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February 14, 2011

Vertica snatched by HP

Filed under: News — Tags: , , — Nate @ 9:00 pm

Funny timing! One of my friends who used to work for 3PAR left 3PAR not long after HP completed the acquisition and he went to Vertica, which is a scale out column-based distributed high performance database. Certainly not an area I am well versed in but I got a bit of info a couple weeks ago and the performance numbers are just outstanding, the kind of performance gains that you really probably have to see to believe, fortunately for users their software is free to download, and it sounds like it is easy to get up and running (I have no personal experience with it, but would like to see it in action at some point soon). Performance gains up up to 10,000% are not uncommon vs traditional databases.

It really sounds like an awesome product that can do more real time analysis on large amounts of data (from a few gigs to over a Petabyte). Something that Hadoop users out there should take notice of. If you recall last year I wrote a bit about organizations I have talked to that were trying to do real time with hadoop with (most likely) disastrous results, it’s not built for that, never was, which is why Google abandoned it (well not hadoop since they never used the thing but Mapreduce technology in general at least as far as their search index is concerned they may use it for other things). Vertica is unique in that it is the only product of it’s kind in the world that has a software connector that can connect hadoop to Vertica. Quite a market opportunity. Of course a lot of the PHB-types are attracted to Hadoop because it is a buzzword and because it’s free. They’ll find out the hard way that it’s not the holy grail they thought it was going to be and go to something like Vertica kicking and screaming.

So back to my friend, he’s back at HP again, he just couldn’t quite escape the gravitational pull that was HP.

Also somewhat funny as it wasn’t very long ago that HP announced a partnership with Microsoft to do data warehousing applications. Sort of reminds me when NetApp tried to go after Data Domain, mere days before they announced their bid they put out a press release saying how good their dedupe was..

Oh and here’s the news article from our friends at The Register.

The database runs in parallel across multiple machines, but has a shared-nothing architecture, so the query is routed to the data and runs locally. And the data for each column is stored in main memory, so a query can run anywhere from 50 to 1,000 times faster than a traditional data warehouse and its disk-based I/O – according to Vertica.

The Vertica Analytics Database went from project to commercial status very quickly – in under a year – and has been available for more than five years. In addition to real-time query functions, the Vertica product continuously loads data from production databases, so any queries done on the data sets is up to date. The data chunks are also replicated around the x64-based cluster for high availability and load balancing for queries. Data compression is heavily used to speed up data transfers and reduce the footprint of a relational database, something on the order of a 5X to 10X compression.

Vertica’s front page now has a picture of a c Class blade enclosure, jus think of what you can analyze with a enclosure filled with 384 x 2.3Ghz Opteron 6100s (which were released today as well and HP announced support for them on my favorite BL685c G7), and 4TB of memory all squeezed into 10U of space.

If your in the market for a data warehouse / BI platform of sorts, I urge you to at least see what Vertica has to offer, it really does seem revolutionary, and they make it easy enough to use that you don’t need an army of PhDs to design and build it yourself (i.e. google).

Speakin’ of HP, I did look at what the new Palm stuff will be and I’m pretty excited I just wish it was going to get here sooner. I went out and bought a new phone in the interim until I can get my hands on the Pre 3 and the Touchpad. My Pre 1 was not even on it’s last legs it was in a wheelchair and a oxygen bottle. New phone isn’t anything fancy just a feature phone, it does have one thing I’m not used to having though, battery life. The damn thing can go easily 3 days and the battery doesn’t even go down by 1 bar. And I have heard from folks that it will be available on Sprint, which makes me happy as a Sprint customer. Still didn’t take a chance and extend my contract just in case that changes.

November 4, 2010

Chicken and the egg

Filed under: Random Thought,Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , , — Nate @ 5:24 pm

Random thought time! –  came across an interesting headline on Chuck’s Blog – Attack of the Vblock Clones.

Now I’m the first to admit I didn’t read the whole thing but the basic gist he is saying if you want a fully tested integrated stack (of course you know I don’t like these stacks they restrict you too much, the point of open systems is you can connect many different types of systems together and have them work but anyways), then you should go with their VBlock because it’s there now, and tested, deployed etc. Others recently announced initiatives are responses to the VBlock and VCE, Arcadia(sp?) etc.

I’ve brought up 3cV before, something that 3PAR coined back almost 3 years ago now. Which is, in their words “Validated Blueprint of 3PAR, HP, and VMware Products Can Halve Costs and Floor Space”.

And for those that don’t know what 3cV is, a brief recap –

The Elements of 3cV
3cV combines the following products from 3PAR, HP, and VMware to deliver the virtual data center:

  • 3PAR InServ Storage Server featuring Virtual Domains and thin technologies—The leading utility storage platform, the 3PAR InServ is a highly virtualized tiered-storage array built for utility computing. Organizations creating virtualized IT infrastructures for workload consolidation use the 3PAR InServ to reduce the cost of allocated storage capacity, storage administration, and the SAN infrastructure.
  • HP BladeSystem c-Class—The No. 1 blade infrastructure on the market for datacenters of all sizes, the HP BladeSystem c-Class minimizes energy and space requirements and increases administrative productivity through advantages in I/O virtualization, power and cooling, and manageability. (1)
  • VMware Infrastructure—Infrastructure virtualization suite for industry-standard servers. VMware Infrastructure delivers the production-proven efficiency, availability, and dynamic management needed to build the responsive data center.

Sounds to me that 3cV beat VBlock to the punch by quite a ways. It would have been interesting to see how Dell would of handled the 3cV solution had they managed to win the bidding war, given they don’t have anything that competes effectively with c-Class. But fortunately HP won out so 3cV can be just that much more official.

It’s not sold as a pre-packaged product I guess you could say, but I mean how hard is it to say I need this much CPU, this much ram, this much storage HP go get it for me. Really it’s not hard. The hard part is all the testing and certification. Even if 3cV never existed you can bet your ass that it would work regardless. It’s not that complicated, really. Even if Dell managed to buy 3PAR and kill off the 3cV program because they wouldn’t want to directly promote HP’s products, you could still buy the 3PAR from Dell and the blades from HP and have it work. But of course you know that.

The only thing missing from 3cV is I’d like a more powerful networking stack, or at least sFlow support. I’ll take Flex10 (or Flexfabric) over Cisco any day of the week but I’d still like more.

I don’t know why this thought didn’t pop into my head until I read that headline, but it gave me something to write about.

But whatever, that’s my random thought of the day/week.

October 7, 2010

Testing the limits of virtualization

Filed under: Datacenter,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , , — Nate @ 11:24 pm

You know I’m a big fan of the AMD Opteron 6100 series processor, also a fan of the HP c class blade system, specifically the BL685c G7 which was released on June 21st. I was and am very excited about it.

It is interesting to think, it really wasn’t that long ago that blade systems still weren’t all that viable for virtualization primarily because they lacked the memory density, I mean so many of them offered a paltry 2 or maybe 4 DIMM sockets. That was my biggest complaint with them for the longest time. About a year or year and a half ago that really started shifting. We all know that Cisco bought some small startup a few years ago that had their memory extender ASIC but well you know I’m not a Cisco fan so won’t give them any more real estate in this blog entry, I have better places to spend my mad typing skills.

A little over a year ago HP released their Opteron G6 blades, at the time I was looking at the half height BL485c G6 (guessing here, too lazy to check). It had 16 DIMM sockets, that was just outstanding. I mean the company I was with at the time really liked Dell (you know I hate Dell by now I’m sure), I was poking around their site at the time and they had no answer to that(they have since introduced answers), the highest capacity half height blade they had at the time anyways was 8 DIMM sockets.

I had always assumed that due to the more advanced design in the HP blades that you ended up paying a huge premium, but wow I was surprised at the real world pricing, more so at the time because you needed of course significantly higher density memory modules in the Dell model to compete with the HP model.

Anyways fast forward to the BL685c G7 powered by the Opteron 6174 processor, a 12-core 2.2Ghz 80W processor.

Load a chassis up with eight of those:

  • 384 CPU cores (860Ghz of compute)
  • 4 TB of memory (512GB/server w/32x16GB each)
  • 6,750 Watts @ 100% load (feel free to use HP dynamic power capping if you need it)

I’ve thought long and hard over the past 6 months on whether or not to go 8GB or 16GB, and all of my virtualization experience has taught me in every case I’m memory(capacity) bound, not CPU bound. I mean it wasn’t long ago we were building servers with only 32GB of memory on them!!!

There is indeed a massive premium associated with going with 16GB DIMMs but if your capacity utilization is anywhere near the industry average then it is well worth investing in those DIMMs for this system, your cost of going from 2TB to 4TB of memory using 8GB chips in this configuration makes you get a 2nd chassis and associated rack/power/cooling + hypervisor licensing. You can easily halve your costs by just taking the jump to 16GB chips and keeping it in one chassis(or at least 8 blades – maybe you want to split them between two chassis I’m not going to get into that level of detail here)

Low power memory chips aren’t available for the 16GB chips so the power usage jumps by 1.2kW/enclosure for 512GB/server vs 256GB/server. A small price to pay, really.

So onto the point of my post – testing the limits of virtualization. When your running 32, 64, 128 or even 256GB of memory on a VM server that’s great, you really don’t have much to worry about. But step it up to 512GB of memory and you might just find yourself maxing out the capabilities of the hypervisor. At least in vSphere 4.1 for example you are limited to only 512 vCPUs per server or only 320 powered on virtual machines. So it really depends on your memory requirements, If your able to achieve massive amounts of memory de duplication(myself I have not had much luck here with linux it doesn’t de-dupe well, windows seems to dedupe a lot though), you may find yourself unable to fully use the memory on the system, because you run out of the ability to fire up more VMs ! I’m not going to cover other hypervisor technologies, they aren’t worth my time at this point but like I mentioned I do have my eye on KVM for future use.

Keep in mind 320 VMs is only 6.6VMs per CPU core on a 48-core server. That to me is not a whole lot for workloads I have personally deployed in the past. Now of course everybody is different.

But it got me thinking, I mean The Register has been touting off and on for the past several months every time a new Xeon 7500-based system launches ooh they can get 1TB of ram in the box. Or in the case of the big new bad ass HP 8-way system you can get 2TB of ram. Setting aside the fact that vSphere doesn’t go above 1TB, even if you go to 1TB I bet in most cases you will run out of virtual CPUs before you run out of memory.

It was interesting to see, in the “early” years the hypervisor technology really exploiting hardware very well, and now we see the real possibility of hitting a scalability wall at least as far as a single system is concerned. I have no doubt that VMware will address these scalability issues it’s only a matter of time.

Are you concerned about running your servers with 512GB of ram? After all that is a lot of “eggs” in one basket(as one expert VMware consultant I know & respect put it). For me at smaller scales I am really not too concerned. I have been using HP hardware for a long time and on the enterprise end it really is pretty robust. I have the most concerns about memory failure, or memory errors. Fortunately HP has had Advanced ECC for a long time now(I think I remember even seeing it in the DL360 G2 back in ’03).

HP’s Advanced ECC spreads the error correcting over four different ECC chips, and it really does provide quite robust memory protection. When I was dealing with cheap crap white box servers the #1 problem BY FAR was memory, I can’t tell you how many memory sticks I had to replace it was sick. The systems just couldn’t handle errors (yes all the memory was ECC!).

By contrast, honestly I can’t even think of a time a enterprise HP server failed (e.g crashed) due to a memory problem. I recall many times the little amber status light come on and I log into the iLO and say, oh, memory errors on stick #2, so I go replace it. But no crash! There was a firmware bug in the HP DL585G1s I used to use that would cause them to crash if too many errors were encountered, but that was a bug that was fixed years ago, not a fault with the system design. I’m sure there have been other such bugs here and there, nothing is perfect.

Dell introduced their version of Advanced ECC about a year ago, but it doesn’t (or at least didn’t maybe it does now) hold a candle to the HP stuff. The biggest issue with the Dell version of Advanced ECC was if you enabled it, it disabled a bunch of your memory sockets! I could not get an answer out of Dell support at the time at least why it did that. So I left it disabled because I needed the memory capacity.

So combine Advanced ECC with ultra dense blades with 48 cores and 512GB/memory a piece and you got yourself a serious compute resource pool.

Power/cooling issues aside(maybe if your lucky you can get in to SuperNap down in Vegas) you can get up to 1,500 CPU cores and 16TB of memory in a single cabinet. That’s just nuts! WAY beyond what you expect to be able to support in a single VMware cluster(being that your limited to 3,000 powered on VMs per cluster – the density would be only 2 VMs/core and 5GB/VM!)

And if you manage to get a 47U rack, well you can get one of those c3000 chassis in the rack on top of the four c7000 and get another 2TB of memory and 192 cores. We’re talking power kicking up into the 27kW range in a single rack! Like I said you need SuperNap or the like!

Think about that for a minute, 1,500 CPU cores and 16TB of memory in a single rack. Multiply that by say 10 racks. 15,000 CPU cores and 160TB of memory. How many tens of thousands of physical servers could be consolidated into that? A conservative number may be 7 VMs/core, your talking 105,000 physical servers consolidated into ten racks. Well excluding storage of course. Think about that! Insane! I mean that’s consolidating multiple data centers into a high density closet! That’s taking tens to hundreds of megawatts of power off the grid and consolidating it into a measly 250 kW.

I built out, what was to me some pretty beefy server infrastructure back in 2005, around a $7 million project. Part of it included roughly 300 servers in roughly 28 racks. There was 336kW of power provisioned for those servers.

Think about that for a minute. And re-read the previous paragraph.

I have thought for quite a while because of this trend, the traditional network guy or server guy is well, there won’t be as many of them around going forward. When you can consolidate that much crap in that small of a space, it’s just astonishing.

One reason I really do like the Opteron 6100 is the cpu cores, just raw cores. And they are pretty fast cores too. The more cores you have the more things the hypervisor can do at the same time, and there is no possibilities of contention like there are with hyperthreading. CPU processing capacity has gotten to a point I believe where raw cpu performance matters much less than getting more cores on the boxes. More cores means more consolidation. After all industry utilization rates for CPUs are typically sub 30%. Though in my experience it’s typically sub 10%, and a lot of times sub 5%. My own server sits at less than 1% cpu usage.

Now fast raw speed is still important in some applications of course. I’m not one to promote the usage of a 100 core CPU with each core running at 100Mhz(10Ghz), there is a balance that has to be achieved, and I really do believe the Opteron 6100 has achieved that balance, I look forward to the 6200(socket compatible 16 core). Ask anyone that has known me this decade I have not been AMD’s strongest supporter for a very long period of time. But I see the light now.

October 6, 2010

Who’s next

Filed under: Networking,Random Thought — Tags: , , — Nate @ 9:42 pm

I was thinking about this earlier this week or late last week I forget.

It wasn’t long ago that IBM acquired Blade Network Technologies, a long time partner of IBM as Blade made a lot of switches for the Blade Center, and also for the HP blade system as well I believe.

I don’t think that Blade Networks was really well known outside of their niche of being a supplier to HP and IBM (and maybe others I don’t recall and haven’t checked recently) on the back end. I certainly never heard of them until in the past year or two and I do keep my eyes out there for such companies.

Anyways that is what started my train of thought. The next step in the process was watching several reports on CNBC about companies pulling their IPOs due to market conditions. Which to me is confusing considering how high the “market” has come recently. It apparently just boils down to investors and IPO companies not able to agree on a “market price” or whatever. I don’t really care what the reason is, but the point is this — earlier this year Force10 Networks filed for IPO, and well haven’t heard much of a peep since.

Given the recent fight over 3PAR between Dell and HP, and the continuing saga of stack wars, it got me speculating.

What I think should happen, is Dell should go buy Force10 before they IPO. Dell obviously has no networking talent in house, last I recall their Powerconnect crap was OEM’d from someone like SMC or one of those really low tier providers. I remember someone else making the decision to use that product last year, and then when we tried to send 5% of our network traffic to the site that was running those switches they flat out died, had to get remote hands to reboot them. Then shortly afterwards one of them bricked themselves when upgrading the firmware on them, had to RMA. I just pointed and laughed, since I knew it was a mistake to go with them to begin with, the people making the decisions just didn’t know any better. Several outages later they ended up replacing them, and I tought them the benefits of a true layer 3 network, no more static routes.

Then HP should go buy Extreme Networks, which is my favorite network switching company, I think HP could do well with them. Yes we all know HP bought 3COM last year, but we also know HP didn’t buy 3COM for the technology (no matter what the official company line is), they bought them for their presence in China. 3COM was practically a Chinese company by the time HP bought them, really! And yes I did read the news that HP finished kicking Cisco out of their data centers replacing their stuff with a combination of Procurve and 3COM. Juniper tried & failed to buy Extreme a few years ago shortly after they bought Netscreen.

That would make my day though, a c-Class blade system with an Extreme XOS-powered VirtualConnect Ethernet fabric combined with 3PAR storage on the back end. Hell, that’d make my year 🙂

And after that, given that HP bought Palm earlier in the year (yes I own a Palm Pre – mainly so I can run older Palm apps otherwise I’d still be on a feature phone). HP likes the consumer space so they should go buy Tivo and break into the set top box market. Did I mention I use Tivo too? I have 3 of them.

September 27, 2010

Bye Bye 3PAR, Hello HP!

Filed under: News,Storage — Tags: , , — Nate @ 2:14 pm

Wow that was fast! HP completed it’s purchase of 3PAR this morning.

HP today announced that it has completed the acquisition of 3PAR Inc., a leading global provider of utility storage, for a price of $33 per share in cash, or an enterprise value of $2.35 billion.

3PAR technologies expand HP’s storage portfolio into enterprise-class public and private cloud computing environments, which are key growth markets for HP. Complementary with HP’s current storage portfolio, 3PAR brings market-differentiating technology to HP that will enable clients to maximize storage utilization, balance workloads and automate storage tiering. This allows clients to improve productivity and more efficiently operate their storage networks.

With a worldwide sales and channel network, coupled with extensive service operations, HP is uniquely positioned to rapidly expand 3PAR’s market opportunity. As part of the HP Converged Infrastructure portfolio, which integrates servers, storage, networking and management technologies, 3PAR solutions will further strengthen HP’s ability to simplify data center environments for clients.

Further details on product integration will be announced at a later date.

Certainly not messing around!

September 16, 2010

Fusion IO now with VMware support

Filed under: Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , — Nate @ 8:58 am

About damn time! I read earlier in the year on their forums that they were planning on ESX support for their next release of code, originally expected sometime in March/April or something. But that time came and went and saw no new updates.

I saw that Fusion IO put on a pretty impressive VDI demonstration at VMworld, so I figured they must have VMware support now, and of course they do.

I would be very interested to see how performance could be boosted and VM density incerased by leveraging local Fusion IO storage for swap in ESX.  I know of a few 3PAR customers that say they get double the VM density per host vs other storage because of the better I/O they get from 3PAR, though of course Fusion IO is quite a bit snappier.

With VMware’s ability to set swap file locations on a per-host basis, it’s pretty easy to configure, in order to take advantage of it though you’d have to disable memory ballooning in the guests I think in order to force the host to swap. I don’t think I would go so far as to try to put individual swap partitions on the local fusion IO for the guests to swap to directly, at least not when I’m using a shared storage system.

I just checked again, and as far as I can tell, still, from a blade perspective at least, still the only player offering Fusion IO modues for their blades is the HP c Class in the form of their IO Accelerator. With up to two expansion slots on the half width, and three on the full width blades, there’s plenty of room for the 80, 160 GB SLC models or the 320GB MLC model. And if you were really crazy I guess you could use the “standard” Fusion IO cards with the blades by using the PCI Express expansion module, though that seems more geared towards video cards as upcomming VDI technologies leverage hardware GPU acceleration.

HP’s Fusion IO-based I/O Accelerator

FusionIO claims to be able to write 5TB per day for 24 years, even if you cut that to 2TB per day for 5 years, it’s quite an amazing claim.

From what I have seen (can’t speak with personal experience just yet), the biggest advantage Fusion IO has over more traditional SSDs is write performance, of course to get optimal write performance on the system you do need to sacrifice space.

Unlike drive form factor devices, the ioDrive can be tuned to achieve a higher steady-state write performance than what it is shipped with from the factory.

September 7, 2010

Only HP has it

Filed under: Datacenter,Random Thought,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , — Nate @ 11:32 pm

I commented in response to an article on The Register recently but figure I’m here writing stuff might as well bring this up to.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock and/or not reading this site you probably know that AMD launched their Opteron 6100 series CPUs earlier this year. One of the highlights of the design is the ability to support 12 DIMMs of memory per socket, up from the previous eight per socket.

Though of all of the servers that have launched HP seems to have the clear lead in AMD technology, for starters as far as I am aware they are the only ones currently offering Opteron 6100-based blades.

Secondly, I have looked around at the offerings of Dell, IBM, HP, and even Supermicro and Tyan, but as far as I can tell only HP is offering Opteron systems with the full 12 DIMMs/socket support.The only reason I can think of I guess is the other companies have a hard time making a board that can accommodate that many DIMMs, after all it is a lot of memory chips. I’m sure if Sun was still independent they would have a new cutting edge design for the 6100. After all they were the first to launch (as far as I know) a quad socket, 2U AMD system with 32 memory slots nearly three years ago.

The new Barcelona four-socket server comes with dual TCP offloading enabled gigabit NIC cards, redundant power supplies, and 32 DIMM slots for up to 256 GBs of memory capacity  [..] Half the memory and CPU are stacked on top of the other half and this is a rather unusual but innovative design.

Anyways, if your interested in the Opteron 6100, it seems HP is the best bet in town, whether it’s

Kind of fuzzy shot of the HP DL165 G7, anyone got a clearer picture?

HP DL385 G7

HP BL685c G7 – I can understand why they couldn’t fit 48 DIMMs on this blade(Note: two of the CPUs are under the hard disks)!

HP BL465c G7 – again, really no space for 24 DIMMs ! (damnit)

Tyan Quad Socket Opteron 6100 motherboard, tight on space, guess the form factor doesn’t cut it.

Twelve cores not enough? Well you’ll be able to drop Opteron 6200 16-core CPUs into these systems in the not too distant future.

August 30, 2010

Dell vs HP in R&D

Filed under: News — Tags: , , — Nate @ 9:50 am

Came across this link on Data Center Knowledge to Forbes online –

In fiscal 2010 (ended January 31st), Dell spent $617 million for R&D, or 1.2% of sales [..] an R&D budget like that isn’t going to cut it.

[..]Hewlett Packard, the larger company, already has more going on. In the trailing 12 months, it spent $2.849 billion here, or 2.3% of sales.

[..] Assuming both want to stay relevant five years hence, 3Par looks like it will be a bargain for whichever firm wins this bidding war and likely there will be some incredibly long and tense meetings in the conference rooms of the firm that loses.

And another link from Data Center Knowledge to the Boston Globe, which says something I don’t really agree with –

EMC has also partnered with Dell to allow the computer company to resell high-end network storage products made by EMC. But that arrangement would be severely tested if Dell winds up buying 3Par, giving Dell its own high-end storage provider.

For that reason Kerravala said EMC will most likely fare better if HP ends up winning the 3Par bidding war.

“At least that will preserve EMC’s partnership with Dell,’’ he said.

In the short term it will of course preserve the EMC partnership, but the rift has been created by Dell, showing EMC it’s not willing to sit by and just refer sales along to the EMC direct sales team much longer. I’m sure EMC realizes it’s days are numbered as a tight partner with Dell(hence it’s partnership with Cisco UCS which I’m sure didn’t make Dell a happy camper).

I don’t see Dell going to HDS if they lose out on 3PAR, they probably wouldn’t look that hot if they went to HDS’s arms so soon after HP and Sun/Oracle ditched them.

August 23, 2010

HP FlexFabric module launched

Filed under: Datacenter,Networking,Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , — Nate @ 5:03 pm

While they announced it a while back, it seems the HP VirtualConnect FlexFabric Module available for purchase for $18,500 (web price). Pretty impressive technology, Sort of a mix between FCoE and combining a Fibre channel switch and a 10Gbps Flex10 switch into one. The switch has two ports on it that can uplink (apparently) directly fiber channel 2/4/8Gbps. I haven’t read too much into it yet but I assume it can uplink directly to a storage array, unlike the previous Fibre Channel Virtual Connect module which had to be connected to a switch first (due to NPIV).

HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Modules are the simplest, most flexible way to connect virtualized server blades to data or storage networks. VC FlexFabric modules eliminate up to 95% of network sprawl at the server edge with one device that converges traffic inside enclosures and directly connects to external LANs and SANs. Using Flex-10 technology with Fibre Channel over Ethernet and accelerated iSCSI, these modules converge traffic over high speed 10Gb connections to servers with HP FlexFabric Adapters (HP NC551i or HP NC551m Dual Port FlexFabric 10Gb Converged Network Adapters or HP NC553i 10Gb 2-port FlexFabric Converged Network Adapter). Each redundant pair of Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules provide 8 adjustable connections ( six Ethernet and two Fibre Channel, or six Ethernet and 2 iSCSI or eight Ethernet) to dual port10Gb FlexFabric Adapters. VC FlexFabric modules avoid the confusion of traditional and other converged network solutions by eliminating the need for multiple Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, extension modules, cables and software licenses. Also, Virtual Connect wire-once connection management is built-in enabling server adds, moves and replacement in minutes instead of days or weeks.

[..]

  • 16 x 10Gb Ethernet downlinks to server blade NICs and FlexFabric Adapters
  • Each 10Gb downlink supports up to 3 FlexNICs and 1 FlexHBA or 4 FlexNICs
  • Each FlexHBA can be configured to transport either Fiber Channel over Ethernet/CEE or Accelerated iSCSI protocol.
  • Each FlexNIC and FlexHBA is recognized by the server as a PCI-e physical function device with adjustable speeds from 100Mb to 10Gb in 100Mb increments when connected to a HP NC553i 10Gb 2-port FlexFabric Converged Network Adapter or any Flex-10 NIC and from 1Gb to 10Gb in 100Mb increments when connected to a NC551i Dual Port FlexFabric 10Gb Converged Network Adapter or NC551m Dual Port FlexFabric 10Gb Converged Network Adapter
  • 4 SFP+ external uplink ports configurable as either 10Gb Ethernet or 2/4/8Gb auto-negotiating Fibre Channel connections to external LAN or SAN switches
  • 4 SFP+ external uplink ports configurable as 1/10Gb auto-negotiating Ethernet connected to external LAN switches
  • 8 x 10Gb SR, LR fiber and copper SFP+ uplink ports (4 ports also support 10Gb LRM fiber SFP+)
  • Extended list of direct attach copper cable connections supported
  • 2 x 10Gb shared internal cross connects for redundancy and stacking
  • HBA aggregation on FC configured uplink ports using ANSI T11 standards-based N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) technology
  • Allows up to 255 virtual machines running on the same physical server to access separate storage resources
  • Up to 128 VLANs supported per Shared Uplink Set
  • Low latency (1.2 µs Ethernet ports and 1.7 µs Enet/Fibre Channel ports) throughput provides switch-like performance.
  • Line Rate, full-duplex 240Gbps bridging fabric
  • MTU up to 9216 Bytes – Jumbo Frames
  • Configurable up to 8192 MAC addresses and 1000 IGMP groups
  • VLAN Tagging, Pass-Thru and Link Aggregation supported on all uplinks
  • Stack multiple Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules with other VC FlexFabric, VC Flex-10 or VC Ethernet Modules across up to 4 BladeSystem enclosures allowing any server Ethernet port to connect to any Ethernet uplink

Management

  • Pre-configure server I/O configurations prior to server installation for easy deployment
  • Move, add, or change server network connections on the fly without LAN and SAN administrator involvement
  • Supported by Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) v6.2 and higher for centralized connection and workload management for hundreds of Virtual Connect domains. Learn more at: www.hp.com/go/vcem
  • Integrated Virtual Connect Manager included with every module, providing out-of-the-box, secure HTTP and scriptable CLI interfaces for individual Virtual Connect domain configuration and management.
  • Configuration and setup consistent with VC Flex-10 and VC Fibre Channel Modules
  • Monitoring and management via industry standard SNMP v.1 and v.2 Role-based security for network and server administration with LDAP compatibility
  • Port error and Rx/Tx data statistics displayed via CLI
  • Port Mirroring on any uplink provides network troubleshooting support with Network Analyzers
  • IGMP Snooping optimizes network traffic and reduces bandwidth for multicast applications such as streaming applications
  • Recognizes and directs Server-Side VLAN tags
  • Transparent device to the LAN Manager and SAN Manager
  • Provisioned storage resource is associated directly to a specific virtual machine – even if the virtual server is re-allocated within the BladeSystem
  • Server-side NPIV removes storage management constraint of a single physical HBA on a server blade Does not add to SAN switch domains or require traditional SAN management
  • Centralized configuration of boot from iSCSI or Fibre Channel network storage via Virtual Connect Manager GUI and CLI
  • Remotely update Virtual Connect firmware on multiple modules using Virtual Connect Support Utility 1.5.0

Options

  • Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM), provides a central console to manage network connections and workload mobility for thousands of servers across the datacenter
  • Optional HP 10Gb SFP+ SR, LR, and LRM modules and 10Gb SFP+ Copper cables in 0.5m, 1m, 3m, 5m, and 7m lengths
  • Optional HP 8 Gb SFP+ and 4 Gb SFP optical transceivers
  • Supports all Ethernet NICs and Converged Network adapters for BladeSystem c-Class server blades: HP NC551i 10Gb FlexFabric Converged Network Adapters, HP NC551m 10Gb FlexFabric Converged Network Adapters, 1/10Gb Server NICs including LOM and Mezzanine card options and the latest 10Gb KR NICs
  • Supports use with other VC modules within the same enclosure (VC Flex-10 Ethernet Module, VC 1/10Gb Ethernet Module, VC 4 and 8 Gb Fibre Channel Modules).

So in effect this allows you to cut down on the number of switches per chassis from four to two, which can save quite a bit. HP had a cool graphic showing the amount of cables that are saved even against Cisco UCS but I can’t seem to find it at the moment.

The most recently announced G7 blade servers have the new FlexFabric technology built in(which is also backwards compatible with Flex10).

VCEM seems pretty scalable

Built on the Virtual Connect architecture integrated into every BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, VCEM provides a central console to administer network address assignments, perform group-based configuration management and to rapidly deployment, movement and failover of server connections for 250 Virtual Connect domains (up to 1,000 BladeSystem enclosures and 16,000 blade servers).

With each enclosure consuming roughly 5kW with low voltage memory and power capping, 1,000 enclosures should consume roughly 5 Megawatts? From what I see “experts” say it costs roughly ~$18 million per megawatt for a data center, so one VCEM system can manage a $90 million data center, that’s pretty bad ass. I can’t think of who would need so many blades..

If I were building a new system today I would probably get this new module, but have to think hard about sticking to regular fibre channel module to allow the technology to bake a bit more for storage.

The module is built based on Qlogic technology.

HP to the rescue

Filed under: Datacenter,Events,News,Storage — Tags: , , , , — Nate @ 6:03 am

Knock knock.. HP is kicking down your back door 3PAR..

Well that’s more like it, HP offered $1.6 Billion to acquire 3PAR this morning topping Dell’s offer by 33%. Perhaps the 3cV solution can finally be fully backed by HP. More info from The Register here. And more info on what this could mean to HP and 3PAR products from the same source here.

3PAR’s website is having serious issues, this obviously has spawned a ton of interest in the company, I get intermittent blank pages and connection refused messages.

I didn’t wake my rep up for this one.

The 3cV solution was announced about three years ago –

Elements of the 3cV solution include:

  • 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers—highly virtualized, tiered-storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations creating virtualized IT infrastructures for workload consolidation use InServ arrays to reduce the cost of allocated storage capacity, storage administration, and SAN infrastructure.
  • HP BladeSystem c-Class Server Blades—the leading blade server infrastructure on the market for datacenters of all sizes. HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades minimize energy and space requirements and increase administrative productivity through advantages in I/O virtualization, powering and cooling, and manageability.
  • VMware vSphere—the leading virtualization platform for industry-standard servers. VMware vSphere helps customers reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security, and go green.

While I could not find the image that depicts the 3cV solution(not sure how long it’s been gone for), here is more info on it for posterity.

The Advantages of 3cV
3cV offers combined benefits that enable customers to manage and scale their server and storage environments simply, allowing them to halve server, storage and operational costs while lowering the environmental impact of the datacenter.

  • Reduces storage and server costs by 50%—The inherently modular architectures of the HP BladeSystem c-Class and the 3PAR InServ Storage Server—coupled with the increased utilization provided by VMware Infrastructure and 3PAR Thin Provisioning—allow 3cV customers to do more with less capital expenditure. As a result, customers are able to reduce overall storage and server costs by 50% or more. High levels of availability and disaster recovery can also be affordably extended to more applications through VMware Infrastructure and 3PAR thin copy technologies.
  • Cuts operational costs by 50% and increases business agility—With 3cV, customers are able to provision and change server and storage resources on demand. By using VMware Infrastructure’s capabilities for rapid server provisioning and the dynamic optimization provided by VMware VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), HP Virtual Connect and Insight Control management software, and 3PAR Rapid Provisioning and Dynamic Optimization, customers are able to provision and re-provision physical servers, virtual hosts, and virtual arrays with tailored storage services in a matter of minutes, not days. These same technologies also improve operational simplicity, allowing overall server and storage administrative efficiency to increase by 3x or more.
  • Lowers environmental impact—With 3cV, customers are able to cut floor space and power requirements dramatically. Server floor space is minimized through server consolidation enabled by VMware Infrastructure (up to 70% savings) and HP BladeSystem density (up to 50% savings). Additional server power requirements are cut by 30% or more through the unique virtual power management capabilities of HP Thermal Logic technology. Storage floor space is reduced by the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, which delivers twice the capacity per floor tile as compared to alternatives. In addition, 3PAR thin technologies, Fast RAID 5, and wide striping allow customers to power and cool as much as 75% less disk capacity for a given project without sacrificing performance.
  • Delivers security through virtualization, not dedicated hardware silos—Whereas traditional datacenter architectures force tradeoffs between high resource utilization and the need for secure segregation of application resources for disparate user groups, 3cV resolves these competing needs through advanced virtualization. For instance, just as VMware Infrastructure securely isolates virtual machines on shared severs, 3PAR Virtual Domains provides secure “virtual arrays” for private, autonomous storage provisioning from a single, massively-parallel InServ Storage Server.

Though due to the recent stack wars it’s been hard for 3PAR to partner with HP to promote this solution since I’m sure HP would rather push their own full stack. Well hopefully now they can. The best of both worlds technology wise can come together.

More details from 3PAR’s VMware products site.

From HP’s offer letter –

We propose to increase our offer to acquire all of 3PAR outstanding common stock to $24.00 per share in cash. This offer represents a 33.3% premium to Dell’s offer price and is a “Superior Proposal” as defined in your merger agreement with Dell. HP’s proposal is not subject to any financing contingency. HP’s Board of Directors has approved this proposal, which is not subject to any additional internal approvals. If approved by your Board of Directors, we expect the transaction would close by the end of the calendar year.

In addition to the compelling value offered by our proposal, there are unparalleled strategic benefits to be gained by combining these two organizations. HP is uniquely positioned to capitalize on 3PAR’s next-generation storage technology by utilizing our global reach and superior routes to market to deliver 3PAR’s products to customers around the world. Together, we will accelerate our ability to offer unmatched levels of performance, efficiency and scalability to customers deploying cloud or scale-out environments, helping drive new growth for both companies.
As a Silicon Valley-based company, we share 3PAR’s passion for innovation.
[..]

We understand that you will first need to communicate this proposal and your Board’s determinations to Dell, but we are prepared to execute the merger agreement immediately following your termination of the Dell merger agreement.

Music to my ears.

[tangent — begin]

My father worked for HP in the early days back when they were even more innovative than they are today, he recalled their first $50M revenue year. He retired from HP in the early 90s after something like 25-30 years.

I attended my freshman year at Palo Alto Senior High school, and one of my classmates/friends (actually I don’t think I shared any classes with him now that I think about it) was Ben Hewlett, grandson of one of the founders of HP. Along with a couple other friends Ryan and Jon played a bunch of RPGs (I think the main one was Twilight 2000, something one of my other friends Brian introduced me to in 8th grade).

I remember asking Ben one day why he took Japanese as his second language course when it was significantly more difficult than Spanish(which was the easy route, probably still is?) I don’t think I’ll ever forget his answer. He said “because my father says it’s the business language of the future..”

How times have changed.. Now it seems everyone is busy teaching their children Chinese. I’m happy knowing English, and a touch of bash and perl.

I never managed to keep in touch with my friends from Palo Alto, after one short year there I moved back to Thailand for two more years of high school there.

[tangent — end]

HP could do some cool stuff with 3PAR, they have much better technology overall, I have no doubt HP has their eyes on their HDS partnership and the possibility of replacing their XP line with 3PAR technology in the future has got to be pretty enticing. HDS hasn’t done a whole lot recently, and I read not long ago that regardless what HP says, they don’t have much (if any) input into the HDS product line.

The HP USP-V OEM relationship is with Hitachi SSG. The Sun USP-V reseller deal was struck with HDS. Mikkelsen said: “HP became a USP-V OEM in 2004 when the USP-V was already done. HP had no input to the design and, despite what they say, very little input since.” HP has been a Hitachi OEM since 1999.

Another interesting tidbit of information from the same article:

It [HDS] cannot explain why it created the USP-V – because it didn’t, Hitachi SSG did, in Japan, and its deepest thinking and reasons for doing so are literally lost in translation.

The loss of HP as an OEM customer of HDS, so soon after losing Sun as an OEM customer would be a really serious blow to HDS(one person I know claimed it accounts for ~50% of their business), whom seems to have a difficult time selling stuff in western countries, I’ve read it’s mostly because of their culture. Similarly it seems Fujitsu has issues selling stuff in the U.S. at least, they seem to have some good storage products but not much attention is paid to them outside of Asia(and maybe Europe). Will HDS end up like Fujtisu as a result of HP buying 3PAR? Not right away for sure, but longer term they stand to lose a ton of market share in my opinion.

And with the USP getting a little stale (rumor has it they are near to announcing a technology refresh for it), it would be good timing for HP to get 3PAR, to cash in on the upgrade cycle by getting customers to go with the T class arrays instead of the updated USP whenever possible.

I read on an HP blog earlier in the year an interesting comment –

The 3PAR is drastically less expensive than an XP, but is an active/active concurrent design, can scale up to 8 clustered controllers, highly virtualized, customers can self-install, self-maintain, and requires no professional services. Its on par with the XP in terms of raw performance, but has the ease of use of the EVA. Like the XP, the 3PAR can be carved up into virtual domains so that service providers or multi-tenant arrays can have delegated administration.

I still think 3PAR is worth more, and should stay independent, but given the current situation would much rather have them in the arms of HP than Dell.

Obviously those analysts that said Dell paid too much for 3PAR were wrong, and didn’t understand the value of the 3PAR technology. HP does otherwise they wouldn’t be offering 33% more cash.

After the collapse of so many of 3PAR’s NAS partners over the past couple of years, the possibility of having Ibrix available again for a longer term solution is pretty good. Dell bought Exanet’s IP earlier in the year. LSI owns Onstor, HP bought Polyserve and Ibrix. Really just about no “open” NAS players left. Isilon seems to be among the biggest NAS players left but of course their technology is tightly integrated into their disk drive systems, same with Panasas.

Maybe that recent legal investigation into the board at 3PAR had some merit after all.

Dell should take their $billion and shove it in Pillar’s(or was it Compellent ? I forgot) face, so the CEO there can make his dream of being a billion dollar storage company come true, if only for a short time.

I’m not a stock holder or anything, I don’t buy stocks(or bonds).

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