HP Rolls Out Channel-Specific SAN Products

Hewlett-Packard used this week's Americas StorageWorks Conference in Houston to roll out new channel-specific SAN products and to promise more field support for enterprise storage solution providers.

Bob Schultz, senior vice president and managing director of HP's network storage solutions, introduced a new version of the company's StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS), an all-in-one archive and retrieval solution for storing, indexing, and retrieving e-mails. The new model, which starts at under $100,000, has a capacity of 1 Tbyte instead of the previous 4-Tbyte version and is aimed specifically at the channel.

"One Tbyte is good enough for most enterprises," said Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a solution provider in San Diego. "500 Gbytes is actually enough for e-mail archiving."

Felise Katz, CEO of pka Technologies, an HP enterprise solution provider in Suffern, N.Y., said she is looking forward to offering the new RISS to her enterprise clients. "With all the new legislation being enacted, there are a lot of opportunities for this kind of product."

RISS is part of HP's grid storage strategy for delivering storage as a service via plug-in modules, called Smart Cells, which contain all the needed software and disk space for increasing both bandwidth and capacity, Schultz said.Schultz also unveiled new channel initiatives, including devoting more personnel to supporting partners -- especially those working with small and midsize businesses -- and to ensure that related leads are passed to partners right away.

In addition, HP introduced a Simply StorageWorks education initiative to help solution providers help customers better understand storage technology.

The three-pronged initiative includes My First SAN, which explains the benefits of SANs; Easy As NAS, which shows how NAS helps improve SAN storage efficiency, and Ultimate Business Protection, which helps SMBs understand business continuity.