StorageWorks 2006 Day One

February 21, 2006: Announcements and adventure dominate day one of HP’s StorageWorks conference as Indiana Jones and Lara Croft roll out the welcome mat.

Tribal drums and techno beats herald the arrival of StorageWorks Division VP Anthony Chan as tribal Bomoh, or medicine man. The medicine man appears in many different cultures, as a centre of knowledge, of wisdom, of information. This is what HP is pitching itself as, the medicine man with a tincture for any storage ill.

According to HP, storage consolidation is the new IT bugbear. So to battle this headache, the company has made a string of announcements that amount to a major refreshing of the company’s storage lineup.

The first announcement highlighted enhancements that have lead to concurrent Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity in HP’s StorageWorks EVA and XP disk arrays. HP claim that it is the only company to currently offer this capability.

Next came the announcement that it not offers EVA array support for 4Gb SAN environments. Quite a coop considering it was only last year that it released 2Gb support.HP have also announced a new tape library, the MLS2024. It is 2U high and supports 24 cartridges for 9.6TB capacity with LTO drives, which, the company claims, is double the capacity and half the size of competitive offerings.

All of these announcements are part of HP’s overarching storage consolidation push which, according to Gartner’s Vice President of Research Phil Sargent, means greater ease of management, simpler upgrading and significantly reduced maintenance costs.

Sargent says that SAN consolidation can actually be the most important aspect of consolidation.

“Get your storage right first. Don’t put the horse before the cart.” he says.

Making that first step can however, be hazardous if done haphazardly. “Over a third of companies performing storage consolidation will experience a major setback due to poor planning.” warns Sargent citing common consolidation pitfalls such as poorly defined and enforced standards, lack of knowledge when it comes to legal requirements, lack of project leadership, problems with software co-existence and general lack of skills.

Sargent says that before commencing storage consolidation an organisation must investigate its benefits, clearly understand the objects for consolidation, assess the impact on the disaster recovery plan and above all set realistic expectations and objectives.

There’s plenty more to come from Kota Kinabalu, check back for more liveIDM reports as they happen.

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