News

posted on 06 May 2008 10:02

HP has announced a marketing offensive on Isilon and all high-end networked-attached storage (NAS vendors with an appliance-like  NAS product that can scale to a massive 820TB and grow performance and capacity separately.

The ExDS9100 - Extreme Data Storage System - combines HP's C-class server blades and 'storage blocks' across a switched fabric using undisclosed technology. Multiple ExDS9100s can be aggregated together to provide a multi-petabyte resource.

The server blades use x86 processors in a C-class chassis and there can be up to 16 blades, type unspecified as yet, in the first release, with, according to Michael Callahan, HP's chief technologist for the StorageWorks NAS division: "128 cores." That indicates 8 cores per blade and could be met by a pair of quad-core Xeons  or quad Opteron 2300s; HP has server blades using both processors. 

The storage building block is a 7U enclosure with 82 1TB 3.5-inch nearline serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives, ones with SATA platters and SAS controllers. The drives hook up to a pair of clustered controllers in an active:active failover configuration, which provide RAID 6 data protection. Each storage block has two I/O paths for redundancy.

A base configuration has four server blades and three storage blocks. Callahan said the storage blocks: "are always fully populated; that's the increment of expansion." Now for the clever bit: "All blades have simultaneous access to all of the storage in the device."

HP is not disclosing its secret sauce here but it is apparent that a switched fabric must be used to provide the any-to-any connectivity. HP's Tandem NonStop product line has a proprietary Servernet switching fabric, providing disk I/O clustering, that could do the job.

We would expect a redundant fabric in the ExDS9100 to preserve system availability.

The server blades run Linux with storage system software layered on top and can be accessed using NFS and CIFS protocols. Callahan expects that HTTP though will be the dominant file access protocol. He also says that customers (or HP's channel partners) could run their own software directly on the blades and access the storage as a single logical pool using standard file system interfaces. Callahan describe this as: "moving applications into the storage tier" reminding us of Sun's approach with its Thumper X4500 server/storage hybrid product.

Callahan said the management interface is very simple, appliance-like, and petabytes of capacity can be managed by just one administrator. Asymmetric ExDS9100s can be built to emphasise either processing power or storage capacity.

The system software can detect a failed server blade and route traffic away from it. You can add or remove blades from a running system without the system's availability being compromised.

The intended market for ExDS9100 are online digital media archives and Web 2.0 companies with very large repositories of digital media content.

Concerning competing suppliers, Callahan said HP was a much large company than Isilon with a much broader engagement with the market. Sun's X4500 is hampered, in Callahan's view by it not being able to scale processing power and storage capacity separately.

The ExDS9100 will be available in the last quarter of 2008. Prices were not disclosed but Callahan said it would be less than $2/GB: "An extremely aggressive effort on our part."

With HP being secretive about the connecting fabric inside the product but having Tandem technology available in-house perhaps the ExDS9100 is HP's non-stop NAS.

^{[Chris Mellor, editor.]}