Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.

1. How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain
Visibility, Reduce Costs and Implement IT ‘Disaster
Avoidance'
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play
improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP Enterprise
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on
people’s lives.
Our next storage management innovation case study highlights how
communications cooperative HTC centralizes storage management to gain
powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement IT disaster avoidance
capabilities.
We’ll learn more about how HTC has lowered total storage utilization cost while
bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources
allocation, and more fully gain compliance, as well as set the stage for broader virtualization
benefits.
To learn how HTC is gaining better total storage management, please join me now in welcoming
our guest, Philip Sellers, Senior System Administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Welcome, Philip.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Philip Sellers: Good morning, Dana, thanks for having me.
Gardner: Glad to have you here. Before we get in to your storage management journey, tell us a
little bit about HTC. What kind of company are you? Let our viewers understand the types of
requirements your organization has.
Sellers: HTC is the largest telephone cooperative in the nation. We serve the Myrtle Beach and
surrounding South Carolina area. We started out as a telephone company, but at this point, we're
a full-line telecommunications company, doing cable TV, internet security, home automation, and
through our partnership with AT and T, we also do wireless service.
Gardner

2. Gardner: Now, you are not HTC, the handset maker from Asia; you are an entirely different
company.
Sellers: A completely different company, although we do sell a few of those handsets with our
wireless division.
Gardner: You told me when we talked earlier that you are a reluctant storage administrator. You
started out as a VMware in virtualization admin. How did you get from one to the other, and why
is it important for your organization?
Common story
Sellers: It’s probably a common story in a lot of shops. As VMware became more prolific in
our environment, the line started to blur between networking and VMware, and storage and
VMware. So I was pulled more into those directions as the primary VMware
admin for our company. That gave me the opportunity to dig in and start to learn
an area of IT that was new to me.
Gardner: Philip, tell us a little bit about the scale: how many virtual machines
(VMs), how many employees, what sort of a size organization are you?
Sellers: We have 700 or so employees at this point, almost that number of VMs
that we're managing also. We have a couple of different storage platforms today
with the HP EVA and HP 3PAR StoreServ in house.
We also use lots of other things. We have StoreOnce for back up and we also have StoreVirtual
for some of our smaller needs, remote offices and that sort of thing.
Gardner: What kind of storage workloads are we dealing with here? Is this all of the apps across
the company? Is this your cable organization? What set of IT workloads are you addressing?
Sellers: The group that I'm a part of is actually the internal IT group. So we're running line-of-
business applications, not the things that our customers are delivered service
across, but the things that run our business to take orders, support financial
operations, and those sorts of things.
And we're running a mixture of test and dev and production. One of the great
benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and
development platform to mirror what we have in production. So it runs the gamut
for internal IT.
Gardner: When you start to think about progressing to a better utilization and the rationalization
of storage, rather than have overlapping or disjointed storage capabilities, what sort of
Sellers

3. philosophy do you have about storage? How do you think that you can make the whole greater
than sum of the parts and get those utilization benefits over time?
Deeper insight
Sellers: It’s something that I learned back in my virtualization days. For me, it’s huge to have
visibility into what’s going to in your storage. One of the benefits of our transition to 3PAR
storage that we've been able to realize is much deeper levels of insight into what’s going on
inside of the arrays.
You know as we were making that switch, we evaluated other third parties, ultimately deciding
on the mid range 7000 3PAR series for our environment and for our needs. That visibility has
been key for us.
But it’s also come with a set of challenges, because we now have multiple storage consoles that
we need to manage from. We have different places that we need to check. One of the keys for us
is having somewhere where we can see it all or get a better idea of the entire environment from
an end-to-end perspective.
That’s one of the things we learned from our VMware days. We were flying blind early on, and
that caused us problems and potential problems, because we didn’t know something was going
on. One of our main goals is establishing good visibility into our storage environment.
Gardner: So, it’s not just enough to modernize your storage and improve your storage
capabilities and that utilization rate, but at the same time, you really need to address the
management issues and consolidate management. In doing so, what have been some of the
payoffs that you can recall? How has this helped your organization better provide IT services
internally?
Sellers: From a performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not great at
telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance capabilities. We never knew exactly
what was going to cause a problem or the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We
never knew where we were going to have issues.
Being able to see into that has allowed us to prevent helpdesk cost for slow services, for
problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially. One of the other huge benefits
that we've realized is some level of disaster avoidance.
Gardner: And what do you mean by that, rather than disaster recovery (DR), which is taking
care of business after we have had some terrible thing happen? How do you head that off?

4. Disaster avoidance
Sellers: I know that’s not an industry term, but that’s what I like to call it, because in our
environment, we have two data centers that are fairly close together. What we've implemented is
the 3PAR StoreServ metro storage clustering feature, which they call peer persistence, but it's
VMware’s metro storage clustering. We've also done that with windows clustering as well.
We have two sets of 3PARs in different data centers, and they act as one. So, they replicate
synchronously between the two locations and they fail over "automagically." I don’t know how
else to say it. It just seamlessly fails over between the two sites.
For our environment, we were at a particularly vulnerable state if we lost a data array, because so
many things were pointing at it. Now if we lose a single data array it’s not a big deal. It fails over
and it continues running.
Gardner: And when you say vulnerable, I think you're talking about hurricanes?
Sellers: A lot of times we plan for those large natural disasters, but sometimes it’s the small ones
that get us like UPS maintenance or something as simple as power outage. Maybe your generator
doesn’t kick in in time. Sometimes, that can be a disaster of almost the same scale as a hurricane
to your business operations -- just from something simple.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Gardner: So the storage management capability has provided "automagically," as you say, this
disaster avoidance. That’s a pretty important metric. Do you have any idea of the value of that to
your business, and maybe start to put dollar terms? It seems to be pretty profound difference.
Sellers: I can’t necessarily put it into dollar terms. That’s not the world that I work in, but I know
that anytime that there is downtime to our customer relationship advisors and the people in the
field, that’s bad for business.
So we're avoiding those kinds of situations as best we can. We could lose an entire data center
site and, with technology built into the VMware layer and into the 3PAR layer, it will come back
up. It may be reboot of a server, but we try to do everything we can to avoid disaster situations
today, rather than just plan for we need to fail this data center over to site B and go through all of
that testing.
Gardner: Let’s get down to some more brass tacks on actual storage utilization benefits. Any
thoughts or recollections about what this means in terms of utilization, no more worries about
running out of storage base or capacity?

5. Seeing benefits
Sellers: Yeah, the 3PAR platform has been really great inside of our environment because we
realize the marketing term of the two-to-one thin provisioning. We're seeing that benefit.
When I looked at the console before I came here, we were seeing around a 2.3 to 1 compaction,
and that’s without deduplication and some of the other newer technologies that are capable in the
3PAR platform. We may be able to realize better than that in the future.
Gardner: We've talked about disaster avoidance. We've recognized some significant savings in
the provisioning and utilization. Let’s go back to management. What sort of benefits are you
getting now with a more holistic approach and how does that help, perhaps on a data lifecycle
basis?
Sellers: One of the ways that we're approaching that set of problems is with storage resource
management software. We've traditionally used a piece of software called Storage Essentials,
which HP makes. It’s heterogeneous storage-management software, so it can look at all of our
different arrays and looks at our backup arrays and our primary storage arrays, as well as our
back up environment. and pulls that information together.
We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint
growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view. Over the last six months or so,
I've been working in an early-release program for a product called Storage Operations
Management.
This software is the next iteration of Storage Essentials. It’s got a much more approachable and
modern user interface, which brings up and aggregates our total environment so that we can get a
full picture of what’s going on there. Then, we can drill down and see at specific levels how
things are performing, what our utilization trend is, or how much time we have until a device or a
storage pool is full.
Those are things that keep us out of the really dangerous situations in getting down to a time
where you're in a mission critical season, maybe the holidays or something where it’s heavy sales
and you run out of disc space and you can’t get your procurement cycle to get storage quickly
enough.
Those things are just as dangerous as the hurricane that we were talking about earlier from a
business operations perspective. Tools like this help us to manage and see what’s going on in the
environment and help us plan and act proactively.
Gardner: I could really see why your philosophy is visibility and management oversight. It
comes back again and again as a huge multiplier benefit.

6. Room to grow
Sellers: Absolutely. There's a saying that ignorance is bliss. When you're flying blind, that’s
true, until it catches up with you, and it eventually catches up with you. We have lots and lots of
room to grow and capabilities where we're at today. This new version of management storage
resource management product has lots of great potential too.
It’s an initial release. So, it’s got somewhat limited support for different storage families and that
kind of thing, but they're working to bring in additional support and make it all that the previous
product was and much more, and that’s visible from the initial release.
So we're excited about seeing where that can help us, particularly because one of the switches in
this new product is that it’s not just a collect, an analytics reporting system. It’s a dashboard
system where it takes that analytics and brings it back to a dashboard to let you drill down in to it
and see it real clearly in near real time. I won’t say in real time, but within whatever amount of
time you configure.
Gardner: How about your future business activities. How well you can support them? I know
that media is a fast-changing business. Do you feel confident now that when your superiors in
your organization come to you and say, "We need this" that you're in a better position to, hop to
quickly? Is there a sense of confidence that you can take on market change better?
Sellers: I certainly believe so. We've been able to adapt and change more quickly because of
changes that we've made with VMware, with 3PAR. We feel confident that we have room to
grow and that we can do so in shorter terms. We've been able to try and look at new things like
VDI deployments and stuff to help us with compliance-type issues, where we're under
regulations and have to patch and have to ensure that our systems are secure.
And so we are looking at things like that now that we were afraid to put on to primary storage in
the past. It's something where we think we have a good mix today for the future.
Gardner: What advice might you might provide others who would be approaching a desperate
storage environment and maybe shares your philosophy about visibility and anticipation being
better than reaction. Maybe they are also seeking disaster avoidance, rather than disaster
recovery. For those folks that are not quite as far along in this journey as you are, what might you
suggest for them to be thinking about or that you wish you knew about earlier?
Sellers: There is definitely some low hanging fruit, and that’s what visibility will bring to you --
the ability to handle some of that low hanging fruit. If you have a situation where your storage
team is siloed away from your server team, bringing something in that can see both of those sides
and map together that whole environment is a real easy way to identify inefficiency.
Those are LUNs that maybe are provisioned but not in use. There is no I/O on them. That’s a
dollar amount immediately reclaimed. Finding VMs and things with visibility. These tools can

7. look in to the VMware environment where you can see that you have lots and lots of VMs that
are shut down.
There are easy things that you can do to start that process, no matter what your storage platform
is. I think that’s a universal thing. If you have something that can gain you visibility in to the
environment there are some easy things and easy wins that you can bring back.
Further improvements
Gardner: And those of course provide grist for the mill of further improvements and further
budget to accomplish even more.
Sellers: Absolutely. If you want to make a storage platform switch or if you want to do other
improvements and gain more efficiency, this gives you a little bit of extra room, some wiggle
room, to make those things reality. We spent an awful lot of our budget just in keeping the lights
on, keeping things up and running. Anytime you can gain some wiggle room from that budget, it
certainly allows you the ability to look at innovation.
Gardner: Great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how HTC
centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce storage costs, and implement
a disaster avoidance capability.
And we have heard why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem
resolution and automates resource allocation more fully and therefore gaining better compliance
and setting a stage for broader virtualization benefits.
So join me in thanking our guest. We've been here with Philip Sellers, senior systems
administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South California. Thank you, Philip.
Sellers: Thank you, Dana.
Storage Operations Manager
Reduce Total Costs -- Increase Productivity
Try It Now
Gardner: And I would like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this data and
information governance innovation case study discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP Sponsored discussion. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP Enterprise

8. Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play
improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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