ESG Lab Review: HP P4000: Affordable, Scalable, Reliable Storage


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Note that the P4000 VSA software that has been installed as two virtualmachines (towards the left in Figure 2) is working to create a clustered SAN with 2 nodes using capacity that is striped across the internal storage in two physical servers. It should also be noted that the VSA can run in parallel with a number of virtual machines to maximize the levels of server consolidation and savings. For example, virtualmachines dedicated to common utilities (e.g., active directory) and common business applications (e.g.,Microsoft Exchange) can be deployed within virtual machines alongside the VSA.


The P4000 SAN Centralized Management Console was used to add the two VSA appliances to a cluster, create volumes, and map those volumes to an iSCSI attached Microsoft Windows 2008 server. As documented in previous reports, ESG Lab found the management console used to create and manage P4000 volumes to be extremely intuitive and responsive.2


The cluster was then upgraded online from two to four P4000 SAN nodes. This phase of testing began with a background IO workload running on the Windows 2008 server. The upgrade was performed using an intuitive “add node” menu option. Two clicks and less than a minute later, the cluster had been expanded from two to four nodes. No interruption in IO access was noted as SAN/iQ began automatically rebalancing capacity and performance.


Why This Matters


As an ever growing number of organizations have embarked on server virtualization to reduce costs and increase efficiency, IT managers are faced with a number of new storage challenges. Predictably fast performance, always- on upgradability, and storage that can match virtual servers’ growth, virtual machine movement, and virtual server high availability are crucial.


ESG Lab has validated that the SAN/iQ software at the heart of the HP P4000 SAN architecture can be installed as a VSA in a VMware-enabled virtual server environment. Getting started is easy since the VSA is deployed as an industry standard VMware appliance. Adding two servers with additional processing power and storage capacity was completed in two mouse clicks and in less than a minute.


When this report was published, the HP P4000 VSA was the only VMware certified ‘Storage Virtual Appliance and support for Microsoft Hyper-V is planned.


A no-cost VMware ESXi license combined with full featured P4000 VSA software (downloadable from HP for a no- cost 60 day evaluation) can be used to create an affordable server AND storage virtualization platform that is ideally suited for virtualized applications withmoderate performance requirements.


2 ESG Lab Validation Report: LeftHand Networks Open iSCSI Platform, May 2006, http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=2167; ESG Lab Validation Report, LeftHand Networks 100 TB SAN, July 2007, http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=1753; ESG Lab Validation Report, HP LeftHand P4000 SAN – Optimizing Virtual Desktop Infrastructurewith Citrix XenDesktop, July 2009, http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=4686.


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