HP Emphasises Simple Storage Management

February 6th, 2007: HP is promising to make storage environments easier to manage with its latest range of consolidation and virtualisation offerings.

Unveiled at this years Asia Pacific StorageWorks conference in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the new range includes enhancements to the StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, the first embedded switch from Cisco for HP’s BladeSystem.

Next to the BladeSystem improvements, HP says its EVA File Services now allow customers to consolidate their storage with an integrated, virtualised solution that serves both application (block) and file data concurrently.

The company says that EVA File Services also offers greater flexibility and redundancy by providing a single, shared pool of storage with no single point of failure and aggregate performance far in excess of traditional NAS appliances or file servers. It also offers a single point of control that can be centrally managed and backed up.

Regarding secure backup and its role in meeting continuity needs of consolidated storage environments, HP says that it is enhancing its HP Data Protector Software 6.0 to provide 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption. HP is aiming this solution at businesses who don’t trust network backup or cannot afford a dedicated encryption appliance.

HP claims that these releases and others announced during the conference help address the increased need for unifying and managing direct-attach, NAS and storage-area network (SAN) resources that accompany the significant growth in corporate data servers.

“In the past 10 years, businesses have experienced an exponential growth of data and the trend is expected to continue for years to come,” said Phillip Sargeant, managing vice president, Storage Research, Gartner Dataquest. “To deal with this data proliferation, end users are increasingly relying on consolidation and virtualisation to maintain the most cost-effective and manageable storage environments.”

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