HP cuts power and cooling costs in half with new storage offerings

HP has introduced "green" storage technology that can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by 50 percent.

Introduced at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference, the new Adaptive Infrastructure offerings include thin provisioning and performance enhancements for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family, tape drives based on the Linear Tape Open (LTO) 4 standard, new DAT 160 tape drives for small and medium businesses, and the first HP StorageWorks tape product developed exclusively for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures.

According to analyst firm StorageIO Group, storage currently accounts for 37 percent to 40 percent of overall data centre energy usage from hardware. With the new HP storage products, a customer with a monthly storage electric bill of R21 000 could save as much as R252 000 a year in power and cooling costs.

"Power and cooling is a key enabler for an Adaptive Infrastructure, and these environmentally responsible storage products will help address two key areas that our customers care about: saving money and conserving energy," said Yesh Surjoodeen, Business Unit Manager, StorageWorks Division, HP. "With products like these, HP is helping customers build next-generation data centres that can lower costs, mitigate risks and optimise business outcomes."

The HP StorageWorks EVA4100, 6100 and 8100 midrange disk arrays improve power efficiency for customers by up to 45 percent compared to previous EVAs, with performance improvements of up to 24 percent.

Using advanced hardware and software technologies such as EVA Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM), Vsnap and FATA disk drives, the new EVAs help customers optimise hard drive utilisation, eliminate unnecessary HDD storage disk purchases, shrink their carbon footprint and efficiently manage IT resources and storage provisioning tasks.

"We did a study in 2006 that found that 55 percent of end users we surveyed left between 30 and 50 percent of their storage capacity stranded," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, an industry analyst firm focused on storage and information management.

Similar to thin provisioning, DCM software enables customers to double capacity utilization rates and delay the purchase of additional hard drives. Leveraging the new virtual disk service (VDS) volume shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, DCM continuously monitors storage utilization rates and automatically grows or shrinks host volumes to match application data needs, thereby reducing the necessity for ongoing storage administration and virtually eliminating stranded storage.

Tape continues to be the most energy-efficient storage technology for long-term data retention - requiring neither power or cooling - while maintaining data integrity for 30 years. The next-generation HP Ultrium and DAT tape formats are proven technology that offer the lowest cost per terabyte and have withstood some of the most extreme conditions on the planet.

The HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium1840 tape drive provides mid-sized and enterprise customers with HP's highest capacity, fastest performing and most secure tape backup, consuming up to 50 percent fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations.(4) The LTO-4 technology and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit data encryption protects user data from unauthorised access if cartridges are lost or stolen while being stored or transported offsite.

Unlike competitive tape drives, the LTO-4 Ultrium1840 includes HP Data Protector Express Single Server edition software with hardware encryption support at no added cost. LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drives also will be integrated and available in HP StorageWorks MSL, EML and ESL E-Series Tape Libraries.

The HP Ultrium 448c Tape Blade is a new half-height tape storage blade that provides data protection for HP BladeSystem c-Class servers and storage blades. Ideal for customers not connected into a storage area network, the Ultrium 448c provides direct-attach data protection for both half-height and full-height c-Class server blades and leverages the HP Dynamic Power Saving mode to achieve up to a 22 percent reduction in power requirements.(5) It also supports HP One-Button Disaster Recovery, which allows quick recovery of operating system, applications and data from the latest backup set in the event of a hard drive failure.

The HP StorageWorks DAT 160 tape drive offers a balance of price and performance for small and medium business customers and consumes fewer watts per gigabyte (GB) than previous generations of DAT drives. Ideal for use with HP ProLiant 100 and 300 series servers and available with either a SCSI or USB interface, the DAT 160 delivers backup speeds of up to 50 GB per hour and offers up to 160 GB of capacity on a single cartridge - twice the capacity and performance of any other DAT drive available.

More information on environmentally responsible HP StorageWorks offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/GreenStorage and in an online press kit at www.hp.com/go/hpvegasevents2007media.