HP gears up for future hard drives
HP gears up for future hard drives
Apr 28, 2005: Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Fujitsu, Hitachi and Seagate to speed up the development and adoption of the next generation hard drive technology designed to improve performance and server/storage density.
The small form factor 2.5-inch, 10K RPM hard drive, was first unveiled on March 14th. HP is aiming to be the first storage vendor to offer the industry standard hard drive with its products when it launches it across the HP ProLiant server family.HP also plans to ship 3.5-inch, 15K RPM drives to meet the highest levels of system performance.Paul Perez, the vice president of storage, networks and infrastructure and industry standard servers at HP said: "HP is proud to have all the leaders in hard drive disk technology closely aligned with our strategy, helping to deliver innovations to customers that will improve the performance of their IT infrastructures."By leading the adoption of the new form factor, HP is helping customers reduce costs and simplify change management of their server storage investments."HP claims that the hard drives will allow its products to deal more competently with performance-oriented and mission-critical applications.The new 2.5-inch drive has more drive spindles server at the popular volume capacities of 36 GB and 73 GB, which means it is more suited to performance-intensive applications, such as online transaction processing.The new 3.5-inch drive offers up to 147 GB of storage, which is useful for applications that need to get the balance right between capacity and throughput, such as in decision support and shared external storage.Brian Dexheimer, the executive vice president of global sales and marketing at Seagate, talked about how important the development of the new drives are for the industry."These 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives that Seagate was first to ship to the industry are solutions targets at solving some very real IT management issues. This includes the need to consolidate and optimise storage where information demands are growing faster than the physical capacity of data centres."HP's positioning of small form factor 2.5-inch enterprise, 15K-rpm 3.5-inch and SAS as emerging mainstream enterprise choices is closely aligned with requirements of the growing IT industry."The 2.5-inch, 10K hard drive is expected to be available in HP ProLiant servers in mid-2005, and its implementation into HP BladeSystem, HP Integrity and HP StorageWorks will continue throughout 2006. HP also expects to deliver the 2.5-inch, 15K drives by 2006.Related Article: