HP expands virtualisation leadership

HP has announced three major software innovations in the enterprise data storage market: OpenView Continuous Access Storage Appliance (CASA), OpenView Storage Provisioner and OpenView Storage Media Operations.

* CASA introduces affordable business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities to medium-sized enterprises. It uniquely enables data replication and migration between storage arrays at the high and mid-range with other less expensive disk storage devices from any major vendor. Moreover, CASA is the industry`s only open networked virtualisation solution that integrates data stored on multi-vendor platforms

* OpenView Storage Provisioner is the industry`s first available software management tool that delivers digital data as a utility service.

* OpenView Storage Media Operations is an industry first for automating removable storage media tracking and for increasing its operator efficiency.

HP builds on EVA success "HP pioneered virtualisation in the storage market with its modular and open-standard-based Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) solution," said Olaf Swantee, general manager and vice-president, Network Storage Solutions, HP EMEA. "We sold more than 600 EVA units in just one year in EMEA. Collectively they contain more than 2.2 petabytes (more than 2 000 000 000 000 000 bytes) of disk storage. We are now taking the next logical step to networked virtualisation, data replication and migration."

Illustrating HP`s capabilities in virtualisation, last month`s independent Storage Performance Council Benchmark-1 (SPC-1) reported that EVA is more than 50% faster than its nearest competitor. It scored an impressive 24 0005.54 input/output per second (IOPS) in a storage area network (SAN) environment. That makes it the leader in open systems workload environments.

HP`s storage solutions form a core part of the IT-infrastructure at companies such as DaimlerChrysler, Federal Mogul, and Dumont:

Armin Flamming, Chief Technical Officer of M Dumont Schauberg, a major publishing house in Germany, commented: "The permanent availability of and access to our data is absolutely vital. The stability and flexibility of HP`s storage environment is a key success factor for our success in a challenging environment."

EVA saves time, capacity and costs. Today, HP is extending this leadership to the network level. The new software-enabled open data replication and migration capabilities increase system flexibility so that customers can easily allocate resources and capacity. For instance, network configurations systems can now best fit individual price/performance requirements because:

* The combination of EVA and CASA allows customers to off-load copies of data from monolithic storage to affordable, modular storage: data warehousing, testing or disk recovery/backup.

* CASA provides snapshot/data replication capabilities to enhance existing storage infrastructure, helping customers to protect their investments in their legacy storage systems.

* CASA enables customer to migrate data from legacy arrays to EVA.

CASA is a major enhancement of HP`s SV3000 software that introduced heterogeneous enterprise workgroup storage services. New developments include asynchronous write ordering for improved availability and data integrity. Enhancements also include expanded operating system support for NetWare 5.1 and 6, and clustering support with MC/ServiceGuard for HP-UX, which allows customers to virtually manage information in heterogeneous environments.

Storage Provisioner minimises the complexity and time involved in manual storage provisioning. This improves system availability and allows managers to focus on higher-level tasks. Storage Provisioner divides the storage pools into services or utilities, based upon agreed attributes between administrators and internal consumers. With the parameters of operation pre-set, users are free to adjust remotely their own storage configurations.

The software provides an accurate view of available storage capacity, which ensures that capacity allocation and new purchasing decisions can be kept in line with developing business needs. Storage Provisioner effectively makes digital storage a utility service that is available on demand at an appropriate level.

HP OpenView Storage Media Operations is designed for the many companies managing large amounts of removable media. It is the first heterogeneous media management tool from a major systems vendor, automating removable storage media tracking and enforcing policies to increase data availability.

Unlike other media management products, Storage Media Operations maximises the effectiveness of media procedures by creating daily task lists, and organising tapes for logical data centre walkthroughs. It enables operator control of tape libraries, barcode scanners and media label printers.

The tool is currently deployed by HP Operations for managing nearly 900 000 tapes in HP data centres worldwide. Storage Media Operations is integrated with most midrange and enterprise tape library systems from leading vendors, including the HP StorageWorks MSL and ESL tape libraries.

For more information on all the products listed above, please visit HP`s storage solutions home page at: http://thenew.hp.com/country/us/eng/prodserv/storage.html.