 year support cycle on the platform (with back ported fixes etc) that means it’s probably hit a good milestone.

I believe OpenStack will do well in the future, it’s just not there yet today.

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