HP Pushes Storage Infrastructure Economics

12:55 PM -- In its latest storage announcement, HP focused on helping its customers improve their storage infrastructure economics. In the current economic climate, HP is faced with the challenge of trying to convince customers that spending money on its products is a better economic decision than just cutting spending.

Overall, HP believes customers should revisit how they produce, distribute, and consume technology resources. To achieve this, HP describes three basic IT strategies that customers can pursue: 1) standardize, optimize, and automate; 2) prioritize for business value; and 3) deploy flexible sourcing. Among the economic benefits that can result from these actions are reduced operational costs and elimination of waste.

From a storage perspective, HP focused on the "standardize, optimize and automate" action. The announcement had three major product components.

SAN Virtualization Services Platform -- The goal of HP's SVSP is to provide storage virtualization to improve SAN economics. Through the centralized management of virtual storage pools and a broad set of data services, SVSP enables the pooling and sharing of storage resources with the expected direct customer economic benefits of improving efficiency, simplifying operations, and lowering TCO. In fact, HP makes some impressive claims with regard to SVSP: improving asset utilization by 300 percent, saving on administrative costs by managing three times more storage and two times more servers per administrator, and improving operational efficiency by shrinking backup times by up to 80 percent. These numbers should make customers sit up and take notice.

HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array -- HP also announced two new products at the high end of its EVA family -- the EVA6400 and the EVA 8400. EVA is HP's home-grown storage line, targeted at mid-market and enterprise-class customers who do not need the very high-end XP product line. HP claims five nines availability for the EVA architectures, which translates into unplanned downtime of only a few minutes per year.Built-in storage virtualization spreads data over all EVA drives, which improve performance and capacity optimization by having no stranded capacity or performance. Without virtualization, some LUNs might not be used at all, meaning, among other things, that their spindles are also not used. Spreading out I/O requests to more spindles improves response time performance if the spindles on more active disks are overloaded trying to satisfy high I/O demand. HP claims that as a result EVA arrays can save up to 50 percent on administrative costs as compared to its competitors' traditional disk arrays.

Additionally, the footprint and density of the EVA6400 is improved by 92 percent as compared to the product that it replaces, and the EVA8400 boasts a 32 percent improvement compared to the previous model. A couple of other notable improvements include support for RAID 6 (or, as HP calls it, Vraid 6), which results in improved reliability since an array can tolerate two (not just one) disk failures without losing data. HP is also entering the solid-state disk (SSD) market with support for STEC-based SSDs for high I/O and low latency applications.

Data Protector 6.1 -- Data Protector 6.1 qualifies as the most major update of HP's enterprise-class backup/restore software product in two years. Data Protector, which used to be Omniback for many years, now claims more than 24,000 customers worldwide. In carrying on with its overall theme of changing economics, the focus of this newest update defines how Data Protector can change the economics of data protection.

Server virtualization creates greater operational efficiencies, but means that businesses cannot afford any data loss or any downtime. To solve this problem, Data Protector delivers automated, zero-downtime backup of VMware virtual machines through integration with HP StorageWorks EVA. Reducing backup volumes through data de-duplication and other data reduction techniques is another hot topic, enabling IT to get by with less storage. HP has emphasized its virtual full capability, which is a data reduction technique that is designed to reduce the need for storage and has been in the product since 2006. This method uses pointers to create a virtual full backup that HP claims uses 95 percent less space than required for a full backup. Moreover, HP also offers some other options with respect to de-duplication.

Securing sensitive data has also become a key priority in mitigating the risk of a costly data breach, and Data Protector offers a centralized encryption capability to protect the confidentiality of sensitive data.To slightly change an old adage, you must spend money to save money, but getting IT customers with tightly constrained budgets to open their wallets for new or upgraded products is a real challenge. HP intends to rise to that challenge by demonstrating how buying its storage products can translate into a standardize-optimize-automate action that yields tangible economic benefits, such as improved operational efficiency.

HP's SAN virtualization approach -- SVSP -- significantly improves SAN system and management efficiencies. Its new EVA models give customers more footprint and performance bang for the buck. The company's new Data Protector 6.1 creates efficiencies when used with server virtualization, saves space when doing full backups, and leverages new encryption capabilities to help avoid the unfavorable publicity (as well as potential costs) of the loss of data privacy through data breaches.

Overall, HP has taken some positive product steps forward in both helping storage customers better understand the notion that more is less (i.e., spending more money may lead to lower overall costs) and providing them the tools to achieve that worthy goal.

Find out more about innovative storage. InformationWeek and Byte and Switch are hosting a virtual event on this topic on March 25. Sign up now (registration required).

David Hill is principal of Mesabi Group LLC, which focuses on helping organizations make their complex storage, storage management, and interrelated IT infrastructure decisions easier by making the choices simpler and clearer to understand.7019