October 2004

Storage Engine extends 3000’s IO reach

ORBiT, Neartek engineer solution to bring new tape devices to MPE/iX

HP sees the HP 3000’s connectivity as a mission so important that the vendor has maintained full-time staff on the computer’s IO projects, even after it’s stopped selling the system. IO, it appears, is a mission-critical feature in HP’s quest to keep 3000 customers happy.

ORBiT Software sees the same picture, but the third party vendor is taking a more flexible approach. Instead of revising the 3000’s IO to accept each new storage device, ORBiT is selling a solution that may keep the server in step with new storage long after HP has left the market.

The solution is the Virtual Storage Engine (VSE), one that ORBiT rolled out late this summer and showed off for the first time at the latest HP World conference. The engine is a combination of PC hardware and software that runs on both the HP 3000 and a Windows system. The goal is to allow Windows to keep up with new tape library storage devices, while a PC workstation handles the transfer to the 3000’s IO.

The VSE is new to the HP 3000 world, but the solution has a track record built in another mission-critical arena: the mainframe marketplace. Neartek first created the VSE for IBM’s biggest iron, then moved the product to other business platforms over the last eight years. The VSE has been in service in one generation after another for 12 years.

ORBiT is partnering with Neartek in development, marketing, sales and support of the solution for the 3000 community. Neartek engineering has already scored a hit with 3000 customers; the company’s AMXW migration tool suite was created by Neartek before it was sold to Speedware Ltd. last summer. ORBiT’s Library Manager software (OLM) makes it possible to deliver VSE’s technology to any 3000 site that needs to keep servers running for years to come.

The ORBiT piece of technology eliminates the need for a separate HP 3000 client in the solution. It can also keep the 3000s still serving customers in step with the same tape libraries supported by Unix, Linux, Windows and even IBM’s servers.

“A lot of the benefit of the VSE is to people in the 3000 community who are cross-platformed,” said Neartek’s Brian Moriarty. “It’s a software solution that goes across all the platforms.” The VSE’s lead engineer is Gary Dry, who came from storage leader EMC to work in the Neartek labs in the East Coast storage hub of Western Massachusetts.

ORBiT’s contributes its Online Library Manager to the VSE solution, so the HP 3000 doesn’t need a separate client, Dry said. Storage libraries don’t have much direct support under MPE/iX, but these collections of tape devices have become essential to state of the art backup strategies. VSE removes a lot of the limits of the HP 3000’s connectivity to such devices.

“We support just about every modern library out there,” Dry said. Current tape drives, including SDLT and DLT, AIT, SAIT and even Linear Tape Open (LTO) devices, can be connected to an HP 3000 using VSE. HP has been testing and engineering LTO support for the 3000, but its release is still off in the future. Customers don’t have to wait for that project to finish if they choose VSE as their 3000 IO path.

The platform’s future may not include many more new IO engineering efforts from HP, either. HP’s 3000 Business Manager Dave Wilde said at HP World that the 3000 group is ramping down its enhancements for the platform, so the server might be cut off from future storage devices if HP were the only tape IO option. Because it works with any tape library which bar-codes its volumes, VSE will keep 3000s in service beyond HP’s 2006 support plans.

“It extends the usefulness of the HP 3000,” said Paul Meszauros of ORBiT. “With this, the 3000 won’t be left out of the game.”

Even when the 3000 has been picked by HP to play in the latest IO games, the server has had to endure slower transfer speeds. VSE will take data from the 3000 as fast it can be delivered, or “eat the data from the host at Fiber Channel speed,” Moriarty said.

Off the shelf PC hardware, such as Dell or Proliant servers, and off the shelf host bus adapters, can run with device drivers written by Neartek. “Those drivers look like tape drives and libraries [to the 3000],” Moriarty said. The VSE pumps data out of the other end of the IO chain to cache and then to tape, or directly to tape if the device can handle faster speeds.

A VSE workstation can support up to 32 servers as transfer units, and pass data at 700 Mb/second per server. VSE supports up to 255 tape devices per LTU, so it can put thousands of devices online with an HP 3000.

VSE’s software provides more than just the technology to emulate tape devices to the 3000 host and cache a copy of the data for near-real-time access. A graphical user interface centralizes monitoring and control of data storage architecture across multiple platforms. Such sharing of storage between the 3000 and other platforms could let 3000 managers get approval for a long-term solution that might otherwise be out of the 3000’s reach.

Pricing on the VSE solution is tier-based, with the HP 3000s sitting in the same tier as what Neartek calls “open systems.” The rare 3000 which enjoys a Fiber Channel connection can get started for less than those which use SCSI-2 to connect to storage peripherals.

“This is more of a mid-range to high-end HP 3000 solution,” said ORBiT’s Meszauros. “I can’t see somebody with a Series 918 fitting this in. I see this as a solution for a heterogenous, complex environment.”

Big database clients in the MPE/iX world offer a target market, too. One prospect heard about the ORBiT solution at HP World when he was searching for a way to make a high-volume storage device, already connected to an IBM mainframe in a healthcare shop, do storage for its HP 3000, Meszauros added.