LeftHand P4000 now works on HP BladeSystem blades

In the spring, we already talked about the recent HP StorageWorks P4000 series of clustered disk storage systems for iSCSI-based SANs, based on the development of LeftHand Networks, which was acquired the year before last. In June, a new powerful system from the HP StorageWorks P4800 series was introduced.

Recall that the SAN / iQ package created in LeftHand that implements failover clustering, tiered storage, Network RAID, snapshots, cloning, remote replication and thin provisioning is able to work on any servers with the standard x86 architecture and can be purchased separately without server hardware as virtual machine running in a VMware ESX environment. And if the control nodes of other HP StorageWorks P4000 are using dual-processor rack servers, then StorageWorks P4800 SAN / iQ, in accordance with the HP strategy of gradual "blade" of its servers and storage systems, SAN / iQ software is installed on four blades of the BL460 G6 standard half HP BladeSystem c-Class chassis form factor, redundant among themselves using the SAN / iQ Storage Clustering function according to the active-active scheme. Therefore, the full name of the new product is the HP StorageWorks P4800 BladeSystem SAN.

Two eight-port three-gigabit SAS switches installed in the HP BladeSystem c-Class chassis are connected to cluster nodes by two HP StorageWorks MDS 600 rack-mounted disk shelves. The feature of these shelves, consisting of two drawers, is the extra-dense placement of disk capacity. One five-unit StorageWorks MDS 600 accommodates seventy full-sized 450-gigabyte fifteen-thousandth SASs and as a result, the StorageWorks P4000 BladeSystem SAN scales from 63 TB in a standard 140-disk configuration to up to a quarter petabytes when connecting additional StorageWorks MDS 600 shelves.

HP has developed reference hardware configurations (called Reference Architecture) for large-scale implementation of virtualized workplace infrastructure (VDI) based on the appropriate software solutions from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix using the new HP BladeSystem c-Class storage system and blade servers.

For example, the ready-to-deploy Reference Architecture solution for VMware View 4 consists of two HP BladeSystem c7000 chassis, in which up to 28 ProLiant BL490c dual-socket blades with 72 GB of RAM are installed, serving desktop virtual machines and connected to the local network via the enterprises located in the chassis HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules, and four more BL460 G6 control blades from StorageWorks P4000 BladeSystem SAN, and two MDS 600 shelves that store virtual desktop images.

Such a solution is able to provide maintenance of the virtual desktop infrastructure for more than one and a half thousand users. Due to the use of high-speed data exchange channels and a large number of hard drives, the StorageWorks P4800 is fast enough to cope with the traffic that is generated if several hundred users simultaneously launch their desktop virtual machines at the beginning of the working day. And fault-tolerant SAN / iQ technologies guarantee uninterrupted operation of virtual desktops and online expansion of storage system capacity as new users are added to VDI or data volumes increase for current users.

The new StorageWorks P4800 BladeSystem SAN can also be used for those tasks that already use StorageWorks P4000 models based on rack-mount servers, for example, storing virtual machine images when implementing server virtualization from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.