Executive summary

Rather than spending IT dollars on infrastructure and overheads, today’s businesses need their IT dollars to go toward delivering new applications to help them to be more competitive in the business they're in, help them enter new businesses, and to support business transformation. Businesses everywhere are counting on IT to deliver more value to their business. HP believes that IT has the resources to do it. The problem is, because of the sprawl of data and systems, those resources are tangled up in the overheads of legacy architectures and inflexible stacks of IT.

Data explosion is a primary contributor to IT sprawl, inefficiency, and waste. The data growth challenge is particularly acute when looking at how much time and money customers spend in managing data protection processes and the ever growing mountain of archival and offline data. The digital data universe grew to 800 billion gigabytes in 2009, an increase of 62 percent from the 2008 figures, and it doesn’t stop there; the digital data universe is expected to grow by 44 times between 2010 and 2020.1 It’s no surprise then, that a 2010 Storage Priorities Survey. Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead. reported that Enterprise storage managers list two of their three top storage priorities to be related to data protection; namely data backup and disaster recovery. Data deduplication continues to be the likeliest new technology to be added to backup operations, with 61 percent of customers in the storage priorities survey either deploying or evaluating it, and that’s on top of the 23 percent of current deduplication users.

Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead.

This whitepaper introduces and describes StoreOnce software, next-generation deduplication technology from HP that allows for better management, higher performance, and more efficient data protection, while providing IT administrators with a cost-effective way to control unrelenting data growth.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 3, 2010- HP today announced it has been positioned as a “leader” in the latest Gartner “Magic Quadrant Report for MFPs and Printers.”

A leading provider of IT research and advice, Gartner issues independent multivendor reports that position vendors based on their “ability to execute” and their “completeness of vision.”

According to Gartner’s report, “software, vertical solutions and service integration are playing a bigger role in the purchasing decisions of office printers and multifunction products (MFPs). The traditional speeds and feeds for typical office printing … have given way to the hardware’s ability to integrate and deploy software applications that connect them to the company’s document management systems. Remote monitoring capabilities, diagnostics, security and other factors are becoming the true differentiators.”

HP recently introduced solutions that not only leverage web, mobile and security technologies, but also offer customers new ways to print and manage their information. From the first web-enabled printer that allows users to print from anywhere without a PC, to the HP ePrint Enterprise Solution, which enables users to print from a Blackberry device, HP demonstrates a vision for market change.

Objective:

ViewPlus wanted to develop a too to help people with visual impairments communicate better with their sighted counterparts.

Approach:

ViewPlus teamed up with HP Specialty Printing Systems (SPS) to combine HP TIJ 2.x color inkjet printing technology with advanced paper embossing technology to produce raised color text and graphics, making it possible for people who are sighted and visually impaired, or have learning disabilities, to collaborate on the same document, communicate more effective and develop better comprehension and learning. HP SPS also helped bring the resulting product to market by providing engineering support and featuring the prototype at trade shows.

IT improvements:

• Emprint features a fully integrated solution without the need for an add-on product • Documents printed with Emprint have the same high quality as documents printed with HP inkjet printers • Emprint uses the same paper and reliable ink cartridges as HP inkjet printers • Emprint can print Braille and ink together or separate

Business benefits:

• Coupling HP color inkjet printing technology with Braille embossing serves multiple needs; people with visual impairments, normal sight and learning disabilities can work together more effective• Partnership with HP ensures high-quality printing and further bolsters credibility in the marketplace • Tripled initial sales forecasts in its frst month on the market

Abstract
This document defines the “Best Practices” for Enterprise Virtual Array Cluster (EVA Cluster). These best practices are strongly recommended based upon our field experience with the EVA Cluster solution and should be followed as closely as possible. The intended audience for this document is customers and administrators who configure and use EVA Cluster, testers, installers, and troubleshooters of the product.

Introduction and philosophy of best practices
The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array Cluster is a bigger and faster product than a single EVA array. It comes with Command View software that makes it simple to manage, saving management time and money, and reduces configuration errors. You can help reduce errors and unnecessary expense by implementing a few best practices and enhancing your EVA Cluster for its intended applications. This paper highlights some basic configuration rules and tradeoffs for enhancing the EVA Cluster for cost, availability, and performance. Getting the most from your HP EVA storage has never been easier.

EVA Cluster can offer ease of use for day-to-day operations. However, the breadth and flexibility of EVA Cluster capabilities coupled with the implementation as a fabric based storage solution introduces multiple opportunities for issues with performance and stability of the solution.

This document is intended to describe practices that HP has learned from field experience that will help avoid issues with performance or stability. However, if a user chooses to operate beyond these best practices, this document describes tools to allow the administrator to pay extra attention to factors mentioned in this document, such as congestion of fabrics and saturation of array controllers. Careful monitoring can help to avoid issues. This document is a “work in progress,” questions, discrepancies areas that need to be clarified and areas where the recommendations do not meet your particular need should be directed to EVACluster@hp.com. It should be noted that this solution is different from the SVSP solution; there are different features highlighted and exposed for each of the products. Therefore this guide should only be used to reference the EVA Cluster solution, likewise refer to the SVSP best practices as a reference for that solution.