HP Adds New Storage Bricks to Consolidation Road

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HP today trotted out new
storage hardware and software to address multiple storage protocols and help alleviate some of the complexity and shave some dollars off of acquisition costs. All in the name of winning new customers and keeping current ones happy.

Consolidating corporate data onto fewer servers and storage arrays has been
a recurring goal for HP (Quote) and rival computer systems
vendors IBM (Quote), EMC (Quote) and Network Appliance
(Quote) for years.

“Customers are managing 36 times the amount of data they were less than 10
years ago,” said Harry Baeverstad, general manager of NAS for HP’s
StorageWorks Division. “By 2010, they’ll need to manage six times more data
than they do today.”

To wit, the company is offering StorageWorks EVA File Services, a system
that allows customers to consolidate their data by pooling both block data
and file data on the same machine. The array represents a marriage of HP’s
StorageWorks Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway with the HP EVA
machine, Baeverstad said.

The software adds file services to any new EVA4000, EVA6000 or EVA8000 in
Microsoft Windows or Linux environments. Available March 1, the File
Services will start at $90,000 for a 2-node configuration on an HP EVA.

Baeverstad said he thinks consolidation is driving the merger block-based
data, such as applications and database data and file data, onto single
machines that support multiple protocols, including Fibre Channel SAN
(define), iSCSI (define) and NAS (define).

The HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Storage Server, the logical progression from the
G1, is a plug-and-play NAS gateway.

The system supports Microsoft’s Unified Windows Data Storage Server
operating system, allowing HP to support iSCSI
(define) connectivity in addition to Fibre Channel SAN and NAS
for file and print serving tasks.

HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Storage Server

Source: HP

HP will start selling the ProLiant DL585 G2 Storage Server on Feb. 12
for $18,687.

Baeverstad said HP is also offering Cisco’s MDS 9124e Fabric Switch for its
c-Class BladeSystem server, fitting the blade server with 4-gigabit Fibre
Channel performance.

Embedding the switch directly into the blade chassis accomplishes several
efficiency goals: it frees up more space in the datacenter; reduces the
number of wires and components that need to be managed and maintained; and
reduces the power and cooling footprint associated with two boxes to one.

For sale March 1, the Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric Switch for HP c-Class
BladeSystem is $5,999 for the 12-port model and $9,500 for the 24-port model.

Finally, the executive said HP supports the highly regarded
256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption standard into the HP
Data Protector Software 6.0.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.