With the introduction of a
new tape storage blade from HP this week and the SB40c storage
blade announced last autumn starting to see user deployment, HP's
"blade everything" strategy is edging toward fruition in
storage.
In the wake of the announcement this week, many users at the HP
Technology Forum conference said they were beginning to evaluate
the technology for use in certain applications, and most were eager
to see a networked version of the disk blade.
One user, Michael J. Kaufman, vice president for Calyon Credit
Agricole CIB, a bank headquartered in France, said his company has
deployed 2 terabytes (TB) of the direct attached storage (DAS)
SB40c blades to support BizTalk and SharePoint applications for an
upcoming project to be announced in August. (Kaufman said he
couldn't comment further on the nature of the project.) The company
is also looking into using storage blades for rapid deployment at a
disaster recovery site. "The main advantage is rapid deployment
and scalability," he said.
The blades aren't without their pitfalls. "Heat is still an issue
with any blade enclosure," Kaufman said. He also would like to see
HP improve its BladeSystem management application. "Once in a while
when we have to do firmware upgrades on the chassis, it has dropped
the blades from the management application, and we have to bring
them back manually."
Kaufman added that he's anxious to see HP add a networked
storage blade, as well as full height, denser storage blades. His
company doesn't plan to deploy the 448c tape blade HP announced
this week because its LTO-2 drives are too small for its
purposes.
Eventually, however, Kaufman said he believes there could be
such a thing as bladed
storage area networks (San). "It's still years away, but we're
already saving tens of thousands of dollars on rack space,
management overhead and power by deploying the blades we have," he
said.
Other users said that networked storage blades could be useful
at remote offices to replace standalone network attached storage
(Nas) servers. "A [bladed] Nas storage server might have value at
small and remote locations as a way to get them both power and IP
[networking] cheaply," said Brad Allen, systems architect for Texas
Instruments. "But there might be a [pricing] premium for the small
form factor, which would eliminate that benefit."
"Both the storage blade and tape blade look interesting at first
glance, especially for rapid recovery when it comes to DR," said
Ron Service, director of MIS for Com Dev, a Canadian satellite
manufacturer.
A storage administrator for a large bank, who declined to be
named, said his organization was looking at storage blades as
networked storage for larger applications. "Anything VMware," he
said, which is already on blade servers anyway. "There may also be
places for it, like applications, that have to be brought up
quickly, but the extra money may not be there."
Some users, meanwhile, remained more skeptical. "There would
have to be proof that it could handle throughput in our
environment, and we'd have to carefully evaluate whether a storage
blade could handle the stress of tiered storage migration," said
J.R. Ashby, senior systems engineer for TriWest Healthcare
Alliance.
HP executives have hinted that a networked version of the SB40c
is coming, but HP chief technologist Hal Woods said it will take
fatter network pipes before that happens. "Today's blade enclosures
aren't designed to move data in and out at as fast a rate as
storage arrays," he said. He added that 8 Gbps Fibre Channel or 10
Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) could change all that. "We're headed in
that direction of enabling technologies to make it work."
Illuminata Inc. principal IT advisor John Webster said he
thought HP would integrate the clustered file system IP it acquired
with PolyServe Inc. in June to create networked blade storage. "The
issue with a bladed SAN is that if you have the server and storage
in that blade chassis, where's the switch [between them]? But it's
conceivable the PolyServe software could act like a kind of
'logical switch' between the server and storage layers -- I think
that's where HP is going."