This is my 5^th consecutive post on HP TechDay in Colorado Springs.

HP Techday 2009 Updates

HP TechDay 2009 Day 0

HP TechDay 2009 Day 1

HP TechDay 2009 Day 2

HP facilities in Colorado Springs, a Satellite view

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Positives

This event was a very smart move by HP and as far as I can see they have exceeded their expectations with this event. It was truly a fireworks of hash tag #hptechday both Monday and Tuesday which dominated twitter. The after discussions have taken over the blogging, twitter and the Internet press by surprise with the number of twits, blogs and press articles written about this event.

Clearly for me this was a good platform to learn, understand and share some visions and technologies related to HP Storage products. An Event like this helps understand and connect the dots together with future products and emerging technologies.

The R&D and Engineering teams gave us a good background of the inter-workings of the storage technology not necessarily the intra-workings of all technologies messed together. There were some awkward moments, but overall they pulled it together really well. The marketing folks spoke about some strategy related to these technologies and painted an overall picture. The mix of people involved with the presentations and demos seem to accomplish the agenda, where marketing pitches came in with engineering details.

HP really left competition out of all the discussions except for the hands-on lab. No mentions of EMC, NetApp, IBM, Cisco or HDS. The hands-on lab did have an exercise on NetApp FAS2050C and an EMC Clariion CX4-120 for LUN provisioning purposes in comparison to LUN provisioning on HP EVA’s. It was a positive strategy from HP, not to compare their products to that of EMC, NetApp and others.

A lot of discussions revolved around Virtualization related to VMware, Xen and Hyper-V, but HP made it clear they were VMware’s largest revenue producing partner and would like to remain so.

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Challenges

Platforms like EVA, SVSP, Lefthand, IBRIX and D2D were discussed. Independently every platform looks very interesting and very compelling. But an integration vision was still lacking, a direction or a strategy on how these pieces of puzzle will be joined together to form the common storage platform.  Though HP clearly seems to be making a move towards Converged Data Centers.

HP clearly has a very big competition in the storage market with already proven Vendors and their technologies. EMC, NetApp, IBM, Cisco, VMware in storage, networking and Converged Data Centers. Also technologies that are strong and emerging would largely cause market nuisance or focus disruption for HP.

One of the biggest problems I saw was, HP has these segments of storage and technology, rather not a unified vision, or didn’t come across as one. There are pouches of storage like EVA teams, SVSP teams, Lefthand teams and so forth, not sure if there is technology sharing and again a moved towards integrating all these technologies to form a unified storage platform. Though Proliant is the chosen platform for all Lefthand and Converged Data Center products.

HP still needs a very strong storage technology in the Enterprise space that is there own and not OEM’d. The truth is, eventually the HP – Hitachi relationship has to come to an end with HP’s new product that may compete in the same market space. This strategy will enable HP to be very unique in terms of the markets they serve, which may include their own inhouse storage products for SMB, Midsize and Enterprise customers.

So other lacking things from HP were the Cloud Strategy (if they ever plan to enter that space), Unified Storage details, FCoE discussions, Procurve, Deduplication platform discussions, IBRIX technology integration details, Storage Management, Storage Optimization and XP.

It may have been very hard to cover all these platforms in a day and a half with giving all the technology details behind it. Also remember this was an NON NDA session, so we were not preview to all the future products and technologies.

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Summary

Overall HP did hammer us for 2 consecutive days with HP Storage Technology. Coming out of it, I can truly say I didn’t realize HP had so much focus on Storage. Their move to hire Dave Donatelli was a smart one and hope over the next year as the Storage business moves under him; he will insert some new strategic direction.

So HP was the first OEM to arrange the HP Techday and make it open to Bloggers as an Invite Only Event. The ratio of Bloggers to HP Personnel was 1:2, giving everyone a lot of attention.

Now the question is who will be next OEM to do a similar event and what will they do to prove themselves different. Already hearing some buzz in the industry about some the effects of HP Techday and some possible events from other OEMs.

But I clearly see an advantage of an event like this and the after effects of it, Good move HP Storage – Marketing Team!

Colorado Springs is a great small town, surrounded by snow covered mountains, an a US Airforce Academy in town. Colorado Springs is also the home of the HP StorageWorks platform R&D center.

A view of mountains from the Hotel room, the purple majestic as it’s called.

The HP Techday kicked off at around 8 AM on Monday morning with Breakfast and then a Welcome session following it.

The understandable goals HP has with this event is to promote HP products, technology and strategy with industry bloggers, which could further create a wave of discussion about HP products in the Twitter / Blogging community.

There were 11 Industry Bloggers and around 20 HP folks including Marketing, CTO’s office, R&D team and Storage Architects.

A few pictures from the Technology Session Rooms

Technology Session Rooms

Our friend “Nigel Poulton” – Ruptured Monkey

I will try to leave the focus of this blog post to the overview of the events at the HP Tech Day. It will be impossible to jump into all the related technologies in this post, but over the next month, please stay tuned on some technical talk around StorageWorks platform.

To read about HP Techday 2009 Day 0, click here

To read about HP Techday 2009 Updates, click here

The first technology session started at around 10:00 AM with a deep dive into the HP EVA platform. Lots of questions were asked by all of us related to this technology, the vision, the strategy and market competition. This was an NON NDA session, there were no talks about futures.

This session was presented by Kyle Fitze, Don Fraser and Ted Bruning.

Picture of Array level virtualization with EVA platform

As part of the Enterprise Storage Virtualization, HP presented on the SVSP (SAN Virtualization Services Platform): honestly I didn’t even realize HP had this platform, but this technology somewhat compares with HDS’s USP-VM (diskless storage) for a mid tier market.  This session was very interesting.

Slide showing the benefits of Storage Virtualization with the HP Platforms.

Around 11:30 AM, the Lefthand Team jumped in with the presentation. The purchase of Lefthand was done by HP back in Oct / Nov 2008. Seems the vision HP has today is to integrate HP Lefthand products with their next gen storage architecture.

The CTO and founder of Lefthand, John Spiers did the presentation. Believe it or not, he still has the same passion for the product and the value it brings to the market. Great session.

Broke out for lunch.

This was one of those times, when we had free access to all HP teams to talk about products, technology etc.

Then started the 3 hour-long sessions on HP EVA’s, SVSP and Lefthand.

So there were 3 systems for the bloggers to provision LUN along with a snapshot on EMC Clariion CX4, NetApp FAS system and HP EVA. The point of this session was to show the ease of use with HP EVA storage related functions.

Though I am not going to discuss any technology related items now, there were some discoveries I would like to talk on the blog later.

Robin Harris configuring a CX4-120

LUN Provisioning on NETAPP FAS2050c system

John, Nina and Simon configuring an EVA

The lefthand hands on session was great, went through the entire lab exercise to create clusters, create LUNs, present to host and perform failovers.

SVSP session was another great session, where we got some hands-on experience with configuring a SVSP and presenting LUNs to and from it to host.

We then got a tour of the HP EVA development labs in Colorado Springs, though we were not allowed to take pictures in this lab. There were surely sections of the lab, where we were not allowed.

Next session kicked off was around Unified Storage Platforms at HP. Though this was one of those sessions, where a lot of technology details were not given out, again I would think because it’s a NON NDA session. But its great to see how HP is jumping into the Unified Storage Vision as other Storage manufacturers are. This session was presented by Lee Johns the Director of Unified Storage Division at HP.

Unified Storage at HP

Lee Johns presenting Unified Storage

Unified Storage Vision

The next session was on Data Deduplication. Quite interesting stuff happening at HP related to data Deduplication. Some slides as shared below. Also some discussions around HP’s self developed dedupe engine and the joint development of another dedupe engine with Sepaton.

Slide on Data Deduplication

The day comes to an end, but the networking day begins now.

Here are some key things we brought back from HP including Lefthand SANiQ free full-featured version, SVSP Interface configuration Software.

Picture of some good things to take home and configure on test systems

Went out to dinner with all the Bloggers and HP folks at the Marigold Café and Bakery in Colorado Springs. The food was awesome, great entrees and desserts. Though being a Vegetarian, I had some good foods selections there.

During dinner had some discussions with Simon Seagrave related to his blog and how he has been able to generate thousands of visits a day. Check out his blog!! A very nice design and great information that he provides related to Virtualization.

Had some discussions with Stephen Foskett and Rich Brambley on GestaltIT and some new things we are working on.

Long discussions with George Wagner of HP Lefthand Networks about Lefthand technology.

Had an hour-long discussion on Unified Storage with Lee Johns. This guy is a smart marketing dude, really was a very valuable conversation with him.

The one thing I love about these tech days is, the undivided attention you get may be for  30 mins or 60 mins or more, to pick someone’s brain, hammer them with questions and understand the strategy.

Earlier in the day met up with Robin Harris for the first time. It was great to see an industry expert and talk to him about his visions, his involvement with the storage industry over all these years.

Also had some great discussions with Tom and Halley from Ivy Marketing that organized this entire event.

Discussions around Storage industry continued with Stephen Foskett, Greg Knieriemen and Calvin Zito at the Bar.

So some very important folks that organized this entire event are

Halley Bass: She’s done an amazing job to get everyone in and out of Colorado Springs, event management, our interface for this entire event, she deserves a big thank you from the team.

Terri Stratton: She wasn’t at the event, but all the reservations and other things were taken care by her.

Tom Augenthaler: He organized the entire event and verified all went smoothly both from an IVY Marketing and HP standpoint.

Finally from HP

Becca Taylor: She is the TSG Social Media Manager at HP and it was her event from an HP standpoint. Just amazing co-ordination of all things to make it a success.

Kathleen Moore: Kathleen verified the entire event went flawless all the way

Calvin Zito: Calvin was a big orchestrator of this event

So there are some things we didn’t hear about today, which we expect to hear tomorrow:

Networking technology

Unified Storage details

Converged Data Centers

XP’s

Check out the new featured blog post on GestaltIT by myself and Ed Saipetch on EMC’s Unified Platform and Storage Tiering, where we talk about some important next generation features and products from EMC. Also discussion revolves around possibly the direction EMC is moving with their Unified Hardware – Software Platforms and Storage Tiering using next generation technologies like FAST.

Cheers,
@storagenerve

If you were to walk in a Datacenter and see an EMC Symmetrix V-Max for the first time, you will end up giving it a look.

It’s those Blue Flashy lights in the front of the unit that just catches your eyes.

It gives the Symmetrix V-Max the Sleek and Sexy look..

Here are some pictures to prove that..

Visible in the picture below are Cisco UCS blades, NetApp systems, HP systems, Cisco Switches, Xsigo Systems, but you can surely spot the Symmetrix V-Max

A video from EMC World 2009

So these lights are USB powered through USB cables, a very simple idea though a genius one. Enterprise class arrays and the use of USB ports at the backend of these systems keep these Blue flashy lights on.

Here are the pictures of those USB connectors from the front. Believe it or not, they are redundant as well.

(Look at the USB cable connectors that go on the front door, 2 of them right above the blue light)

As Storage Anarchist says in his Blog post “The first thing you’ll probably notice about the new Symmetrix V-Max is the packaging – and specifically the glossy-black panel with the blazing blue LED light bar that underscores the name Symmetrix on every door. The design team had a lot of fun blending the modern gloss-black look of today’s popular personal communications devices with the image of stability and security that customers expect from Symmetrix.”

Yea that is right,,,,,,,,,, this post was about the Blue lights on the Symmetrix V-Max Systems

Oh…the big question, will it call home through the EMC ESRS Gateway if one of these Blue lights fail?