Network World - HP is expected to announce on February 21 a variety of enhancements to its high-end and midrange storage arrays and storage software that will aid customer consolidation and management of heterogeneous storage environments.
The company's StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays will be enhanced to allow the attachment of HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) 4000, 6000 and 8000 mid-range systems and will ship with double the cache memory to increase performance.
The midrange EVA arrays will now include iSCSI connectivity via an add-on ProLiant server running Windows Storage Server 2003. They will also be upgraded to 4GB Fibre Channel host-side connectivity and use 400GB and 500GB low-cost Fibre ATA drives so customers can tier their storage within the same array.
The company's WAN Accelerator will be enhanced to support encrypted communications between accelerators located in branch offices and data centers. Protocol acceleration for Microsoft SQL Server and high-speed TCP optimization for high bandwidth, high latency long fat networks and a proxy file service for disconnected access to specific files will be added to improve performance over the WAN.
HP's Storage Essentials management software can now manage Tru64 and OpenVMS hosts, HP and Sun network-attached storage, the HP-UX implementation of Veritas Volume Manager and IBM DS 6000 and 8000 provisioning.
The HP StorageWorks Virtual Library System's capacity will be increased to 70TB from 40TB with use of 500GB drives. One Button Disaster Recovery for ProLiant servers will be included in HP's StorageWorks Data Protector Express server back-up software.
Finally, support services for implementing storage consolidation and HP's Utility Ready Storage will be added to HP's portfolio of storage offerings.
All these enhancements are seen as benefiting the consolidation of multi-vendor, remote/branch office, online and backup devices.
"Storage consolidation in a homogenous or heterogeneous mixed vendor environment has traditionally been leveraged as a cost savings or cost-avoidance tool," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn. "Consolidation can also be used to improve the service delivery experience including performance, effective and timely resource allocation (provisionment) and, of course, data protection."
The consolidation of EVA storage arrays into the XP family of arrays is important in that it allows customers to continue to use legacy storage devices and simplify migration between different platforms. According to HP, its XP disk arrays already support Sun, EMC, HDS and IBM arrays as external storage.
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