HP AutoRAID 12H User Manual
hp vir
double your operating efficiency
tual array:
executive summary
In today’s market environment, you are
constantly challenged
business and save costs.
saving costs is getting a lot of attention by everyone from Main Street to Wall Street
to inside the Beltway. HP has invented a solution that will get you on the road to
saving money and set you up to grow revenue streams once the economy turns
around. That solution is HP’s Virtual Arrays.
It may sound complicated at first, but HP’s Virtual Arrays are simply just another
automated advancement. They free your organization from the many manual
functions required by the current vintage of arrays on the market today. Just as
automated printing machines revolutionized the publishing industry in the last
century, HP revolutionized the personal and corporate printing industry with its
industry-leading LaserJet printers. Now, HP’s Virtual Arrays are revolutionizing the
storage industry, creating industry-leading storage solutions that save your
organization 2x in operating costs over the current set of arrays on today’s market.
And with the current market growth uncertainties,
to find ways to both grow your
HP’s Virtual Arrays are automated to maximize
your operating efficiencies
on investment.
They are automated to save you money.
and maximize your return
The following customer quotes and two articles explain
how HP’s Virtual Arrays deliver on this money-saving
promise. Read them for the details or have your trusted
IT professionals do this for you. Just remember that HP’s
Virtual Arrays are the only automated arrays on the
market today that offer you these cost-saving features at
a mid-range price.
Can you think of even one profitable publishing house that
has not fully adopted automated publishing equipment?
Can you think of any successful organization that has not
adopted laser printing? The same will be said for HP’s
Virtual Arrays. Capture these savings today.
table of contents
customer quotes
•
Amazon.com i
•
Room & Board i
•
”
State of New Mexico
•
ViaSat
•
Santa Clara ii
section 1: hp storage white paper
November 2001
i
ii
1
• virtualization, simplification and storage 1.0
•
array virtualization defined 1.0
•
the reasons you need more virtualization in the array 1.1
• key features of hp’s patented virtual technology 1.1
• why now is the time for array virtualization 1.2
•
managing traditional storage 1.2
• configuring an array for a database 1.3
• the system administrator’s dilemma 1.4
•
managing the hp virtual array 1.4
• adding capacity with hp virtual arrays 1.4
• time to implementation: formatting the array 1.5
•
automating the cache parameters 1.5
• performance 1.5
• faqs 1.6
•
summary 1.8
• for more information 1.8
section 2: “hp extends virtualization to
the array”
—by D.H. Brown Associates, Inc. November 15, 2001
2
• virtual value in hp’s va7000 series 2.0
• super redundancy enhances RAID 2.1
• reliability characteristics of hp’s va7000 series 2.2
• software extends virtual functions 2.3
customer quotes
After seven years and 20,000 sales,
virtualization new
Amazon.com
“We look at three things when selecting data
warehouse disks. Price per terabyte, throughput
capabilities, and availability features. With the
HP Virtual Array 7100, the price per terabyte
was extremely competitive and the throughput
was phenomenal. Our current Superdome VA7100
configuration is capable of driving three to four
gigabytes of I/O per second, and the autoraid
features of the VA7100 exceed our availability
requirements.”
Mark Dunlap
Director of Data Warehousing
Amazon.com
. Many companies have optimized their performance with HP, including:
State of New Mexico
“In consolidating from eight controllers to the HP
Surestore VA7100 we expected to see some
performance degradation in running our Children,
Youth, and Family Department databases. We
haven't seen any degradation and are pleased
with the performance. We've found it very easy
to allocate space with the VA7100 and have
saved time with reduced administrative overhead.
With the AutoRAID feature, we've eliminated
worrying about mirroring. We let AutoRAID go
to work and don't even have to think about it.”
Tom Elder
DBA 3 Children, Youth and Family
Department
State of New Mexico
we hardly consider
”
Room & Board
“After reviewing various competitive scenarios
for our SAP environment, we selected HP as our
single vendor with rp5450 servers and a VA7100
for our SAN. We found the set-up to be fast and
easy, and the performance excellent. It was an
easy decision to add a second virtual array, a
VA7400, to accommodate our growth and
position us for the future.”
John Focht
Systems Administrator
Room & Board
i
customer quotes cont’d
Santa Clara
“We needed to move to the next generation of
technology as we merged data centers. We had
outgrown the large server farm scenario and
wanted to focus on consolidation. In discussing our
current and future needs for our NT environment,
the VA7400 was the best solution. We have
transformed to an enterprise environment with
great expandability for the future. And as a hospital
environment with needs for an always-on, 24x7
operation, we've found a reliable solution with HP.”
Gary Davis
Hospital Information Systems Manager II
Santa Clara
ViaSat
“We selected the HP Surestore Virtual Array
7400 storage based on the number of Oracle
ERP instances that would be needed. We found
the Virtual Array has many more features and
capabilities than the Sun solution that was being
proposed. We felt it would scale the way we needed,
provided strong price/performance, and offered
excellent operating efficiencies. It has saved many
hours and long nights for our DBA’s and system
administrators. Plus, we're using the HP Surestore
tape library for efficient tape backup data protection.”
Mike Johnson
IT Manager
ViaSat
”
ii
section 1
hp storage white paper
virtualization, simplification
and storage
In 2001, HP announced two new disk arrays—
the HP Surestore Virtual Array 7400 and the HP
Surestore Virtual Array 7100. This paper will focus
entirely on the virtualization technology that makes
these the easiest arrays to manage and the most
intelligently simple arrays on the market. This paper
answers the question, “What is the value
of HP’s Array Virtualization?”
For those familiar with data center environments,
virtualization is not a new concept. Virtualization
already exists to some extent at every point in the
solution stack. For example, servers, operating
systems, databases, file systems, volume managers,
drivers, switches, and storage devices all require
virtualization to achieve their purposes.
At the array level, HP’s Virtual Architecture simply
expands on already familiar ground, and it
cleanly fulfills the promise of virtualization—
it hides complexity from the administrator and
can have a dramatic and positive effect on realworld performance.
This reduction in complexity greatly simplifies and
streamlines the data center environment.
hp’s array virtualization:
• reduces the time spent managing individual
arrays
• allows storage administrators to manage
more storage with less effort
• reduces the opportunities for human error
•
frees up precious IT resources to work on
revenue-generating projects
• self-manages the RAID configuration for
optimum performance
These are not trivial benefits. Data centers are
already complex, and with the continued explosion
in storage capacity they will only become more so.
HP’s Array Virtualization is evolutionary, not
revolutionary. It is a logical progression in array
technology. It is proven. It is necessary. It is the
perfect storage area network (SAN) technology.
And it is offered only by Hewlett-Packard!
1
array virtualization defined
The purpose of virtualization in any technology
is to hide complexity from the user, or in the case
of disk arrays, to hide complexity from the storage
administrator and provide a standard environment
for application development and increased
price/performance.
Disk arrays are complex devices designed for
complex tasks. A disk array with 50 disk drives
is more complex to manage than a disk array
with one drive. Armed with virtualization, an
array could potentially allow the 50 drives to be
perceived and managed as one big drive or as
one big pool of storage. The power of virtualization
is the power of simplification.
Now for the definition: Virtualization in arrays is
about creating and managing virtual storage
devices. It is about taking blocks of storage on
the disk drives and presenting them as LUNs
(logical units of storage). What system administrators
see, then, are not the actual physical disk drives
but rather a created, simplified “virtual” view of
the actual physical storage, i.e., the LUNs.
HP’s Virtual Array works with LUNs just as traditional
arrays do. However, the virtual array doesn’t
stop there. The virtual array actually manages
the disks down to the level of the smallest available
“cluster” or “chunk.” Further, while traditional
arrays utilize static address-translation algorithms
for managing the chunks, the virtual array uses
a dynamic mapping system.
1.0
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