HP Data Storage: Buying Tips

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HP is clearly a contender among the big enterprise data storage vendors. Drew Robb details HP’s extensive storage portfolio.

HP is synonymous with a lot of things–printers, ink, laptops and computers. Yet it is also one of the giants of the storage world, where it offers a massive portfolio of products. In recent years, HP’s range of offerings has been expanded by acquisitions of companies such as LeftHand Networks and 3PAR.

Let’s take a look at the HP storage lineup.

HP 3PAR Utility Storage Family

HP 3PAR is positioned as a Tier-1 storage solution for virtual and cloud data centers. 3PAR gained much kudos for its cache-coherent, tightly-coupled and massively load-balanced clustered architecture. Added to a thin built-in ASIC, it copes well with mixed workloads and multiple tenants typically found in cloud computing environments.

“With HP 3PAR thin technologies, customers can expect efficient solutions with optimized capacity utilization,” said Sean Kinney, director of product marketing, HP Storage. “The HP 3PAR Utility Storage family serves midrange to enterprise customers in a variety of vertical industries.”

The 3PAR family includes the new HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, HP 3PAR F-Class Storage Systems and HP 3PAR T-Class Storage Systems.

It also consists of a series of software titles, the most significant of which are HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software, HP 3PAR Thin Conversion Software and HP 3PAR Thin Persistence Software. Additionally, HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software enables automated storage tiering.

HP recently augmented this product line with the introduction of a federated storage technology called HP Peer Motion. This helps to redistribute workloads transparently in response to an unpredictable environment and move data from retiring to new systems non-disruptively.

“HP 3PAR Storage Systems should be considered by customers who are adopting converged data center technologies and want to optimize their storage solutions within,” said Kinney. “As they move away from traditional modular storage architectures, they should consider HP 3PAR solutions.”

HP P4000 LeftHand Storage Systems

HP P4000 LeftHand Storage Systems are designed for a variety of virtual servers, client virtualization, database, email and business applications. Their core is the SAN/iQ storage software, which provides SAN management features, such as storage clustering, application integrated snapshots, thin provisioning, remote copy (asynchronous replication) and SmartClone Technology volumes. In addition, SAN/iQ includes a Network RAID capability, which protects against disk, controller, storage node, power, network or site failures while keeping data volumes accessible and applications online.

Read the rest about HP data storage at Enterprise Storage Forum.