Category Archives: HP

Data Deduplication – Dell is first and last

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A very interesting report surfaced in front of me today. It is Information Week’s IT Pro ranking of Data Deduplication vendors, just made available a few weeks ago, and it is the overview of the dedupe market so far.

It surveyed over 400 IT professionals from various industries with companies ranging from less than 50 employees to over 10,000 employees and revenues of less than USD5 million to USD1 billion. Overall, it had a good mix of respondents. But the results were quite interesting.

It surveyed 2 segments

  1. Overall performance – product reliability, product performance, acquisition costs, operations costs etc.
  2. Technical features – replication, VTL, encryption, iSCSI and FCoE support etc.

When I saw the results (shown below), surprise, surprise! Here’s the overall performance survey chart:

Dell/Compellent scored the highest in this survey while EMC/Data Domain ranked the lowest. However, the difference between the first place and the last place vendor is only 4%, and this is to suggest that EMC/Data Domain was about just as good as the Dell/Compellent solution, but it scored poorly in the areas that matters most to the customer. In fact, as we drill down into the requirements of the overall performance one-by-one, as shown below,

there is little difference among the 7 vendors.

However, when it comes to Technical Features, Dell/Compellent is ranked last, the complete opposite. As you can see from the survey chart below, IBM ProtecTier, NetApp and HP are all ranked #1.

The details, as per the technical requirements of the customers, are shown below:

These figures show that the competition between the vendors is very, very stiff, with little edge difference from one to another. But what I was more interested were the following findings, because these figures tell a story.

In the survey, only 34% of the respondents say they have implemented some data deduplication solutions, while the rest are evaluating and plan to evaluation. This means that the overall market is not saturated and there is still a window of opportunity for the vendors. However, the speed of the a maturing data deduplication market, from early adopters perhaps 4-5 years ago to overall market adoption, surprised many, because the storage industry tend to be a bit less trendy than most areas of IT. With the way the rate of data deduplication is going, it will be very much a standard feature of all storage vendors in the very near future.

The second figures that is probably not-so-surprising is, for most of the customers who have already implemented the data deduplication solution, almost 99% are satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their solutions. Therefore, the likelihood of these customer switching vendors and replacing their gear is very low, perhaps partly because of the reliability of the solution as well as those products performing as they should.

The Information Week’s IT Pro survey probably reflected well of where the deduplication market is going and there isn’t much difference in terms of technical and technology features from vendor to vendor. Customer will have to choose beyond the usual technology pitch, and look for other (and perhaps more important) subtleties such as customer service, price and flexibility of doing business with. EMC/Data Domain, being king-of-the-hill, has not been the best of vendor when it comes to price, quality of post-sales support and service innovation. Let’s hope they are not like the EMC sales folks of the past, carrying the “Take it or leave it” tag when they develop their relationship with their future customers. And it will not help if word-of-mouth goes around the industry about EMC’s arrogance of their dominance. It may not be true, and let’s hope it is not true because the EMC of today has changed plenty compared to the Symmetrix days. EMC/Data Domain is now part of their Backup Recovery Service (BRS) team, and I have good friends there at EMC Malaysia and Singapore. They are good guys but remember guys, customer is still king!

Dell, new with their acquisition of Compellent and Ocarina Networks, seems very eager to win the business and kudos to them as well. In fact, I heard from a little birdie that Dell is “giving away” several units of Compellents to selected customers in Malaysia. I did not and cannot ascertain if this is true or not but if it is, that’s what I call thinking-out-of-the-box, given Dell as a late comer into the storage game. Well done!

One thing to note is that the survey took in 17 vendors, including Exagrid, Falconstor, Quantum, Sepaton and so on, but only the top-7 shown in the charts qualified.

In the end, I believe the deduplication vendors had better scramble to grab as much as they can in the coming months, because this market will be going, going, gone pretty soon with nothing much to grab after that, unless there is a disruptive innovation to the deduplication technology

HP P4000 – Pretty impressive

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After being in the storage networking industry for so long, I have seen most of the new storage solutions out there. Most of them don’t really differ much from what already out there, and it gets a little boring. But once in a while, a little gem is unearthed and my excitement bubbles up again.

Today, I was at the HP P4000 G2 SAN workshop and the LeftHand Networks SAN/iQ storage solution which HP acquired in 2008 left me with 3 words – Interesting, Innovative and Impressive – from a technology standpoint.

I must admit that this is a little gem that got past my radar and now it’s HP’s gain. I have heard about LeftHand Networks in the past, and at the same time, I was also looking at another storage solution called Intransa. Unfortunately, Intransa went on to differentiate themselves and today, they are focused more as a storage solution for videos and CCTVs, seldom surfacing with innovative technology. LeftHand Networks was and is different and I can understand why HP bought them, because the technology that they bring with them to HP is really cool!

Now rebranded and renamed as HP P4000 G2 SAN, the storage solution no longer sits on proprietary hardware. As part of HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy, the SAN/iQ has been fully integrated into the HP Proliant x86 platform (I heard there’s a blade version as well), making it simple to procure and probably helps simplify operational resource planning and logistics as well. At the same, there is also a P4000 VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) as well, which HP guys have been using for demo for several years now. There is a 60-day trial available at the HP P4000 VSA Download site, for organizations to have a try-and-buy and if they do, they can turn some of their old x86 platforms into a storage appliance by just adding more hard disk drives. That’s saves money too!

So, what’s cool, you say?

2 key technologies stands out

  • Storage Clustering
  • Network RAID

As I was well informed at the workshop today, the Storage Clustering technology is not exclusive to the P4000. In fact, Dell EqualLogic employs something similar as well. But it was something that impressed me and it is different from the traditional storage SANs that we usually see.

You see, in the traditional SAN setup, the LUNs or volumes are either loosely or tightly linked to 2 active/active storage processors/controllers. And the way most of the storage vendors do, when a customer runs out of capacity or performance or both, they would have to do a forklift upgrade of the controllers. This is something that is disruptive and also does not allow CPU, memory or I/O channels upgrade to the existing controller. Today, most storage vendors do not allow you to break open the storage processor chassis and change the CPU, add more RAM or add more I/O paths to support more disk drives or increase throughput. Mind you, this is something that I have been questioning for a long time but as the storage networking industry has it, you got to upgrade the entire storage processor or controller in order to get more power and capacity.

The P4000 (as well as the Dell EqualLogic) approaches this from another angle where instead of doing a forklift upgrade of the storage processor/controller, just add another node of the same CPU and RAM profile, and have the P4000 SAN/iQ software group the new node together with the existing node(s) to form a storage cluster group. As best practice, the Storage Cluster feature should have 16 nodes or less, but in one of the war stories shared, one customer in the US actually had 32 nodes in a Storage Cluster group, for storage capacity reasons.

As more nodes are added to the Storage Cluster group, the LUNs/volumes can be extended or spanned to the other nodes as long as they are physically connected in a Gigabit network and the entire LUN or volume is been seen as ONE  irregardless of which physical nodes it may be sitting. Typically you will see this sort of thing of single “Global Namespace” concept at the file system level but this is the first time I have seen it implemented at the SAN level. (Ok, I have to admit that I am a little behind times with this technology)

Here’s a little diagram I dug up from LeftHand before it was acquired by HP which I hope will enlightened the readers about this Storage Cluster feature.

 

But the best is yet to come as the HP Solution Architect (Timothy Chua) mentioned that the Network RAID feature was uniquely LeftHand’s and way cooler. And I couldn’t agree more because this lighted me up like a spark plug!

Since Storage Clustering could span LUNs/volumes across nodes, it was only natural that the RAID capability be extended across nodes as well. RAID-10, RAID-5, RAID-6 could all be spanned across all nodes, spread the data blocks and its mirrored/parity data blocks across the nodes in the network. And the nodes does not have to at a single site. With Gigabit networks, the nodes can be separated into multiple sites as well, giving the entire solution quite a comprehensive campus-wide storage high availability. And since this is Network RAID, it gives an entirely new meaning to the word Disaster Recovery because this will eliminate the need for data replication. Primary data in a Network RAID-10 in Node 1/Site 2 could be mirrored in Node 2/Site 2, which can be further mirrored to Node 3/Site 3 and Node 4/Site 4 for a 4-way mirror. This is the P4000 Multi-site SAN solution.

The diagram below shows how Network RAID is implemented with VMware ESX.

 

And since replication is no longer a requirement, VMware’s SRM (Site Recovery Manager) is also not required as well.

It is no surprise that synchronous replication in the P4000 solution is equivalent to Network RAID. Though the concept of separating the storage controllers/nodes into multiple sites for true long-distance mirroring exists, they usually don’t exist at this level. NetApp has their Fabric and Stretch MetroCluster and EMC has their VPlex, but they usually are proposed at the higher end of the spectrum. Looks to me that HP P4000 is the only one that has this concept at the entry level iSCSI SAN level. Kudos!

They have an asynchronous replication as well for longer distance networks.

I did not stay for the demo today but I am already tickled pink about the HP P4000 technology. It had a good impression on me and I can’t wait to know more of how it works internally. Looking forward to a deeper dive of the P4000 and hope to stay for the demo next time.

Storage Tiering – Responsible and Prudent

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Does your IT have bottomless budget? If not, storage tiering is likely to be considered as one of IT’s weapons to combat the ever growing need for storage capacity.

Storage tiering is not new and in the past, features such as HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) and ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) addresses storage tiering in different capacities, ranging for simple aging files movement and migration, to data objects being moved within the data infrastructure of an organization with some kind of workflow and searching capabilities.

Lately, storage tiering, and especially automated storage tiering, has been gaining prominence, thanks to the 2 high profile acquisitions – HP 3PAR and Dell Compellent. According to Wikibon,

Tiered storage is a system of assigning applications to different
types of storage media based on application requirements. Factors
considered in the allocation of storage type include the level of
protection needed, performance requirements, speed of recovery,
and many other considerations.Since assigning application data to
specific media may be complex, some vendors provide software for
automatically managing the process.

For the sake of simplicity, this blog talks about automated storage tiering within the storage array itself, where different data blocks are moved within several tiers to achieve just-right storage provisioning. Why do we need to achieve this “just-right provisioning”? Rather than discussing this from an IT, technical angle, the just-right storage provisioning should be addressed from a business and operational angle, and more rightly so, costs and benefits.

Business and operations are about managing costs and increasing profits. In the past, many storage administrators employ a single storage tier architecture. Using the same type of disks, for example, 146G 10,000RPM Fibre Channel disks, there was usually 1 or 2 RAID levels for the entire data storage requirement. Usually RAID 1+0 volumes/LUNs are for the applications that require the highest performance and availability but they come with a big cost. So, the rest of the data are kept in RAID-5 volumes/LUNs. The introduction of enterprise SATA hard disk drives basically changed the rules of the ball game, giving storage administrators another option, a cheaper alternative to store their data. Obviously, storage vendors saw the great need to address this requirement, and hence created automated storage tiering as part of their offerings.

There are quite a few storage solutions that offers the storage tiering feature, and most of them are automated as well, meaning that the data blocks are moved between the different tiers of storage within the array itself automatically. 3PAR, long before they were acquired by HP, had their Dynamic Autonomic Tiering. Today, with HP, 3PAR offers 2 key strengths in their Autonomic Tiering offering.

  • Adaptive Optimization
  • Dynamic Optimization

As HP puts it,

 

Not to be outdone, Compellent (also long before its acquisition by Dell) had the Data Progression feature as part of the Automated Storage Tiering offering. In a nutshell, their solution (which is basically similar from a 10,000 feet view with most of the competitors) is shown below.

 

The idea is to put the most frequently accessed data blocks to the most expensive, fastest, storage tier and then dynamically move the lesser accessed data block to the least expensive, most economical tier.

I have had the privilege to learn more about Compellent (before Dell) technology about 2.5 years ago, thanks to my friends Chyr and Winston, the bosses at Impact Business Solutions. And what Compellent has was pretty cool stuff and I would like to share what I have picked up about Dell Compellent storage solution. But some of the information could be a little out of date.

The foundation of Dell Compellent automated storage tiering feature, called Data Progression, is their Dynamic Block Architecture (as shown below)

 

From a high level, all data blocks are bunched together into a logical data structure called a page. A page is by default 2MB but can be configured between 512KB and 4MB. The page is the granular unit required to initiate and implement the Data Progression feature in Compellent’s automated storage tiering solution. Every page comes with attached metadata about the page such as

  • When was this page created
  • When was this page last accessed
  • Which RAID level is it currently in (RAID 1+0, RAID-59, RAID-55 and so on)
  • Which Tier does it currently reside (Tier 1, 2 or 3)
  • Which kind of disk track does it live in (Fast or Standard)

Meanwhile, there are different storage Tiers and notably, Tier 1, 2 or 3 where different disk profiles reside. Typically, the SSDs or the 15K RPM disk drives will be in Tier 1, the 10K RPM disk drives will be in Tier 2 and the slowest 7200 RPM disks will be in Tier 3.  Each of the 3 tiers are further divided into the outer Fast disk cylinders (where the platters spin the fastest) and the Standard disk cylinders (running in the inner tracks and slower).

As data chunks or blocks are accessed, their frequency of access and their data movement statistics are gathered in real-time, giving the Compellent solution a fairly good intelligence of how the pages should be laid out on the most relevant tiers. As the pages become more stale, and less relevant, the pages of data chunks are progressively relegated to the lower tiers, while the more active, and most relevant pages relative to importance of access, is progressively promoted to the higher tiers.

Different policies can also be configured to ensure that some important pages stay where they are regardless of their frequency of access or their relevance.

There is a very nice whitepaper from Dell detailing their Data Progression technology.

Another big automated storage tiering player is HP 3PAR. I admit that I don’t know the inner details of the HP 3PAR Dynamic Tiering solution, though I had some glossy lessons from a 3PAR Systems Engineer called Nathan Boeger (thanks to my friends at PTC Singapore, the 3PAR distributor back then) about the same time I learned about Dell Compellent. I hope HP can offer to introduce more in depth of how the 3PAR technology works, now that I have gotten cosy with some of the HP Malaysia’s folks.

Similarly, the other big boys are offering the automated storage tiering solution as well. IBM has been offering Easy Tier for almost 18 months and EMC has its FAST2 for about the same time.

Funnily, the odd one out in this automated storage tiering game is NetApp. I was in a partner conference call about 1 year ago and there were questions asking NetApp about their views of automated storage tiering. At that time of the concall, NetApp did not believe in automated storage tiering, preferring to market their FlashCache PCIe (previously called the PAM card) solution. Take note that the FlashCache is a Read-Only “extension” to their NVRAM, and used to accelerate read operations of WAFL. And also take note that NetApp, at the time of writing, does not have an “engine” that performs automated storage tiering, regardless of how they spin it.

There are also host-based file tiering solutions as well.Since I am familiar with the NetApp universe, Arkivio and Enigma Data Solutions are 2 of the main partners that NetApp works with. Recently NetApp also resells StorNext from Quantum. But note that these host-based solutions are file-based, making them less granular, less dynamic and less efficient. They are usually marketed as file archiving solutions, and the host-based license are usually charged by per TB. In large enterprises, this might make sense but for the everyday Joes (with tight IT budgets), host-based file archiving solutions are expensive. And it is nowhere close to the efficiencies of automated storage tiering.

Overall, automated storage tiering, when applied, should help the IT operations and the organization’s business reduce costs. There is no longer a one-size-fit-all model and associating the right storage tier to the relevance and importance of the data at a very granular sub-LUN/sub-volume level will help any organization define a more prudent approach in managing their data actively and more importantly their cost of operations.

This is called Responsible IT. 😀

HP StoreOnce – Further Depth

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I promised last week I will look deeper into HP StoreOnce technology and I did. As I mentioned in my previous blog, HP StoreOnce technology now embedded in its D2D series of secondary, target backup devices that does the job with no fuss and no fancy bells and whistles.

Here’s the lineup of the present HP D2D solutions.

 

HP Malaysia has constantly reminded me that their D2D deduplication solution is much more price competitive than their competitors and this is something you, the readers, have to find out on your own. But I do believe that they are. Unfortunately they did not have the first mover’s advantage when Data Domain took the industry by storm in 2009, since HP StoreOnce was only launched with much fanfare last year in June 2010. Despite that, there still plenty of room in the IT market to grow, especially in HP’s huge set of customers.

Without the first movers advantage, HP StoreOnce has to differentiate itself from the existing competitors such as EMC Data Domain and Quantum. Labeling their deduplication technology as version 2.0 (whereas the competitors are still at “Version 1.0”?), HP StoreOnce banks on 3 key technologies. They are

  • Sparse Indexing
  • Intelligent Block Size Management
  • Reduction in Disk Fragmentation

Out of these 3, sparse indexing is the most interesting but I will save the best from last. Let’s start with Intelligent Block Size Management.

HP StoreOnce uses a variable chunking method with a smaller granularity of 4K in size and this is managed intelligently, thus achieving a higher deduplication ratio compared to its competitors which either uses a fixed chunking method or with a variable chunking method of larger block sizes in the range of 8K to 32K. The HP Lab’s testing reveals that the space savings was significant when compared with others.

Below are a set of results for a PowerPoint presentation and you can see for yourself.

 

(NOTE: Please note that the savings/deduplication ratio can be very different and can range from good to bad for different types of data. Video and images files are highly encoded. Seismic and geo-mapping files are highly compressed. It is very likely that most deduplication solutions cannot achieve a high percentage with these types of files)

Point #2 talks about Reduction in Disk Fragmentation. The inherent benefits from Intelligent Block Size Management brings about the Reduction in Disk Fragmentation. The smaller chunks means lesser space wastage, especially when the block size is 4K or lower. HP StoreOnce also uses an intelligent algorithm to place the blocks that are perceived to be related close to one another. Hence this “locality” presence helps and the retrieval and restore process will be faster and more efficient.

Sparse Indexing is where HP StoreOnce touts to be a game changer. Today’s data is already as massive as a mountain, and it’s going to get bigger and growing faster. Using “Version 1.0” type of deduplication, the hashes created are stored in either memory or on disks. However, the massive data sets (especially unstructured data) are already producing massive amounts of hashes. Hashes are used to identify unique data blocks but the avalanche of unstructured data means that most deduplication solutions are generating more and more hashes, making most Version 1.0s hashes sluggish and difficult to retrieve.

Sparse Indexing addresses this hash problem (by the way, HP StoreOnce uses SHA-1 hash) by intelligently sampling a small chunks and creating a very fast index lookup mechanism that stays in the system’s memory all the time. As the engineers at HP Labs put it

Instead of holding every index item in RAM ready for comparison,
the HP team keeps just one in every hundred or so items in RAM
and puts the rest onto a hard drive. Duplicate data almost
always arrives in bursts. In other words, if one chunk of the
arriving stream is a duplicate, it is very likely that many
following chunks are duplicates. Sparse indexing takes advantage
of this phenomenon by storing the sequence of hashes of the
stored chunks next to each other on disk. As a result, a ‘hit’
in the sample RAM index can direct the system to an area of
the disk where many duplicates are likely to be found.

Sparse Indexing is not unique in the industry, but the engineers at HP Labs have put their thinking hats on and applied it to improve the search and looking up of the hashes in the StoreOnce deduplication technology.

Further savings are also achieved when the deduped data is compressed with the LZ (Lempel-Ziv) compression method before it is stored into the disks.

The HP StoreOnce technology is 100% fully concocted in the renown HP Labs and according to sources, this technology will indeed permeate across all HP StorageWorks (HP has since renamed it to HP Storage) line. With this strategy, HP hopes to address the “fragmented and complicated” (as quoted by HP) deduplication and data protection strategy across the enterprise. By “fragmented and complicated”, they mean that the deduplicated data constant has to be rehydrated and deduped again as the data moves across different IT devices and functions.

In a perfect world, HP wants their StoreOnce technology to be like the diagram below.

 

However, one very interesting fact that I found was HP does not believe that primary storage deduplication is a good idea. They claim that it complicates the whole thing. Whether HP likes it or not, NetApp has been dishing out primary storage deduplication for several years now and you don’t see their customers unhappy with NetApp about this feature.

In one of the HP Business whitepapers I read, one of the takeaways was

 

I was like, “Whoa! What’s this?”. I felt bemused about what was mentioned in the whitepaper. After all the best claims of the HP StoreOnce technology, I can’t help but to think that this could be a banana skin on the pavement for HP.


HP has a new CEO (again!)

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It is past midnight and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so I thought I catch up with some US news. And lo and behold, another big one showed up on Google News.

HP has fired Leo Apotheker and appointed Meg Whitman, the former boss of EBay, to become the new CEO and President of HP. Leo Apotheker was on the job for about 10 months (Damn!). Such actions shake investors confidence and not good for the image of the company. If Leo Apotheker wasn’t the right guy, why take him in the first place?

Leo is responsible for HP’s purchase of Autonomous just a  month ago and now, the HP vision and direction have to be realigned again.

Here’s one of the news from Reuters.

Wait! There’s more confidence shattering news. Excerpt from one of the online news:

 

HP has laid off hundreds of employees in its ill-fated foray 
into the mobile ecosystem. HP is trying to spin off its PC unit
and, at the same time, find a home for its fast deteriorating 
mobile assets, having spent billions of dollars trying to break 
into phones and tablets ($1 billion+ to buy Palm, investments 
in the business and write off of inventory) and then yanking 
the cord approximately 60 days into the adventure.

It is not hard to write not so good news about HP. They keep making such discouraging news on their own.

HP StoreOnce technology – job done!

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I had the privilege to attend HP’s D2D workshop yesterday, thanks to the invitation of my old friend, Mr. CC Chung. He is Malaysia’s HP StorageWorks Division Country Manager

I am allowed to assess their D2D solution without fear or favour (I think) and the plush sling bag door gift has nothing to do with my assessment (what do you think? Ha, ha) So here goes.

I based my assessment from these criteria (something I picked up when I was mucking around with Data Domain for 3 months at MTech Security some years ago). The criteria are

  • Hash-based chunking granularity vs Single Instance Store (ala-EMC Centera)
  • Inline or post-processing
  • Source-based or target-based deduplication
  • Forward or reverse referencing (though it has little significance – for now)
  • Global or Local Deduplication

First of all, most people would ask about how well it dedupes and the technical guy’s answer would be “It depends …“. The sales would probably say “YMMV” (can anyone tell me what this acronym is for?). I believe the advertised rate is 20:1, pretty realistic because as we know in the deduplication world, the longer the data is retained, the higher the ratio can get. It also depends on the type of data to be deduped.

And of course, one of the participants (there are always skeptics) was bickering about how his customer was complaining that the deduplication ratio for a SQL database was lower than what was advertised. My take on this matter – Both the customer and the reseller are at fault! The customer happily took what the sales/pre-sales guy said in verbatim and expected fantastic results. The reseller was ill-equipped to know the D2D solution well and therefore, screwed the customer with realistic numbers for the wrong data type.

To me, as Justin (the HP Solution Architect) was presenting the HP D2D solution, I was ticking my check boxes for these criteria. And in my opinion, the HP D2D solution does the job. HP was telling the attendees that they will be surprised to know the end pricing for the D2D solution. I never got to know the figures and I never asked. But when compared to the king of the deduplication devices, Data Domain, it is likely to be lower.

So, here are the ticks to the HP D2D solution

  • In-line deduplication
  • Target-based (of course)
  • Hash-based chunking with variable length for deduplication granularity
  • Local Deduplication

They have several models ranging from the entry-level 2500 series to the 4100 and the 4300 series. After that, HP has another disparate deduplication solution meant for the higher end market called the VLS, and it was not presented in the workshop.

The D2D can be both a VTL and a NAS target dedupe device and the browser-based management GUI was simple and uncluttered. But what interested me was the HP StoreOnce technology, but I did not dig deeper into it. I found a nice video (below) to show a whiteboarding session for HP StoreOnce.

I promised to look deeper into it in a few days time. This week has been such a muck for me but overall, it has been turning up well at the end of the day.

Another thing that was interesting was its sparse indexing for the hashes and there were some dedupe vendors already doing the same thing. But, if you know me, I will research this for knowledge and benefit of all.

After the workshop, HP was so kind to give me an update about their Converged vision, how LeftHand, IBRIX, and 3PAR fit into their strategy and more importantly, their story to the storage market. I will speak more about this in the future. Of course, I will not reveal what’s in store for the future of the D2D solution, but all I can say is, I left the workshop feeling that the solution will do what it is supposed to, nothing more, nothing less. And I meant it in a good way.

I still reserve my opinions about HP because a lot of their storage business are still attached to the server side but hopefully with the upcoming P4000 and P6000 workshops coming up, my opinions may change a little.

Got invited to HP Malaysia’s workshop … he he!

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No, HP probably didn’t read my blogs and this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction from HP about things I have been writing. OK, I didn’t write about HP because I don’t know much about them. But this came as a coincidence as well as an apt title (my bad for the shameless plug for this entry’s title).

In my previous blog entry, I wrote about HP’s future in the latest IDC Q2 market share figures. I was not too enthusiastic about HP’s storage line up. Today, my old friend Mr. CC Chung, who is HP’s Country Manager for Storage, had tea with me at Bangsar Shopping Center. We were there to discuss about HP engagement with SNIA when the topic of HP’s storage came about (obviously). Chung said I lack the understanding of HP storage solutions, which I admit, is very true. And so, my friend with his kind gesture invited me to a series of HP Storage Solutions workshops, which I accept with glee and gratitude. Thank you very much, my friend.

Here’s a screenshot of their upcoming workshops:

 

I am seriously looking forward to the workshop and learn about the vibes of HP Storage Solutions. Too bad there aren’t workshops for HP 3PAR and HP X9000 IBRIX but I am sure this will be the start of my new friendship with HP.

Incidentally, as I was waiting for Chung, I was reading the HWM Magazine August 2011 issue, and lo behold, Chung was in the news announcing the HP X9000 IBRIX and X5000 G2 Network Storage System. I couldn’t find the HWM article online but I found the next best thing. A similar article (online, of course), appeared at CIO Asia. And with a nice picture of Mr. CC Chung too!