HP expands storage portfolio

MUMBAI, INDIA: The Storage Works Division of Hewlett-Packard (HP) today announced the launch of its next-generation storage products and solutions in Mumbai. These new products and solutions are targeted at small, medium and large business with the aim to fulfill the storage needs in a virtualized, physical and cloud environments.

The new storage products and solutions include P4000 G2 SAN, P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA) System and LTO-5 Ultrium Tape drives and cartridges.

The P4000 G2 SAN is designed to deliver high data availability in both virtualized and physical environments via its unique Network RAID functionality. It lowers customer's downtime risk and data loss with better total ownership cost.

According to HP, the product is vital for a converged infrastructure and for delivering virtual resource pools. The new SAN/iQ software allows the management and control of P400 G2 SAN that provides better utilization and capabilities of storage.

The P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA) System targeted at small to mid-size business offers a flexible, simple and affordable SAN solution. It has a combination of Fiber Channel (FC) and iSCSI for fast application performance and workloads. Also, it comes with a new Remote Snap – replication software for reliable disaster recovery by replicating data to a second P2000 G3 array.

While disk storage have been around for many years now, it has been fully successful in replacing the old and cheaper tape storage. HP has expanded its Linear Tape Open (LTO) technology portfolio with the new LTO-5 Ultrium tape drives and data cartridges. It improves business performance via faster data backup and retrieval, which allows more data storage at a lower cost along with meeting data security requirements.

According to Som Satsangi, HP Enterprise Business' director for Enterprise Servers, Storage & Network, the storage space is driven by some key trends that include data growth across businesses, virtualization, compliance and regulations, technology shifts, cloud computing and power cost.

“These trends have impacted the storage demands that requires a new way to meet the need of data storage, its retrieval and extraction in a quick time – on the fly,” said Satsangi. He suggested, about 70-80 per cent CIOs across organizations have to deal in managing the IT resources and infrastructure with available funds.

Sharing a study, Satsangi pointed out that, of the total revenue, about 65 per cent is spent on operations – maintenance and management of IT infrastructure, 25 per cent is utilized for migration and upgrades, while only about 10 per cent is spent on innovation.

“For CIOs the pressure is to drive the business and innovation with the existing or available IT resources and monetary funds. And while there is the rise in virtualization of servers, the server virtualization needs to be aligned with storage virtualization too,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, HP's country manager for Storage Works Division.