The new offerings include HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, the first embedded switch from Cisco for HP BladeSystem, a new network-attached storage (NAS) gateway and advanced encryption for HP Data Protector Software.
Parag Suri, category business manager of the StorageWorks division for Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co., based in Mississauga, Ont., said storage consolidation and virtual consolidation is a hot topic in the industry.
According to research by market intelligence firm IDC, the IT consolidation market is expected to grow 6.5 per cent from 2004 to 2009, from US$18.1 billion to US$24.7 billion, outpacing growth of the overall IT market.
“Our focus is on storage consolidation and the adaptive infrastructure,” Suri said.
“Fragmentation continues to be a big pain point in customer environments today. And virtual consolidation is the key in enabling them to consolidate.”
Suri added that adaptive consolidation can deliver the change a CIO is looking for such as lowering costs of operations not just from a storage perspective, but also across the entire IT environment.
“Lots of customers make due with existing IT, but those are run in silos and the infrastructure is today older than five years in a lot of cases. The data for various applications are on islands and becomes less flexible. So it’s not a great situation,” Suri said.
According to HP figures, customers are currently managing 36 times the amount of data they had less than 10 years ago, Suri said. That data is expected to rise six times in the coming years. The staff resources needed to handle the increase in storage is outpacing the cost of the server and storage equipment, he said.
“People are looking at storage as another big challenge,” he added.
For the channel, the good news is that these customers have allocated significant IT budgets for consolidation.
“This presents a tremendous opportunity for our channel partners. There are a lot of CIOs who are looking at these projects today and the reasoning is that data is growing very quickly and with that goes headcount increases. That is the costliest component and they need to drive that down. Every CIO is thinking about this. A lot of doors will open for channel partners here in Canada,” Suri said.
Each product released helps to address this increased need for unifying and managing direct-attach, NAS and storage-area network (SAN) resources that accompany the significant growth in corporate data servers.
HP StorageWorks EVA File Services allow customers to consolidate their storage with an integrated, virtualized solution that serves both application (block) and file data concurrently. The new solution adds file services to any new EVA4000, EVA6000 or EVA8000 in Windows or Linux environments.
For customers that require high availability and scalable performance, EVA-File Services provides 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.
The HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Storage Server is a plug-and-play NAS gateway that provides high-performance, multi-protocol file and print serving and iSCSI connectivity for both enterprise and workgroup SAN environments.
HP is also embeding 4-gigabit Fibre Channel performance with the new Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric Switch for HP c-Class BladeSystem.
