How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and Implement IT Disaster Avoidance

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on why bringing a common management view into play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Our next storage management innovation case study highlights how communications cooperative HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement IT disaster avoidance capabilities.

We’ll learn more about how HTC has lowered total storage utilization cost while bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization benefits.

To learn how HTC gains better total storage management, please join me now in welcoming Philip Sellers, Senior System Administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Welcome, Philip.

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Philip Sellers: Good morning, Dana, thanks for having me. 

Gardner: Tell us about HTC.

Sellers

Sellers: HTC is the largest telephone cooperative in the nation. We serve the Myrtle Beach and surrounding South Carolina area. We started out as a telephone company, but at this point, we're a full-line telecommunications company, doing cable TV, internet security, home automation, and through our partnership with AT and T, we also do wireless service. 

Gardner: Now, you are not HTC, the handset maker from Asia; you are an entirely different company.

Sellers: A completely different company, although we do sell a few of those handsets with our wireless division.

Gardner: You told me when we talked earlier that you are a reluctant storage administrator. You started out as a VMware in virtualization admin. How did you get from one to the other, and why is it important for your organization?

Common story

Sellers: It’s probably a common story in a lot of shops. As VMware became more prolific in our environment, the line started to blur between networking and VMware, and storage and VMware. So I was pulled more into those directions as the primary VMware admin for our company. That gave me the opportunity to dig in and start to learn an area of IT that was new to me.

Gardner: Philip, tell us a little bit about the scale: how many virtual machines (VMs), how many employees, what sort of a size organization are you?

Sellers: We have 700 or so employees at this point, and almost that number of VMs that we're managing. We have a couple of different storage platforms today with the HP EVA and HP 3PAR StoreServ in-house.

We also use lots of other things. We have HP StoreOnce for backup and HP StoreVirtual for some of our smaller needs, such as remote offices. 

Gardner: What kind of storage workloads are we dealing with here? Is this all of the apps across the company? What set of IT workloads are you addressing? 

One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production.

Sellers: The group that I'm a part of is actually the internal IT group. So we're running line-of-business applications, not the things that our customers are delivered service across, but the things that run our business to take orders, support financial operations, and those sorts of things.

And we're running a mixture of test and dev and production. One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production. So it runs the gamut for internal IT.

Gardner: When you start to think about progressing to a better utilization and the rationalization of storage, rather than have overlapping or disjointed storage capabilities, what sort of philosophy do you have about storage? How do you think that you can make the whole greater than sum of the parts and get those utilization benefits over time?

Deeper insight

Sellers: It’s something that I learned back in my virtualization days. For me, it’s huge to have visibility into what’s going to in your storage. One of the benefits of our transition to HP 3PAR storage is that we've been able to realize much deeper levels of insight into what’s going on inside of the arrays.

You know, as we were making that switch, we evaluated other third parties, ultimately deciding on the mid-range 7000 3PAR series for our environment and for our needs. That visibility has been key for us.

But it’s also come with a set of challenges, because we now have multiple storage consoles that we need to manage from. We have different places that we need to check. One of the keys for us is having somewhere where we can see it all, or get a better idea of the entire environment from an end-to-end perspective.

One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is some level of disaster avoidance.

That’s one of the things we learned from our VMware days. We were flying blind early on, and that caused us problems and potential problems, because we didn’t know something was going on. One of our main goals is establishing good visibility into our storage environment.

Gardner: So, it’s not just enough to modernize your storage and improve your storage capabilities, but at the same time you really need to address the management issues and consolidate management. In doing so, what have been some of the payoffs that you can recall? How has this helped your organization better provide IT services internally?

Sellers: From a performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not great at telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance capabilities. We never knew exactly what was going to cause a problem or the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We never knew where we were going to have issues.

Being able to see into that has allowed us to prevent help desk cost for slow services, for problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially. One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is new levels of disaster avoidance.

Gardner: And what do you mean by that, rather than disaster recovery (DR), which is taking care of business after we have had some terrible thing happen? How do you head that off?

Disaster avoidance

Sellers: I know that’s not an industry term, but that’s what I like to call it, because in our environment, we have two data centers that are fairly close together. What we've implemented is the HP 3PAR StoreServ metro storage clustering feature, which they call peer persistence, but it's VMware’s metro storage clustering. We've also done that with Windows clustering as well.

We have two sets of 3PARs in different data centers, and they act as one. So, they replicate synchronously between the two locations and they fail-over "automagically." I don’t know how else to say it. It just seamlessly fails-over between the two sites.

For our environment, we were at a particularly vulnerable state if we lost a data array, because so many things were pointing at it. Now if we lose a single data array it’s not a big deal. It fails-over and it continues running.

Gardner: And when you say vulnerable, I think you're talking about hurricanes?

Sellers: A lot of times we plan for those large natural disasters, but sometimes it’s the small ones that get us like UPS maintenance or something as simple as a power outage. Maybe your generator doesn’t kick in in time. Sometimes, that can be a disaster of almost the same scale as a hurricane to your business operations -- just from something simple.

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Gardner: So the storage management capability has provided "automagically," as you say, this disaster avoidance. That’s a pretty important metric. Do you have any idea of the value of that to your business, and maybe start to put that in dollar terms? It seems a pretty profound difference.

Sellers: I can’t necessarily put it into dollar terms. That’s not the world that I work in, but I know that anytime there is downtime to our customer relationship advisers, and the people in the field, that’s bad for business.

So we're avoiding those kinds of situations as best we can. We could lose an entire data center site and, with technology built into the VMware layer and into the HP 3PAR layer, it will come back up. It may be reboot of a server, but we try to do everything we can to avoid disaster situations today, rather than just plan for needing to fail a data center over to "site B," and go through all of that testing.

Gardner: Let’s get down to some more brass tacks on actual storage utilization benefits. Any thoughts or recollections about what this means in terms of utilization, so  no more worries about running out of storage base or capacity?

Seeing benefits

Sellers: Yeah, the HP 3PAR platform has been really great inside of our environment because we realize the marketing term of the "two-to-one thin provisioning." We're seeing that benefit.

When I looked at the console before I came here, we were seeing around a 2.3 to 1 compaction, and that’s without deduplication and some of the other newer technologies that are capable in the 3PAR platform. We may be able to realize better than that in the future.

Gardner: We've talked about disaster avoidance. We've recognized some significant savings in the provisioning and utilization. Let’s go back to management. What sort of benefits are you getting now with a more holistic approach and how does that help, perhaps on a data lifecycle basis?

Sellers: One of the ways that we're approaching that set of problems is with storage resource management software. We've traditionally used a piece of software called Storage Essentials, which HP makes. It’s heterogeneous storage-management software, so it can look at all of our different arrays and looks at our backup arrays and our primary storage arrays, as well as our back-up environment, and pulls all that information together.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view. Over the last six months or so, I've been working in an early-release program for a product called HP Storage Operations Management.

This software is the next iteration of Storage Essentials. It’s got a much more approachable and modern user interface, which brings up and aggregates our total environment so that we can get a full picture of what’s going on there. Then, we can drill down and see at specific levels how things are performing, what our utilization trend is, or how much time we have until a device or a storage pool is full.

Those are things that keep us out of the really dangerous situations in getting down to a time where you're in a mission critical season, maybe the holidays or something where it’s heavy sales, and you run out of disk space and you can’t get your procurement cycle to get storage quickly enough.

Those things are just as dangerous as the hurricane that we were talking about earlier from a business operations perspective. Tools like this help us to manage and see what’s going on in the environment and help us plan and act proactively.

Gardner: I could really see why your philosophy is visibility and management oversight. It comes back again and again as a huge force multiplier benefit. 

Room to grow

Sellers: Absolutely. There's a saying that ignorance is bliss. When you're flying blind, that’s true, until it catches up with you, and it eventually overtakes you. We have lots and lots of room to grow and capabilities where we're at today. This new version of management storage resource management product has lots of great potential, too.

It’s an initial release. So, it’s got somewhat limited support for different storage families and that kind of thing, but they're working to bring in additional support and make it all that the previous product was, and much more -- and that’s visible from the initial release.

So we're excited about seeing where that can help us, particularly because one of the switches in this new product is that it’s not just a collect, an analytics reporting system. It’s a dashboard system where it takes that analytics and brings it back to a dashboard to let you drill down in to it and see it real clearly in near-real-time. I won’t say in real-time, but within whatever amount of time you configure.

Gardner: How about your future business activities? How well you can support them? I know that media is a fast-changing business. Do you feel confident now that when your superiors in your organization come to you and say, "We need this," that you're in a better position to hop-to quickly? Is there a sense of confidence that you can take on market change better?

We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms.

Sellers: I certainly believe so. We've been able to adapt and change more quickly because of changes that we've made with VMware, with HP 3PAR. We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms. We've been able to try and look at new things like VDI deployments to help us with compliance-type issues, where we're under regulations and have to patch and have to ensure that our systems are secure.

And so we are looking at things like that now that we were afraid to put on to primary storage in the past. It's something where we think we have a good mix today for the future.

Gardner: What advice might you might provide others who would be approaching a disparate storage environment? And maybe share your philosophy about visibility and anticipation being better than reaction. Maybe they are also seeking disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery. For those folks that are not quite as far along in this journey as you are, what might you suggest for them to be thinking about -- or that you wish you knew about earlier?

Sellers: There is definitely some low hanging fruit, and that’s what visibility will bring to you -- the ability to handle some of that low-hanging fruit. If you have a situation where your storage team is siloed away from your server team, bringing something in that can see both of those sides and map together that whole environment is a real easy way to identify inefficiency.

Those are LUNs that maybe are provisioned -- but not in use. There is no I/O on them. That’s a dollar amount immediately reclaimed. Finding VMs and things with visibility. These tools can look in to the VMware environment where you can see that you have lots and lots of VMs that are shut down.

There are easy things that you can do to start that process, no matter what your storage platform is. I think that’s a universal thing. If you have something that can gain you visibility in to the environment there are some easy things and easy wins that you can bring back.

Further improvements

Gardner: And those of course provide grist for the mill of further improvements and further budget to accomplish even more.

Sellers: Absolutely. If you want to make a storage platform switch or if you want to do other improvements and gain more efficiency, this gives you a little bit of extra room, some wiggle room, to make those things reality. We spent an awful lot of our budget just in keeping the lights on, keeping things up and running. Anytime you can gain some wiggle room from that budget, it certainly allows you the ability to look at innovation.

Gardner: Great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement a disaster avoidance capability.

And we have heard why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully -- and therefore gains better compliance and sets the stage for broader virtualization benefits.

So join me in thanking our guest, Philip Sellers, senior systems administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South California. Thank you, Philip. 

Sellers: Thank you, Dana.

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Gardner: And I would like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this data and information governance innovation case study discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on why bringing a common management view into play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Time to Give Server Virtualization's Twin, Storage Virtualization, a Top Place at IT Efficiency Table

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the improved business metrics from adopting a virtualized storage architecture.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on storage virtualization. You've heard a lot about server virtualization over the past few years, and many enterprises have adopted server virtualization to improve their ability to manage runtime workloads and high utilization rates to cut total cost.

But, as a sibling to server virtualization, storage virtualization has some strong benefits of its own, not the least of which is the ability to better support server virtualization and make it more successful.

We're here to discuss how storage virtualization works, where it fits in, and why it makes a lot of sense. The cost savings metrics alone caught me by surprise, making me question why we haven't been talking about storage and server virtualization efforts in the same breath over these past several years.

To help us explain how to better take advantage of storage virtualization, we're joined by Mike Koponen, HP's StorageWorks Worldwide Solutions marketing manager. Hello, Mike.

Mike Koponen: Hello, Dana. How are you doing today?

Gardner: Doing very well. Thanks for joining us.

Koponen: You bet.

Gardner: As I said, a lot of folks have been taking up more server virtualization and understanding its benefits. It's become quite popular, particularly in the down economy, where cost is so important. Storage virtualization offers a number of the same types of benefits. Tell us why storage virtualization makes so much sense.

Economic environment

Koponen: Dana, you mentioned that, particularly in today's economic environment, customers need to boost efficiencies from their existing assets as well as the future assets they're going to acquire and then to look for ways to cut capital and operating expenditures. That's really where storage virtualization fits in.

It's a way to increase asset utilization. It's a way to save on administrative cost, and it's also a way to improve operational efficiencies, as businesses deal with the increasing storage requirements of their businesses. In fact, if businesses don't reevaluate their storage infrastructures at the same time as they're reevaluating their server infrastructures, they really won't realize the full potential of a server virtualization.

Gardner: A few years ago, people were putting in servers as fast as they could. Basically, their goal or their motivation was simply to keep up with demand. I have to believe that's the case with storage as well, and storage requirements are still growing rapidly. How do you both keep up with the high demand for more and try to cut cost at the same time.

Koponen: It's an excellent question and one that businesses deal with all the time. As you say, the storage requirements aren’t letting up from regulatory requirements, expansion, 24x7 business environments, and the explosion of multimedia. Storage growth is certainly not stopping due to a slowed down economy.

Storage virtualization and server virtualization are tools that businesses are using to deal with those. In the past, as you said, customers would just continue to deploy servers with direct-attached storage (DAS). All of a sudden, they ended up with silos or islands of storage that were more complex to manage and didn't have the agility that you would need to shift storage resources around from application to application.

Then, people moved into deploying network storage or shared storage, storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) systems and realized a gain in efficiency from that. But, the same can happen. You can end up with islands of SAN systems or NAS systems. Then, to bump things up to the next level of asset utilization, network storage virtualization comes into play.

You can pool all those heterogeneous systems under one common management environment to make it easy to manage and provision these islands of storage that you wound up with.

Gardner: You mentioned this notion of silos of storage and I think I heard at least two or three different levels of silos of storage. Can you break that out for us? What are we really talking about, when we think about the various components at play here?

Three levels

Koponen: I break it down into three levels. One, I'd call basic virtualization. That's where you just have internal storage in your servers or direct attached storage to those servers. The next level would be what I'd call virtualized network storage. We've got SAN systems that have the ability to virtualize the arrays and the disk spindles within that SAN system.

The third level is what I call network-based storage virtualization. There, you have the ability for heterogeneous storage systems to all be managed under a common structure and virtualized as a single common pool of storage. Those would be the three levels that I break them down into.

Gardner: So, the goal with storage virtualization is not just to virtualize on each of those levels, but to virtualize them all together, so there is a single pool of storage. Is that correct, or that I am oversimplifying?

Koponen: No, that's basically it. In the second two levels I described, where you've got a SAN system, those can also come in two types. You can have a traditional one that's non-virtualized and then you can have a virtualized one, such as the HP Enterprise Virtual Array or the HP LeftHand SAN, where you have the ability to stripe data out across disk spindles and multiple drive trays, and all of that is abstracted from the system administrator.

There are different needs or requirements that drive the use of storage virtualization and also different benefits.

The storage is virtualized, and then the level above that is where you have network-based storage virtualization, such as our SAN virtualization services platform, that can take heterogeneous storage systems, multiple SAN systems for multiple vendors, and present those as one common pool of storage. It's this concept of pooling storage, but at different levels.

Gardner: Of course, it's a big management task to be able to do that and then get to the storage the way that you want to prioritize different storage requirements and some responses based on the application set or whether you're doing it for backup or archives. Is that right?

Koponen: That's true. There are different needs or requirements that drive the use of storage virtualization and also different benefits. You mentioned some of them. It may be flexible allocation of tiered storage, so you can move data to different tiers of storage based upon its importance and upon how fast you want to access it. You can take less business-critical information that you need to access less frequently and put it on lower cost storage.

The other might be that you just need more efficient snap-shotting, a replication of things, to provide the right degree of data protection to your business. It's a function of understanding what the top business needs are and then finding the right type of storage virtualization that matches those.

Gardner: It also sounds like we're taking a complete look at storage. We're looking at it from all angles and, therefore, are able to architect in such a way that we can take advantage of all the capacity we have and do that intelligently. Is that a fair assumption?

Key driver

Koponen: That's true. One key driver is boosting asset utilization. We found that in a lot of businesses they may have as little as 20 percent utilization of their storage capacity. By going to storage virtualization, they can have a 300 percent increase in that existing storage asset utilization, depending upon how it's implemented.

Gardner: Mike, tell me how this relates to server virtualization. If I've got a server virtualization program underway and I've enjoyed some benefits from that, what is taking this added step to storage virtualization going to do for me?

Koponen: Well, a couple of things, Dana. First, in order to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of server virtualization, such as being able to do live migration of virtual machines and to put in place high availability infrastructures, advanced server virtualization require some form of shared storage.

So, in some sense, it's a base requirement that you need shared storage. But, what we've experienced is that, when you do server virtualization, it places some unique requirements on your storage infrastructure in terms of high availability and performance loads.

Server virtualization drives the creation of more data from the standpoint of more snapshots, more replicas, and things like that. So, you can quickly consume a lot of storage, if you don't have an efficient storage management scheme in place.

Server virtualization drives the creation of more data from the standpoint of more snapshots, more replicas, and things like that. So, you can quickly consume a lot of storage, if you don't have an efficient storage management scheme in place.

And, there's manageability too. Virtual server environments are extremely flexible. It's much easier to deploy new applications. You need a storage infrastructure that is equally as easy to manage, so that you can provision new storage just as quickly as you can provision new servers.

Gardner: So, is this a case of a whole being greater than the sum of the parts? If we do server virtualization well and then we do storage virtualization well, not only do we get the usual benefits in terms of capacity, cost, flexibility, and intelligence at each of those perspectives, but, by combining them, we get something additional.

Koponen: Yes, you certainly do. The way I would describe that X factor of what you're getting in addition is just the highest level of business agility and flexibility. The underpinning of that would be that you're making maximum use of your assets, both your server assets and your storage assets.

Gardner: Is there something else here in terms of security, compliance, complexity, or those other necessary things to deal with nowadays? Do we get anything else in combining these two?

Increased protection

Koponen: You certainly get an increased degree of data protection by being able to meet backup windows and not having to compromise the amount of information you back up, because you're trying to squeeze more backups through a limited number of physical servers. When you do server virtualization, you're reducing the number of physical servers and running more virtual ones on top of that reduced number.

You might be trying to move same number of backups through a fewer number of physical servers. You also then end up with this higher degree of data protection, because with a virtualized server storage environment you can still achieve the volume of backups you need in a shorter window.

Gardner: So, it's better control, better understanding, higher utilization, and lower cost. If someone is interested after hearing this, where do you start, how do you undertake a journey? I assume you don't do this all at once, but rather it's something you need to do on a rollout basis. Where do you start when it comes to storage virtualization?

Koponen: Step one is assessing your environment and understanding what your starting point is going to be. Is it a greenfield environment, where you've got a lot of departmental, work-group type servers that you don't have tied into shared storage or virtualized storage? It might be starting with putting in place virtualized storage to support those.

You're more exposed now to that single physical server going down, because, if that single physical server goes down, you've lost multiple applications, and not just one.

Or, do you have existing SAN systems in place that are just underutilized. Then, you might look at putting in place, say, the HP SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP), to get a higher degree of asset utilization out of the existing systems.

It depends on where you're starting from. So, step one is to determine that, figure out where your most underutilized assets are, and what's causing you the most pain today from a management complexity standpoint. Or, it could be the case that you don't have an adequate business continuity plan in place. That's your key factor in where to start. So, it's assessing that starting point, Dana.

Gardner: Let's drill into that business continuity one for a second. That's pretty important. What does virtualizing your storage bring to the table, when it comes to data recovery, disaster recovery, backup, archiving, or continuity issues?

Koponen: Well, first, when you virtualize your servers, you're taking multiple applications and running them on a single physical server. You're more exposed now to that single physical server going down, because, if that single physical server goes down, you've lost multiple applications, and not just one. So, the need for high availability goes up.

Server virtualization suppliers like VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix, all have capabilities to provide high availability on the application side. You need to make sure you match that with high availability on the storage infrastructure side, so that you've got the same capabilities within your storage from a high availability standpoint as you do your sever infrastructure.

Gardner: Right, it doesn't make sense to have the applications humming along at whatever requirements are, if the storage and data can't keep up.

High application availability

Koponen: Exactly. From an HP portfolio standpoint, we have some innovative products like the HP LeftHand SAN system that's based on a clustered storage architecture, where data is striped across the arrays and the cluster. If a single array goes down in the cluster, the volume is still online and available to your virtual server environment, so that high degree of application availability is maintained.

Gardner: Mike, how about some examples? For folks that have done this already, what are the typical scenarios? What are some of the paybacks? What's the usual case scenario?

Koponen: Dana, there was a white paper recently done by IDC on the business value of storage virtualization. It looked at a number of factors -- reduced IT labor, reduced hardware and software cost, reduced infrastructure cost, and user productivity improvements. Virtualized storage had a range of payback anywhere from four to six months, based on the type of virtualized storage that was being deployed.

It found asset utilization increases up to 300 percent, savings of administrative cost of 2x to 3x, and shrinking back-up times by up to 80 percent as well. The benefit in the payback was really compelling. That IDC paper is posted on the HP website.

Virtualized storage had a range of payback anywhere from four to six months, based on the type of virtualized storage that was being deployed.

Gardner: What are some of the business returns? Clearly, we've got some cost benefits and technology benefits that folks in the IT department would enjoy, but what would we expect from storage virtualization for the larger business outcomes or goals?

Koponen: You have these benefits of reduced CapEx and OpEx that companies can take to the bottom line, particularly in these economic times, and you also have improved business agility as well. Let's say, a company makes an acquisition and they've got to merge an existing IT resource into their existing IT infrastructure. The ability to do that is going to be greater, given that you've got a virtualized storage infrastructure in place.

Gardner: That gives more agility for changing your organization from a merger and acquisition perspective. How about sourcing, when it comes to what we think about now as cloud computing? Is there some benefit in having virtualized storage that gives you more options for your sourcing?

Koponen: Well, it gives you more options in terms of the flexibility with which you manage your internal cloud, how you can meet your quality of service levels to your internal user community, and how you partition out storage to them, because you can make much more efficient use of those resources. Using your outsourced cloud providers, you can augment that existing server and storage capacity that you've got in place.

Gardner: Returning to the road map of how you would get started and involved with this, what else do you need to consider other than certain technologies? Is this something that's going to change the nature of your organization? Are we going to be asking different folks inside of IT, and perhaps outside of IT, to work together in ways they hadn't before? What are the cultural implications?

Combining resources

Koponen: That's a good question, Dana. In the case of enterprise organizations, you may have the storage management done by a particular set of folks. Then, you may have the management of it, the server infrastructure, done by another set of folks. This will bring those two sets of resources together and provide them more efficient platform to be able to work together.

In medium-sized businesses, it's all about being able to manage storage assets without having to have expert storage administrators in place, so that server administrators can manage the storage assets as easily as they do their server assets.

Gardner: I wonder, if there's something we left out. Is there another item around this that folks should be aware of?

Koponen: I don't think so. However, for people who want to learn more about storage virtualization and what HP has to offer to improve their business returns, I suggest, they go to www.hp.com/go/storagevirtualization. There they can learn about the different types of storage virtualization technologies available. There are also some assets on that website to help them with the justification of putting storage virtualization within their companies.

HP has very strong relationships with all of the server virtualization suppliers in the marketplace, so that we can bring complete solutions to bear on customers.

Gardner: Just to be clear. When HP approaches storage virtualization, you're working with a number of different vendors and suppliers and different technologies. This is really quite a heterogeneous landscape. Is that correct?

Koponen: That's correct. HP has very strong relationships with all of the server virtualization suppliers in the marketplace, so that we can bring complete solutions to bear on customers. We use best-of-breed technology from the entire ecosystem.

Gardner: Well, thanks. We've been hearing about server virtualization in the past few years, but today, we've taken the time to look at a sibling, storage virtualization. It involves improved runtime workloads in the server side, getting the storage and data that it needs, but there is also a lot of pure, economic rationale for going about the storage virtualization on its own.

Here to help us better understand the whys and hows of storage virtualization is Mike Koponen. He's the HP StorageWorks Worldwide Solutions Marketing Manager. Thanks for your time, Mike.

Koponen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the improved business metrics from adopting a virtualized storage architecture. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.