HP LeftHand P4000 iSCSI SANs

Optimized storage solutions for virtual infrastructures

Enabling a flexible, easy and cost-effective storage strategy

HP LeftHand SAN Solutions at a glance:

• Storage that supports virtual servers, including support for high-availability (HA) and disaster-recovery (DR) features in virtual environments

• Double capacity utilization, with space-efficient snapshots and thin provisioning features included at no extra cost

• High availability and 49% lower cost in small sites and remote offices achieved by turning internal server drives into shared storage

Virtualization: doing more with less

Virtualization encompasses more than simply server technology. it is the convergence of servers, storage, and applications in a way that fundamentally changes how you utilize the resources in your entire IT infrastructure. Virtualization impacts your ability to respond to business changes, streamlining some processes and opening up others to a maze of possibilities. To maximize the value of investments in a virtualized environment you need a master plan for your infrastructure.

Server virtualization

Server virtualization is the first step for many businesses. It consolidates resources to reduce costs and increase utilization. It facilitates implementation of better disaster-recovery and application-availability solutions. And it optimizes the IT infrastructure for the flexibility and agility needed to quickly respond to changing business needs and market conditions.

Storage virtualization

Server virtualization demands storage that can support concurrent workloads without performance degradation. It calls for storage capacity and performance that can scale without disruptions. It needs virtual disks to remain online during server or site failures such as VMware High Availability (HA) and Microsoft Hyper-V™ live migration have continuous access to storage while executing failover of virtual machines. And it calls for storage that is simple and easy to manage. HP LeftHand SAN Solutions meet all of those requirements and can drive your costs down and dramatically improve resource utilization.

Solution overview

An HP LeftHand P4000 SAN's architecture is different to that of traditional SANs. Traditional SANs are composed of two separate hardware units-a controller for performance and disk shelves for capacity. Our systems combine these two units in what we call a storage system. A storage system is composed of an x86 processor, a storage controller, disk drives, network ports, RAM and cache- basically everything you need for storage in a single 'building block'. Completing the package is HP SAN/iQ Software, which clusters multiple systems together into a single pool of storage.

• Certification

HP LeftHand P4000 SANs are certified to work with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper -V, and Citrix XenServer software.

• Performance

HP P4000 SANs deliver the performance needed to support the highly concurrent and rapidly changing workloads that virtualized servers impose on storage. As your virtualized infrastructure grows, your SAN grows with it, scaling capacity and performance without disruption.

• Higher Resource Utilization

HP LeftHand SAN technology allows you to thin-provision storage volumes and scale capacity on demand, helping to raise utilization levels while reducing your energy consumption. In part due to their efficient design, HP P4000 SANs double capacity utilization and provide applications with new levels of availability.

• Cost-effective HA/DR

HP P4000 SANs stripe and mirror multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure in the SAN. Applications have continuous data availability in the event of a power, network, disk, controller, or entire storage node failure.

HP LeftHand P4000 SANs can be split between two locations to provide highly available storage that stays online during a site failure. Remote Copy replicates Snapshots between storage nodes at primary and remote locations. Built-in synchronous replication performs storage failover and failback-instantly, automatically, and without human intervention.

Storage Virtualization at remote offices

Virtualization enables even small or remote offices to do more with less by using a smaller number of servers to support the applications they need. Deploying a physical SAN in a remote office is often cost prohibitive. HP P4000 VSA software provides a low cost, virtual solution that rescues storage stranded on servers in branch offices as well as central data centers.

Small sites and remote offices can enable high availability and cut costs 49% by turning internal server drives into shared storage. As an appliance running as a virtual machine, the remote office replication software converts server-based storage into SAN storage that can be clustered and managed like a physical HP P4000 SAN. Not only does it provide a cost-effective way to deploy SANs in remote offices, buy it also allows you to do more with the storage you already have.